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It is very frustrating when you see something like that - things you know are "wrong" but a competitor gets away with it.

I am going to skip the whole preaching about "don't worry too much about competitors or what they do" thing, and point out that if you are going to count/compare links, it is best to look at number of linking domains rather than total links.

100 sitewide footer credit links from one site is not really the same as 100 links from 100 different sites.

Rob's advice is very good in regard to sending people to the more effective inner page.

I would not mess around with canonical tags, unless the content is actually duplicated.  Rethinking your internal links might be helpful.  One thing I have done in similar situations is to use a keyword anchored link from the category page to the home page.  Moz Analytics will tell you this is keyword cannibalization, but it does often work to nudge Google toward ranking the home page.  So on a page about "Red Widgets", you could link to the home page with "Red Widget Company".  What is likely to happen is that you will sort of split the searches based on user intent, and searches that are more than just the base keyword. Searches that Google thinks are more informational would go to the Red Widgets page, where someone looking for a supplier or maker of red widgets might be sent to the home page.  Similar links throughout the site where they are appropriate would also be good.  Like, if you have a page or a blog post that mentions red widgets, link to the category. If it says something about manufacturer of red widgets, link to the home page.  Just like incoming links, you don't want to overuse the same keywords, though.  Mix things up a bit within the same topical theme (red widget maker, manufacturer of red widgets, red widget company...)

You may be over-thinking this, or taking that "one keyword per page" advice too seriously.

You are right that you should accurately describe the category page, and using that keyword (and anything else that accurately describes the topic) is going to be part of that. Since that page is the one that is actually about the category, I would not un-optimize it.  I wouldn't even worry about removing the keyword from the home page, either, since it is also relevant. You may want to link from Home to the category where that keyword is used, though I don't think that would make a huge difference.

The good news is, you just might end up with both showing in the SERPs.

Where on the page is this link? If it is the logo in the header, use the company name as the alt.  If it is a text link in the footer or somewhere that is site wide, company name is probably best.

If it is in a navigation menu, it really depends on how that menu is set up, but there isn't really anything wrong with "Home".  A lot of people don't bother putting a Home link in the menu since the header logo usually goes to the home page. But a lot of users don't know they can click on the logo to go home, so think about what type of readers will be visiting the site and whether or not they will be able to find their way around.

Home page navigational links don't make a huge difference regarding ranking most of the time, unless you have stuffed keywords into the alt tag or used the same keyword repeatedly instead of Home or the company name. Home, company name or simply the logo with the company name as the alt are all kind of interchangeable.

For your on-page strategy that you have described, ask yourself how each part of that benefits the reader. If it really doesn't benefit the reader and you are only doing it because you believe it might help SEO, then skip it. 
Put keywords in the back of your mind, not the front when writing titles. Sometimes, that means not having the keywords at the front of the title as well.

I looked at the example page you gave and the title looks a bit repetitive: "NLP Practitioner Training, NLP Practitioner Certification" To a searcher, that doesn't look very appealing in the SERPs. The repetition of "NLP Practitioner" could even keep the page from ranking as well as it could. Try something a bit more human, like "New NLP Practitioner Training Locations in California & Utah". That's more people-friendly, and if I gathered correctly from a quick skimming of the article, is a better description of what is on the page than simply two keywords stuck together.

So think firstly about what a person will think when they read that title in the SERPs, THEN worry about where you can fit your keywords into it.  Really, this is how you should think about ALL of your content, too.  Write about the topic, and make it your priority to convey your message well to readers.  If you write about it effectively, you will probably use your keyword enough times. The idea is that instead of worrying so much about one or two keywords, you will be able to to get more visitors who were searching for a variety of things related to your topic, in addition to ranking better for that keyword. Not to mention you will run less of a risk of over-optimizing. If you haven't seen the Blueprint yet, do check it out: http://moz.com/blog/how-to-rank 
The part about "Dream Your Theme" goes into more detail about the way optimizing for a theme or topic works.  I have also touched on this idea in a few different articles: http://kercommunications.com/tags/topical-optimization/

I am currently doing an audit of a site that has used clicksubmit for several months as its main method of link building. I am not very deep into the link profile yet, but it doesn't look good. Almost all the same anchor texts, the linking sites look as though they were made specifically to host links... so far the client site doesn't have a single link that I would consider "good". I hate having to report that.

