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Matt Cutts says not to use nofollow on internal links. He says that causes pagerank to evaporate and that Google has made changes so that pagerank sculpting doesn't really work. He is pretty definite about this.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4SAPUx4Beh8

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVOOB_Q0MZY

Rand did a good Whiteboard Friday about this earlier this year.

An excerpt from the talk:

So let's say you've got blog.yoursite.com or you've got www.yoursite.com/blog. Now engines may indeed consider content that's on this separate subdomain to be the same as the content that's on here, and so all of the links, all of the user and usage data signals, all of the ranking signals as an entirety that point here may benefit this site as well as benefiting this subdomain. The keyword there is "may."

Another:

Bottom line is it's really dangerous to put content on a subdomain still. I believe John and I believe Matt when they say that Google has made strides in this direction. The problem is they're not good enough or perfect enough to rely on that factor, and so I'd really urge everyone to keep your content on one single sub and root domain, preferably in subfolders. That's how you're going to maximize your potential SEO benefit. This is one of those technical SEO things that just hasn't changed for many years now.

Noodp= No Open Directory Project
Noydir= No Yahoo Directory

These are used if your website is listed in one of these directories with information you do not want used in the results pages. This might be the case if you have old, outdated listings that no longer apply. They tell robots not to use information from these sources, and they are optional.

A good idea is to keep track of a couple of your competitors' domain rankings, so you can see how you are doing relative to them.

Another quote from the link that keszi provided:
"It's best to use Page Authority (PA) and Domain Authority (DA) as comparative metrics when doing research in the search results and determining which sites/pages may have more powerful/important link profiles than others."

So if you see that your site went down and your competitors' went down as well, you'll know not to be too concerned.

You cannot change it. Google does not allow Moz and other sites to use their data this way, so that is why Moz uses Bing. To get Google data, you need to sign up for Google Adwords and use their tool. (You do not have to be actively using Adwords, just signed up.)

The best way to fix this is with a rel=canonical URL. Tag each page with the lower-case version. (I had this same problem.)

Here is a nice article on the subject: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-recommends-using-xml-sitemaps-rssatom-feeds-optimal-crawling/118364/

"Google explains the differences between the formats by saying that XML sitemaps describe a whole set of URLs within a site, while RSS/Atom feeds only describe the most recent changes. As a result of XML sitemaps containing more information, they are typically larger than RSS/Atom feeds. XML sitemaps are also downloaded less frequently.

As a website owner, which format should you use if you want your website to be crawled to the best of Google’s ability. Google recommends using both, explaining how the formats compliment each other."

In theory, a nofollow link should not transfer authority. However, I recently read an article by Christopher Cemper of LinkResearchTools that kind of argues otherwise. (He mainly talks about nofollow links passing negative signals.) I don't think it is possible to assign a number to this—it's one of those things Google likes to keep to itself.

In any case, relevant links from high-quality sites are a good thing, whether they are nofollow or not.

SEMRush will do this. In their interface under Organic Research is Positions, which shows which keywords you rank in the top 20 for organically. Unfortunately it is a paid tool, but for free you can see how many keywords you rank for and what the first ten are.

Here is a good Moz article on the subject: http://moz.com/learn/seo/anchor-text . It includes examples.

"Key Points:

• If many links point to a page with the right keywords in their anchor text, that page has a very good chance of ranking well. Real examples of this include the search engine result pages for the queries, "click here" and "leave." Many of the Google results for these queries rank solely due to the anchor text of inbound links.
• People have a tendency to link to content using the anchor text of either the domain name or the title of the page. This is an advantage to SEOs who include keywords they want to rank for in these two elements.
• Too many inbound links to a page with the exact same keyword-rich anchor text may cause Google to scrutinize that site’s link profile more closely; using manipulative methods to acquire keyword–rich anchor text is not recommended."

[The emphasis is mine.]

