Don, sorry to hear you are having a tough time. You are so good at what you do, don't let the man get you down

I started working in SEO as a hobby because I loved to write content. I did it for free for my friends' businesses and then started teaching myself some of the technical stuff. Now I work in house as the online marketing director. I hate being the only one in the company who knows anything about SEO and AdWords. I feel like I am always speaking Chinese to these guys. I have a few consultants, but it isn't the same as having a team of people to bounce ideas off of or double check my strategies. That is kind of why I like the Moz Q&A so much, it is like my team away from home lol.

It is a tough decision, the rebel in me wants to find out if you considered starting your own shop and taking your clients with you because I know you could handle it. And if ever something came up that you couldn't tackle you could find answers online; Moz, Search Engine Land, or any other resource. That is kind of the beauty of SEO, you can find the answers without getting out of your pajamas.

Again, sorry to hear this is weighing you down.Good luck!

The files aren't duplicate. I am familiar with using the XRobots tag. I was really just curious if my theory would work.

Thanks for all your input.

Our products have about 4 PDFs a piece, which really inflates our indexed pages. I was wondering if I could add REL=No Index to the PDF's URL? All of the files are on a file server, so they are embedded with links on our product pages. I know I could add a No Follow attribute, but I was wondering if any one knew if the No Index would work the same or if that is even possible. Thanks!

In that case, you really don't need the 301 redirects. The canonical tags should have updated correctly when you made the change in your platform.

It can take months for Google to start deindexing old URLs.

Have you done a search in Google to see what pages they are still indexing? You can type in site:"Your Website" and it will give you the full results of URLs that are indexed. If there are any that shouldn't be, you can fetch and render them in GWT to force Google to crawl the 301 redirect, which should expedite the process. I am sure you submitted a new sitemap once you made all of your changes, but, if you haven't that could also help speed up the process.

I think the better way to pass the authority is to set the canonical tags on the page to the www. version of your site. This passes the same amount of link juice and page rank as a 301 redirect. If you were changing the URL completely I would say a 301 redirect would be best practice, but I think the canonical tag is more appropriate here. Do you have the ability to set the preferred version of your URLs in your store settings on your platform?

You could use a canonical tag to tell google which page is the desired page. Unless the other page also had targeted key terms on it. Then I would avoid the canonical tag and try to find a better way to optimize the other page for key terms not so closely related.

I agree with Laura, Big Commerce, OpenCart, OSCommerce, these would all be great solutions. I think Big Commerce is the best hosted platform on the market right now. OpenCart and OSCommerce are not hosted solutions, and they are both open source so you would have to have some coding experience to get them set up.

It is really important to have diversity in your link profile. However, if you have 2-3 links from one domain, it isn't terrible. Now if you have 100 links from one domain, that could be seen as spammy. I am not sure if there is a way to break these down by percentage of value, like you are referring to as Google has started to change the way it values back links. The second link on the same domain would be more valuable if it were on a different domain.

Wherever you have duplicate content you should try to minimize the effects, usually with canonical tags.

I would shy away from your strategy only because showing viewers one thing and bots another is frowned upon. What's wrong with PPC visitors landing on your SEO pages?