I will check in with my findings later, but I have to agree with Michael York above - Great Reviews + Dodgy Looking Product + Sounds Too Good to Be True = A client website that will be looking for penalty remediation services soon.

Last time this happened, we went about 2 months without an update. I remember because I had been recommending SEOMoz memberships to a lot of my clients who wanted more in-depth info about their links & competitors that they could take with them when they no longer need me. I had some 'splaining to do when some of them discovered one of the key features they were paying for wasn't there.  When MozScape did finally update, it was indeed much better than before. So I am very curious to see if this update with that "new section of the internet that we never crawled before" closes the gap between some of the other link monitors (that do have way too many of the garbage links in their indexes).

Were any of those recommendations to reduce the amount of stuff on the home page? Like, the number of links to articles or number & prominence of ads?

Compare the approximate date your ranking dropped to the Google update history here: http://moz.com/google-algorithm-change and see if anything seems like it would have affected your site. I'm thinking the update about being top heavy with ads, or possibly one of the pandas may be part of the problem. The home page is really just a lot of links to articles (and ads), so you might do well to add some introductory text to tell users (and Google) what to expect from the site. Even adding article excerpts to the thumbnails or the featured articles at the top could be helpful. I know that sounds silly since it is clearly about Android, but some text that isn't a link would be useful for the sometimes stupid googlebot. (Yeah, I know, I am a hypocrite since I always say "for people not search engines").

Took a very quick look at the links in OpenSiteExplorer and it does look pretty clean.

Still doesn't hurt to either spring for a link audit, or try linkresearchtools.com to get a good start on finding suspicious links.

I hate to spin this off in another direction, but if you have great traffic and a huge following (assuming most of the 200k are real, not paid/fake profiles), where is that traffic coming from?

What I am getting at is maybe you are focusing too much on keywords, or looking at the wrong ones. Like, if you are hoping to rank for the generic "tech news", but your individual articles are all ranking well for whatever they are about, then maybe you are doing better than you think?

And the auditor recommendations - you say you followed a lot of the recommendations but not all. The ones you didn't follow may have been more important than you think, or the whole plan the auditor mapped out may be at its best when everything is done as per recommendations.  You might want to revisit the audit recommendations and do them all and see what happens before shopping around.

Agreed, and that is where a lot of small businesses end up in trouble with Google - by hiring the SEO provider they can afford, and that often means one that doesn't know or care what they are doing wrong.

$300-$500 is not unheard of for small business SEO, particularly a local business. The problem, I think, is how "small business" is defined when it comes to online marketing. If a company has only a few people or lower revenues, it is "small" by real world standards - but that doesn't matter if the site is competing online with huge companies that are in the same niche, marketing-wise. For example, a hardware store may only be competing with other "mom & pop" stores locally, but they still have to compete with Walmart, HomeDepot, TruValue, Lowes, etc online. Those all have been around a long time, have strong reputations & branding, and as a result have tons of links. It isn't impossible to rank among them or even above, but it is going to take a great deal of time and the best possible SEO & promotion.

This is why a lot of SEOs don't quote a flat rate. Getting a site about "bamboo handled solar powered grass trimmers" to rank well for all possible search terms is much easier than for a site about "lawn tools". SEO should be priced according to the level of competition.

If you think about all that is involved with doing SEO right, and then try to apply an hourly dollar value to it, $500 gets used up pretty quickly. Even if a site only has 5 or 6 pages and is not a total mess, there is at least an hour or two of analyzing and improving the site itself, just on the first go around. Those adjustments will usually have to be tweaked throughout a campaign. Even if you can get someone to do that at super-cheap hourly developer rates, it runs out quickly. A larger or more complicated site will require more, obviously.
If the SEO is going to be doing any content work and link building, you have the cost of the creative work which is not going to be cheap for good stuff, and the time to track down possible link sources and do whatever is needed to get those links. Even if the link builder is going the easier, riskier route of things like directory submissions, they still need to know what they are doing well enough to not do more harm than good.