And for outbound links: http://moz.com/learn/seo/external-link

"Optimal Format

Use descriptive keywords in anchor text that reflect the same topic or keywords the target page is trying to target. It's not necessary to use the same keyword text every time—in fact, doing so can trigger spam detectors. Instead, strive for a variety of anchor text that enhances context and usability for your users—and for search engines, as well."

It is not unusual for the same page to be reachable by multiple URLs. This can be caused by tracking parameters or site search results (which is what I think is happening in your case). The easiest fix for this is putting a canonical URL on the page using the one Google has indexed. But keep in mind that duplicate content does not cause a penalty as such, it just causes Google to make a choice about which URL to display in the search results and it seems that choice has already been made in your case. (I would still add the canonicals, though.)

July 25, 2013 is when Analytics started using "Channels" as a dimension, so that is why it appears that there is no data before that--it doesn't mean there actually isn't any organic data.

As has already been mentioned, you can use a segment to see organic traffic before then--or you can choose "medium" as your primary dimension and select organic from there.

Looking at your code, I see:

name="robots" content="noindex,follow,noodp,noarchive,noydir" />

That page appears to be noindexed. Check your settings.

Looking at the first one with Screaming Frog, there are 112 pages without descriptions.

Visually checking an example of those, http://sundancevacationsnews.com/, I see in the description, an empty description.

Checking one with a description: https://sundancevacationsblog.com/sundance-vacations-travel-advice/international/, I see

It just looks like some of them didn’t have descriptions added. Check back in Yoast again and look at the pages that Moz says have no description. Does anything look different in those than in the ones that do have descriptions?

I don't think the problem is the plug-in since both the pages with and without the descriptions are using it, and yes, Google will see the same thing.

If you have Yoast (SEO Plugin) you can do that in the settings. (Choose Titles & Metas, then click on the Taxonomies tab.) You can also do it directly, under posts > categories.

Where does your client fall in the chain of command of the company? If s/he is at the very top, sunk costs should not dictate keeping a bad website, and if something different is better for this one product then it is better for all of the products.

But assuming they can't have a total site redo, why not use a subfolder? Although Google's John Muller said subdomain or subfolder does not make a difference, there is enough evidence to the contrary that I'd go with a subfolder if at all possible.

Perhaps the subdomain is because the person wants to distance this part from the rest of the site.

But as we know, a big part of SEO is the way things are linked (including internally) and one robust, well-linked site is stronger than a string of independent microsites, which is partly why microsites are not popular anymore. And existing links to the overall domain will help boost this new section if it is correctly integrated. (Unless the rest of the site is really terrible, in which case this one section probably won't make much difference either way.)

I don't think subdomain/subfolder is the main issue here though. It seems that your client want this product separated--does that make the most sense for the overall business goals of the company (as opposed to the success of this one project)? That's the question that needs answering.

To add to Patrick's great response, this page describes what you are seeing. When you try to go to a page on your site that does not exist, you seem to correctly get an error page.

But the content of the page does not necessarily reflect the HTTP response returned by the server. Your server is saying that the page was found, although the content of the page says it wasn't found. [A 404 response from the server simply means Not Found.]

If you look in your Google Webmaster Tools under Crawl > Crawl Errors you will see a tab called Soft 404. A soft 404 is a page that says it is not found but is not returning an actual 404, not found, response.

[I always wondered how Google could tell--I was given the answer that if Google sees that a whole bunch of different URLs bring up the same page, which does not return a 404 response, it assumes that that page says it is an error page and labels it a soft 404.]

If you want to test whether a URL on your site is correctly returning a 404, you can use Fetch as Google to see if it returns Not Found or else there are a number of free server response checkers online.

Here is a nice Moz Blog post from Peter Meyers on Title Tag Guidelines, including a preview tool.

[The url that shows up is the actual url of the page--it is not like Adwords where you can use a display url; this is different from the title tag.]

I did just this type of thing a little over a year ago and organic traffic is up over 300% now. We made the change mainly to improve the structure of the website(s), with more logical organization and better internal linking. We did do the move all at once (thousands of pages) but it took a lot of behind-the scenes planning to be ready for that.

