I am sure they did, but we were never able to have a read on it because price data was never added to the site. We just started measuring the Call to Action / Conversion as a successful RFQ or a visit to the contact page from these product level pages.

I worked on a B2B with a similar problem sometime back. The business decided to implement a Request for Quote system. And there was no impact on the rankings.

Donnie, I agree. However, we had the same problem on a website and here's what we did the canonical tag:

Over a period of 3-4 weeks, all those print pages disappeared from the SERP. Now if I take a print URL and do a cache: for that page, it shows me the web version of that page.

So yes, I agree the question was about blocking the pages from getting indexed. There's no real recipe here, it's about getting the right solution. Before canonical tag, robots.txt was the only solution. But now with canonical there (provided one has the time and resources available to implement it vs adding one line of text to robots.txt), you can technically 301 the pages and not have to stop/restrict the spiders from crawling them.

Absolutely no offence to your solution in any way. Both are indeed workable solutions. The best part is that your robots.txt solution takes 30 seconds to implement since you provided the actually disallow code :), so it's better.

Yes, it's strongly recommended. It should be fairly simple to populate this tag with the "full" URL of the article based on the article ID. This approach will not only help you get rid of the duplicate content issue, but a canonical tag essentially works like a 301 redirect. So from all search engine perspective you are 301'ing your print pages to the real web urls without redirecting the actual user's who are browsing the print pages if they need to.

I actually remember Lore from a while ago. It's an interesting, easy to use FAQ CMS.

Anyways, I would also recommend implementing Canonical Tags for any possible duplicate content issues. So whether it's the print or the web version, each one of them will contain a canonical tag pointing to the web url of that article in the section of your website.

Are you talking about a Wordpress Blog ? What are you trying to do by exporting site content/meta data into an XML File ? Are you trying to use it as a backup or what ?

As Francisco and Ryan said, they will for sure be counted. This is not an anchor text link, but it will still help you towards domain authority as well as page authority. If this domain/IP subnet has never linked to you before, it will also add towards your link profile in all those areas. It also looks like a natural link, a mix is always good and "natural". I would recommend having these as a part of a link building strategy. Too many anchor text/good/value passing links is always "not natural".

Everything adds up

I agree with Bail and Keri. The takeaway is that the phrase is always important but so is surrounding text. Mix and match and do it what makes sense for a user, not for a Search Engine. It will always work out better in the long-run and you won't have to worry about over optimization kind of penalties.

Design your website for the user as well as the Search Engines, not just the Search Engines. Search Engines like what the user's like. As it leads to more users engaging with your content, website, therefore improving your site-score, helping you not only in SEO but PPC if at all you do PPC.

Are the pages that are linking to that old domain "indexed". I guess they are, that's how you found them in the 1st place. How much of a compromise is it to use the old-domain ? Is it a compromise ? Personally I have seen varying successes with old and new domains, same topic. There are just too many factors that influence the rankings. I would look at the top 20 websites that are ranking for atleast 5 variations of your primary keyword and check their domain age. That should lay it out for you. Feel free to post the new domain, old domain or PM me the URL in private and I can check it for you.

You might also want to look at http://www.mybb.com/

Pretty easy to get it up and running. Eventually, you could consider upgrading to VBulletin.