Low budget "good" SEO is rare, but it can be found. There are trade-offs that you will need to be willing to make, though.

If you can find someone who is relatively new at SEO, but does know what they are doing, you may be able to to get an affordable rate while they are "hungry". But this is not a great long term plan because if they are indeed good, they will outgrow you and will be likely to put more of their time and energy into clients who are willing or able to pay.

Another option would be to find a provider who can work with your monthly budget, but do less work than they would for their normal rates. For example, let's say an SEO would normally do an analysis of the site and keyword research in the first phase of your campaign, then move into content strategy, social and other link acquisition. If they would normally do this for say, 1500 per month, and you will be paying 500, you could expect the set up of analytics and whatever other tracking & dashboards that will be used and analysis of the site's current state during the first month. More fine tuning of that next month, and maybe get into setting up your social presence. Keyword and traffic/usage analysis to start off your new content strategy after that. Then after a few months they may really start getting into outreach for link building. These are just examples, but the point is that SEO is really no different from anything else - you can only do so much with limited resources. If you need good content developed, like video or maybe some decent infographics, there goes your budget for a couple of months. Need a really good press release distributed by an above average press release site - that's a month or two of the budget...
This will take a heck of a lot of time to get anywhere, especially since there are thousands of tech news sites to compete with.

One other thought - you could have a reputable SEO do a thorough analysis or audit, and strategy development. Then you handle all of your own social media and other link building efforts. That should run you the same as about 2-3 months of your budget and could end up being much more effective than trying to turn a full time job into part time.

No worries re: parrotting. If you look here in the Q&A and on things like Disqus, you'll find me repeating myself pretty often.

Travel sites like yours can be really difficult. There are so many of them, most have virtually the same content, and it seems that most are extremely committed to link spam (and are often still succeeding with it).

My gut instinct would be to try to come up with some really useful travel planning guides as a linkable asset like a PDF or maybe video. Some general guides for specific parts of the world (things like "How Not to Offend People in _____"), and maybe some for more specific locations. Then the tricky part is promoting that content in a non-spammy way so it will get shared, Liked, linked to, etc.

That's a lot of work, but if Google ever drops the hammer on the travel site niche which is competitive and pretty spammy, you will have a better chance of survival.

I am not sure how knowing whether or not one particular piece of Google's algorithm found a problem with the site is going to help, but since Panda is generally going after copied or thin/weak content, I think it is safe to say that a lack of unique and "quality" content is to blame. All those links using the anchor text "cheap holidays" are also a potential problem, though not specifically a panda thing.

If I understood correctly, the site dropped from #2 to #10 and back to 7. Still on page one, so count your blessings. With a relatively small drop like that, it is probably just the Google algorithm in general or external factors like lost or devalued incoming links, rather than a specific filter against the site. Not every ranking change is due to a named algorithm update.

If I had a dime for every "professionally recoded" website that was completely hosed from an optimization standpoint...

Not sure why people are throwing out link distribution and other wild-ass-guesses that would have nothing to do with disappearing incoming links. The simplest answer is often the most accurate.
Did your site's domain change? Or did any inner page URLs change? If so, then you'll need to 301 those to their current counterparts. ScreamingFrog is good for finding broken/missing links, but you can also take a look at the Crawl Errors in Google webmaster tools to see if Googlebot is having any problems finding your pages. If no URLs were changed or removed, then it probably doesn't have anything to do with the redesign.

Check with majesticseo.com and ahrefs.com to see if the links have been marked as lost or removed recently. Both of those are pretty quick to spot new and removed links.

The sharp drop in number of links could have come from one or more sites removing your link or the page/site just doesn't exist anymore.  If one site with 20000 pages disappears and they had a sitewide link to you, that would explain it. Do you happen to know how many linking domains you had, compared to how many you currently have? That would be a better indicator.

And your second question (missed that the first time):
If the page is still accessible from somewhere, it won't be a "problem", but it may not rank as well. That really depends on a whole lot of other things - external links to that page, other internal links to it from and the crawlability of the site in general. But in general, no it won't be a huge problem - I have a few pages on my own site that only have one internal link from the sitemap and no external links, yet they still rank for some things.