First came the decisions about what sections and categories made sense for our site. (Using the URL structure to guide users around the site makes it easier for them to find what they are looking for and interlinking between related posts as appropriate is also good—and this helps a lot with search engines.)

Then came the organization of posts into their new categories. To make things easier, we kept the individual path names the same (so www.siteA.com/old-category/old-post-string became www.siteC.com/new category/old-post-string) and uploaded them into their new categories when the time came.

We also used this time to do a limited content review (posts with the most traffic) and we updated a lot of these. We made the choice to keep most of our old posts, even though in our market they can get outdated quickly, to conserve any links we may have acquired. (The main site that we were directing to the new site was pretty old and had picked up a lot of links over time.)

We could have done a more complete content review before the changeover, but in part we wanted to see how these posts did under the new structure—we did get renewed life out of some of them, and we further updated and optimized those.

In conjunction with the export of the old sites to the new one, we made sure to 301 redirect all of the old posts to their counterparts on the new site. For the posts we chose not to bring over, we 301 redirected them to a related post in the same category.

We still occasionally come across things that need to be fixed—old posts that need redirecting/updating or 404 errors that need to be tracked down (one big issue we found was a lot of old pages had old links with hard paths to the old website root domains, causing a bunch of nasty internal not found errors—not good!) but overall we are happy with the change. (Up 308%!)

When you 301 redirect www.site.com to site.com, as long as the redirect is in place, the "link juice" will be passed from www.site.com to site.com. [And as the saying goes, there are no stupid questions...]

Are you just looking for an explanation of what C-blocks are? There was an excellent explanation here a while back:

http://moz.com/community/q/linking-c-blocks

"It refers to the part of the IP address that's different. The same class C address means something has the same third octect in the address. In the following, the first three IPs are in the same class C, and the fourth address is not.
192.168.1.1

192.168.1.2

192.168.1.3

192.168.100.4
The reason we care is like what searchpl says -- it's a hint to Google that the sites are all related to each other and on the same server, and that the links may not be very natural since there is the good possibility that the same person set them up." (from Keri Morgret)

Moz's rankings can change from month to month depending on the current index--you shouldn't rely on them as an absolute value. Have your competitors' ranking also dropped? Here is some info from Rand about fluctuations.

Yes those tools are good and the comment about intent is right on the money too. [Apple might have a high search volume, but that's not necessarily as helpful as you might think, if you are a fruit seller.]

One thing I like to do when looking at various keywords is to put them in Moz's keyword tool and see which sites are ranking.

This tells you something about intent (the sites that rank highest for a search term are likely to be the most closely aligned with user intent) and about competition (the tools shows you some metrics about the ranking domains). It doesn't help to pick a term with a high search volume if the competition is way out of your league.

The http comes in twice, because it seems that an absolute path is being input where a relative path is expected.

In other words, the html of your link to E-mail : Info@SussexChef.com says: <a href="http.sussexchef.com/contact-us/"> this is on the page (I just picked one as an example): http://sussexchef.com/menus/christmas-buffet-delivery. The link becomes http://sussexchef.com/menus/http.sussexchef.com/contact-us/ because apparently in that header a path relative to http://sussexchef.com/menus/ was expected.

It appears to be working for me. Maybe it was a transient glitch.

You could have your affiliates do a cross-domain canonical, pointing to the original content on your site.

In your chrome browser, there is a little "hamburger menu" on the top right (three horizontal lines, stacked).

Click that, go to tools > extensions and you should be able to delete it there.

ps- What do you find that it covers up?

Way back in 2012 Matt Cutts said:

“I read a post by someone offering new top-level domain (TLDs). They made this claim: ‘Will a new TLD web address automatically be favoured by Google over a .com equivalent? Quite simply, yes it will.’