It does take some time for Google to remove pages from the index.  You can speed it along a little by using the "Remove URL" link under Optimization in Google's Webmaster tools. You should also disallow the url in your robots.txt file as well, to be on the safe side if you don't want the page to show up in searches.

And there is also Google's page about removal: https://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=59819

If it isn't going to be so much work that it will wreck the budget or take someone off of something more urgent, I would use schema markup on anything on which it can be legitimately used - regardless of whether or not Google is currently showing that particular itemtype. Google currently only uses some of them, but will probably add more later.

Other sites are starting to use the markup for things like Offers, too. Pinterest just announced that they are now going to have "rich pins", for example.

So you can add the markup now and be a little ahead of the game, or wait until you need to catch up.

I think I understand now. You would have the customer generated listings ending up with duplicate titles so you were adding numbers to the end.

Maybe you could automatically add the location or the date of the listing to the title, or some other thing that would be unique to the listing so your titles would look like like "Home To Home Move in Mytown on May 20"

While it may not be important for these pages to show up in search, at least then they would be unique rather than looking like a bunch of duplicates.  This could also help you with local searches in the areas where your users have posted a listing.

1. If you are talking about the meta keywords tag, don't bother. Google and other search engines don't use it for anything that would benefit you.

2. Does putting those words in bold do anything to benefit users, or are you doing it because you believe it will bold words somehow help improve your position in search results? If it makes something more clear to users by making certain words bold, and doesn't look ugly or stupid, then do it. If there is no benefit to your readers to have seemingly random words in bold, then don't do it.

"LSI" is just a fancy term for synonyms, which are something any writer (SEO or not) should be using so your writing is not repetitive. "Long tail keywords" is just a fancy term for "things people actually search". Write naturally, and think about how people speak and write if you want more "long tail" search traffic.

Yeah.... it sounds like a "don't bother" situation, with these possible exceptions:

Testimonials - You can use aggregate review markup your testimonials page, just make sure the reviews are all legit and verifiable. Not sure if or how Google might verify these, and it seems prone to gaming it

Does the company provide specific service packages like "3 Rooms for $X.00"? That may work as an "Offer" even though it is not a tangible product. http://schema.org/Offer

Technically, they are unique to a search engine bot. To a person, they are pretty much the same thing.

And like Jesse said, they are kind of lame - spammy, uninteresting, and the numbers make it look like some kind of indexing mistake.

It really depends on if your prices are lower than most - and if you are able to make sure you are the at least close to the lowest on price.

If your prices aren't low enough, click through would probably be lower. If your prices are obviously low, it could reduce the time to purchase down to just a few clicks in one visit if the customer gets to the page from the SERP, likes what they see, and all goes well in the checkout process. The downside is that a really thrifty shopper will make a note of your price and keep shopping others who may end up getting the sale if the customer gets to their site and finds a lower price, or something else that makes them want to buy - like free shipping.

In my opinion, if you can't frequently track your pricing on all products compared to all competitors who rank within the first couple of pages of results, you are better off having some enticing things in the meta description or titles. Like: "Red Widgets - Lowest Prices Guaranteed with Free Shipping" (if you do price matching).

Like you, I am still finding a ton of bad SEO, even from "reputable" companies who have been around a long time and talk the talk. It is amazing just how bad some of their work is - or how non-existent it is in some cases.

I have also worked directly with a few well-known internet marketing companies on larger projects only to find out that they are doing some pretty shady things, or not doing what they say they will.

My current pet peeve is large web design & development companies who sell SEO as an add on to their trusting dev clients. Then they do absolutely nothing, other than maybe 5 minutes of keyword suggestions.  The developer will launch a site full of severe content duplication issues, then charge a few thousand a month for an SEO package and take 3 months to fix the issues the dev team created, and call a meeting with the whole team and the client to talk about this great new discovery they have just made: rel="canonical".
That is like buying a brand new car, then paying the dealer's mechanic a hefty fee to make sure the manufacturer designed and assembled the car properly.