“Sorry, but that's just not true, and as an engineer in the search quality team at Google, I feel the need to debunk this misconception. Google has a lot of experience in returning relevant web pages, regardless of the top-level domain (TLD). Google will attempt to rank new TLDs appropriately, but I don't expect a new TLD to get any kind of initial preference over .com, and I wouldn't bet on that happening in the long-term either. If you want to register an entirely new TLD for other reasons, that's your choice, but you shouldn't register a TLD in the mistaken belief that you'll get some sort of boost in search engine rankings.”

and I have not seen anything to indicate that this is no longer true.

Some people like to get the new tlds because they feel that they will be attractive to the user, that if for instance people see a .tv they would choose it over another page because they would think that a .tv provides a better video experience.

This may be true, but on the other hand, there are plenty of people who no longer think of tv when they think of the video experience...

Why do you have the magazine on a separate site? You could instead make a subfolder on your current site, like this: http://www.gulfstream.com/nonstop-magazine . That way all of the lovely links you get will help boost both of them.

If you canonicalize the damaged product back to the original product, the damaged one won't be findable in search anyway, same as if you had deindexed it. In either case, people could still find it on your website.

And are you sure you cannot change the canonical? This support page seems to imply that you can.

You should write your description in a way that will make people want to click on your link when they see your description in the search results.

But be aware that Google won't necessarily pick your description to show—it shows what it thinks best matches what the searcher is looking for. If your description is heavy on keywords that are not on the page and does not contain words that reflect the content of the page, it probably won't get shown.

You mean a 301 redirect? If one of the duplicates is already 301 redirected to the other, like Jaime said, just mark it fixed. [Though if it comes back up, take another look at it, because it means that Google is not seeing the fix you think you made.]

As far as affecting your SEO, duplication can cause the less relevant duplicate to not show up in search but does not cause any penalty as such. [Though make sure your internal linking uses your correct and current URLs.]

You don't seem to mention which site you want people to look at?

Yes, for the most part "index, follow" is what you want on your pages.

But no, the "noodp, noydir" tags do not prevent you from being in the directories (though as Alan pointed out, the Yahoo one isn't around anymore), they just prevent the descriptions from being used.

Google does not always use the title and description found on your page, it sometimes chooses something it deems more relevant. Sometimes this is the description from the Open Directory Project (DMOZ). Sometimes this is not a good thing to choose.

Maybe your site was quite different when it was submitted to the directory, and the information there no longer applies. You want to tell Google not to use what is in there, so you use noodp in the header.

Whether you use or do not use "noodp, noydir", it won't hurt your rankings.

The only reason you might want to make sure to use them is if you saw unexpected content in the descriptions of your pages in the search results pages, and you had reason to believe the descriptions came from DMOZ. In that case, to prevent that from happening, you would use those additional tags, along with "index, follow".

For the first question, Google has become pretty sophisticated in making connections, so ranking for a keyword similar to one you are optimizing for isn't unusual, especially a low search volume keyword that might not have much competition.

For the second question, it's hard to say without knowing the site, but did you do the site search that way, with the www? Is your homepage www or non www?

How much of your content are they using? If it is a small snippet, no need for concern. If it is a large amount, then yes, as Patrick says, a canonical tag on the distributors' sites would be good. But some people won't do that for whatever reason. And sometimes people don't like to put outside links on ecommerce pages that might take people away from a transaction.

Even in that case, you are OK though. Duplicate content doesn't cause a penalty as such, it just makes Google pick which one to show in search results and drop the others. It sounds like your client is established as the content originator, so they won't be the ones to be dropped.

If you wanted to be especially helpful to your distributors, you might tell them about this and frame it as something good they could do for themselves, rather than for you. "You know that since a lot of the content on your page is from our page, you run the risk of your page not being findable in search. Maybe you could write some special content about how you are featuring our widget in your special blue widgets collection and only use a small amount of the content from our page. That should help with your visibility."

Or something like that...

When I demoted a sitelink that was appearing in a general brand search, another (better) one appeared for that search.