We can try to educate clients as much as possible, but many will still be tempted when someone comes along saying "oh we have a totally new Google-friendly thing we do called a link wheel. 100% white hat and Panda/Penguin safe. Only $129!"  I am sometimes jaded enough to think the people who fall for such scams because they want something for nothing get what they deserve... yet I still find myself trying to help them anyway. It is the high profile, seemingly legit companies who are actually not much better that really bug me.

**But I am optimistic.  **

All of Google's webspam efforts and the growth of communities like this one are helping to make it harder for scammers and just plain incompetent SEOs to keep doing what they do.

The good news is word of mouth does work. Kind of like how we tell clients to provide great content and user experience and the links and rankings will follow; when we provide awesome, effective and honest service - the referrals will come. Being truly helpful in communities like this, on social media, forums or anywhere else also works to show your knowledge and spread the truth about real SEO and dispel misconceptions. Even getting into an argument or calling BS on someone when they are spouting nonsense can actually attract new clients. There are plenty of smart website owners who are sick of all the bull and are happy to stumble upon a good rant, apparently.

There will always be scammers and cheap link building services - just like there will be some clients who never learn that you get what you pay for. But it does seem to be getting better. Fear of Pandas & Penguins seems to help some.

Replying to myself because I just noticed something I was wrong about.

I thought that the first box at the top was an excerpt of the page it links to, but it looks like it IS actually unique.

So you probably don't need to add anything, though expanding on that text in the first box might be a good idea.

Try to get a link to that page and see if that helps.

The thing is those words do appear elsewhere on the site, and Google can probably figure out that what is on this particular page is excerpts and links to the originals.

This normally isn't a huge problem, though. Lots of sites and blogs have category and tag pages that fit that description and ARE indexed (though many are not).

Before messing around with adding text which you may not really need to add, try doing a Fetch as Googlebot of the page in Google Webmaster Tools and hit the submit button when the fetch is complete. It may be that the page just got dropped by accident.  If it doesn't return to the index after a few days, try adding a little totally unique content. Just a sentence or two about what these links are should be enough. I have done this on a few sites with lots of thin tag or category pages and it doesn't take a lot of text to get them into the index.

Partner link pages are also typically thin, but they may be indexed anyway if the links are useful, or ignored if it is simply a link exchange page that doesn't really have any value other than swapping links (which isn't much value).  Like most things related to Google search, there isn't always a specific thing that will make the difference.

What you may want to consider is whether or not you want or need that page to appear in search, and if you think it could or should actually rank well for anything. If it doesn't matter, I wouldn't be too concerned unless there are many pages on the site that are not indexed.

It may have been dropped because it was seen as "thin" content. Since most of the page is excerpts from and links to other pages, it is likely being ignored - especially if there are other pages that have the same excerpts and links. If you can add unique, some descriptive text to the page, it may do better.

And about the PageRank: The PR you can see in the Toolbar or other PR checks is usually very out of date. It could be that prior to your page's disappearance, it had a high PR and really does not now. While the visible PR can be used to get a pretty good idea of how Google ranks a page, I wouldn't give it much thought. Plenty of low PR pages rank very well for whatever search terms they are targeting, and lots of high PR pages don't rank very well.

Check this out: http://www.seroundtable.com/google-brand-title-appending-16432.html

It seems that Google is moving the site or company name to the front with a colon in some situations. I don't know if anyone has done a thorough study of it, but from what I have seen it seems to happen with sites that have a fairly solid brand established, but have page titles that are too long, keyword stuffed or for whatever other reason Google decides to alter what appears in the SERPs.

Google has been shortening or altering such longer and spammier titles for a while, but about a month ago these "Brand: xxxxx" titles started appearing.  To me it seemed funny because I have used that format on the home page of my own site and many others for a while because it just made sense to me. I guess Google thinks so too.

If you are looking for a way to update common info on all of them at one time, I don't think that is available.  If you are hoping to simplify it so you only need to login to one account to manage them all, that can be done by transferring ownership to one Profile.

Pick one G+ Profile (not Page) to be the Owner of all of them.
In the settings for each Google+ Local Page, make that Profile a Manager if it is not already.
Then you will be able to make that Manager the Owner.  
If the Profile was not previously a Manager of the Page, you will need to wait about 2 weeks  after making the Profile a Manager before you can do this.

The Places dashboard is not transferable, as far as I know.

Google Local / Places has been very screwy lately. Changing Places to Local is often resulting in the listing disappearing into Limbo for weeks, months or indefinitely - especially if there are any issues that may seem fishy to Google's moderators. Like service area businesses with no walk-in storefront, for example.

One very confusing thing is that the old Google Places dashboard is still active, but it isn't really clear what info is used from there, and what is used from Google+ Local. The Places dashboard does have the ability to upload bulk locations, but I am unsure how that would work with existing listings. http://www.google.com/local/add/

Really, if the listings are showing up OK and there isn't something very wrong with some of them, it may be safest to just tolerate having to update them from multiple owner profiles for the time being. It seems as though central management for businesses with multiple locations, like your client, SHOULD be something coming to Google+ Local in the future.

If you do decide to try to consolidate them under one Owner, make sure that everything in each listing is 100% legitimate.
You have probably already seen this, but here are Google's Places guidelines. http://support.google.com/places/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=107528

I was seeing a date of 8/1/2012 until maybe yesterday.  Seems to have rolled back to July 6.

Agree with Steve - PR is probably not what you should focus on as it is one of hundreds of factors, rarely updated and has little to do with how you rank for specific keywords.  Plenty of PR 0 or 1 sites rank very highly for their target keywords.

With that out of the way, maybe we need some clarification.  You say your site ranks in the top 5 for your keywords, but your are low in organic results.  How are you determining how your site ranks?  Just checking in a browser can yield inaccurate results since Google will use location, and your personal search and browsing history (if you haven't turned it off, and maybe even if you have turned it off) to determine what to show you.

Do you mean you are ranking in the top 5 of search results for your keywords, but not seeing the expected traffic?  If that is the case, take a good look at your page titles and meta descriptions.  Make sure they read nicely to people, and aren't just a bunch of keywords.  It may be that you are ranking well, but the results don't stand out from the competition enough for users to click through to the site.

I was looking for the same and found this: http://www.seomoz.org/q/company-nsphere-www-nsphereinc-com

The lack of pricing info and the sort of confusing interface with no direct upgrade options on the free version was enough for me to assume that it is probably a little shady. The sample directory in the above mentioned discussion confirms that suspicion.

If the other site is outranking yours, it would mean that for whatever reason, Google has decided it is better quality, but not necessarily determined one or the other to be a scraper. That could be based on any combination of the hundreds of factors Google uses to determine position in search results.  It may just be that it has more/better inbound links.

If you focus on keeping only quality original content on your site, getting good links and mall of your on-page SEO is in good shape then you shouldn't have to worry about scrapers. Google will find and devalue the duplicates eventually.

If this is one of those cases where yours is clearly the original and the scraper is outranking yours for whatever reason, you may want to consider filing a DMCA report with the site's hosting company.  You can usually find that info with a whois search.

You can also try submitting a spam report to Google here https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport

I haven't done it in a while, but I am pretty sure you have to add a note in Google Reader if you are using that to create the feed unless something has changed.

Since some of the unwanted URLs are linked from other sites, use 301 redirects.

Usually, people want to remove the file extensions like .aspx for cleaner looking, shorter URLs.

You can remove the .aspx extension from all pages with a rewrite like this in .htaccess:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.aspx -f
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1.aspx

If you want to keep the URLs with .aspx, rather than without, I think you will have to use individual 301 redirects.

You could try using https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/submit-url?continue=http://www.google.com/addurl/ to submit the URL to google, but if the page can only be found by using their locator, it may not get indexed since it is not linked within their site.  Worth a try though.

Unfortunately there is no exact answer to this. Say you get a bunch of links from a variety of sites. The "better" quality sites like blogs that get a lot of traffic, are updated frequently and maybe have a higher pagerank, among other things, will see their pages indexed sooner than lower quality sites like directories. IN some cases, the site may be decent quality but is really huge so indexing new content on it may take longer too. So a link from a high profile site may get indexed almost immediately, but your links from crappyseolinks4salenow.com may take a few weeks.  Then, once Google finds the new links, it will also take some time until they are factored in to Google's ranking of your site. And that can also depend on how often your own site is crawled and re-calculated.