However sitelinks are generated depending on what Google thinks will be best for a given search, so your demotion is only a suggestion, anyway.

Right now, the MozBar only works in Chrome. (Scroll to the bottom of the thread to see the latest update.)

I love this add-on (I especially love it when I do a search and see all the data on each result) but you can get the same information by using the tools inside Moz, you just won't see it immediately as you look at different pages.

I myself prefer Firefox and was disappointed when the MozBar stopped working there. So my compromise is that I still mostly use Firefox but just switch to Chrome if I am doing something where the quick information from the MozBar would be useful. You could do the same with Safari.

Spammy signature links will not help you and they may well hurt you. If Google is ignoring them, that is a good thing.

Alt tags are used to convey information to people who cannot see the images, so they should always be used (unless the image is just decorative). If the images are different, use different alt tags.

If you create high-quality, unique useful pages that are well-optimized and also engage people and encourage linking then yes, they will tend to rank well (how well depends on the competition) and help your website rank well. But it is unlikely that simply optimizing on-page SEO for high-volume search terms will be enough to get the result you want. There is a lot of competition out there and many people know SEO basics. (There are many who don't as well, but I wouldn't depend on that as a strategy.)

The order of attributes does not matter. [Don't you trust your developer? ]

You could do a search using site:domain.com and see what (if any) pages Google has indexed for the site; if there are none, that is a bad sign.

You could also put the domain's URL in Open Site Explorer and take a quick look at the types of links the site has. (I myself have the Moz toolbar installed in my browser so when I go to a site I can quickly get an idea of its authority.)

You can't make Google do anything :-), but submitting a new sitemap with the new structure should help. You can also submit some of your key pages to Fetch as Google in Webmaster Tools, sometimes that can get pages indexed very quickly.

Google has a number of ways to find pages, including links from indexed pages (whether internal to the site or external) as well as sitemaps and Fetch as Google.

Most of the time when you come across a page like that (one that has few if any internal links) it's not an organic-traffic oriented page, it is set up for some other purpose, like a landing page for a marketing effort.

I like option 2. You could put up some information about the searched-for boat and then follow up by saying that there are none available at this time but here are some similar boats, and add your links to those boats.

You could even add something about how each alternate choice is similar to/different from the original boat, if that is something that time allows. This would be useful to the searcher and keep your pages indexed. (Of course, this depends on how many pages we are talking about--it would be labor-intensive for thousands of pages...)

Moz used to have such a list, but found keeping it up was beyond the time and resources they had available. The general advice given about getting listed in directories is that they should be good quality curated directories, relevant to your business.

In general, directory links are not as valuable as they used to be, and there are many low-quality ones out there, so be careful with this type of linking.

Yes, many sites have repeated information in sidebars, footers and so on--that is not a problem. I would wonder about the testimonials, though. Not from an SEO viewpoint but from a user viewpoint. If I read two testimonials that were identical except for the name, I would not give either one much credence. (But that's a small issue.)

You are correct, this has been discussed quite a bit—the answer is subfolder.

Here is an excellent, recent, thread on the subject: http://moz.com/community/q/i-have-a-blog-on-a-sub-domain-would-you-move-it-to-the-rood-domain-in-a-directory

Here is what Rand Fishkin has to say, with an example from moz.com: http://moz.com/community/q/moz-s-official-stance-on-subdomain-vs-subfolder-does-it-need-updating 

An excerpt from his response: "We recently were able to test this using a subdomain on Moz itself (when moving our beginner's guide to SEO from guides.moz.com to the current URL http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo). The results were astounding - rankings rose dramatically across the board for every keyword we tracked to the pages."

As a general rule, a link that anyone can get by just placing one there is unlikely to give SEO benefit. And as mcncll said, most of those types of links are nofollow, anyway.

The benefit of the type of the type of link you are talking about is exposure and possible referral traffic. (Assuming the answer that is posted is a good one, of course.)