So it could be anywhere from a few days to a few weeks.  I have seen the effects of even a good link take anywhere from a day to a month to show up.

Backlinks from adult sites?  Just kidding. That probably refers to a raw URL like http://yoursite.com rather than one with anchor text.

Not sure if it was a connection issue on my end or what, but that page takes a very long time to load, which could explain the lack of indexing of the pages linked from it.  
Also, Google states that pages submitted witht the Fetch as Googlebot tool are not guaranteed to be indexed, so there may be quite a delay on that. Are all pages included in your XML sitemap? An XML sitemap is the preferred way to notify Google of pages it may not normally find.  Here is a link to more about XML sitemaps https://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=156184&hl=en
Even with an XML sitemap, Google may not immediately crawl many pages. Actually, indexing is rarely immediate. The frequency of crawling and speed of indexing has to do with many of the same factors as your ranking - quality, number of inbound links and pagerank, site performance, etc. If all your pages load quickly and you are in pretty good shape as far as links, etc, you could also try something to draw Google's attention to the new pages - like Tweeting a link or posting to Google+. That seems to "force" faster indexing in some cases.
I just checked your site with webpagetest.org and it is showing a load time of about 14 seconds. Tools.pingdom.com seemed to get hung up on some of the javascripts and couldn't complete its test. Doing what you can to speed up the site and address any other "quality" issues will help with indexing, and your performance in search engine results in general.

Without looking at the actual pages to see if your headers and footers are set up properly, my guess would be that the "new" pages have not been fully indexed yet. Though, the 301 redirects in htaccess should make that less of a problem.  They are 301 and not 302 or anything else, right?

Make sure that each page has a unique title tag and meta description. If you used a common header on each, a mistake many people make is not setting it up so that each page has its own unique title.

A 30 or more place drop does seem like a penalty might be in place. If you are only seeing the drop for some keywords and not everything, a 30 or 50 position drop could be an "over promotion" penalty.  I have to admit I haven't done thorough research on the so called 30 or 50 penalties, but the belief is that if you have too many of the same anchor texts in your inbound links as is often the case with bulk directory submissions, you will lose 30 places with this penalty. In extreme cases it can be 50. I guess that could happen if your page is keyword stuffed too.

Again, I have no proof other than some anecdotal evidence - I had a client who prior to working with me hired a "1000s of back links" scammer who did indeed submit to about 1000 junky directories with the exact same keyword anchor text for each. Once those links started showing up, the site's position for that keyword went off a cliff.

If that sounds like your situation, you could try sending a Reconsideration Request through Google's Webmaster Central. They will usually get back to you within a few weeks with a message that either no manual penalty has been imposed, or if there is one, hopefully they will tell you why.

In Webmaster Tools, go to URL Parameters under Site Settings.  You will probably see some of the parameters you want to block in the list.  Click on Edit next to a parameter you want to block like "?app=members" and then choose the appropriate settings to prevent Googlebot crawling.

I don't know if that is the preferred way of doing it, but that should block those dynamic pages.

Noindex/nofollow should be good enough, but if you want to be sure it doesn't get indexed, you could can also include <meta name="robots" content="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW"> in the head section of the page to be blocked. You can also exclude the page in your robots.txt file. </meta name="robots">

You can find a simple robots.txt generator in Google Webmaster Tools if you need to block particular pages or directories. The robots.txt file should be in the root directory of your site and look something like this:

User-agent: * Disallow: /file-you-want-to-hide.html

You can also request removal of specific URLs in Webmaster Tools if it has already been indexed.

Since it may not be practical to have every event linked through navigation, maybe a widget that shows the last maybe ten events would be good enough.

You should use a XML site map to keep Google up to date with new pages. I could not find one for your site. Otherwise, if the event pages can only be found by using the search feature on your site, those pages will not probably not be crawled and indexed.  you could also submit the feed to RSS sites Fetch as Googlebot may work, but it probably will not be as fast as using a sitemap.xml file.

Would it be possible to have the event pages available through some kind of navigation in addition to being found by your site's search?

You might also consider setting up an RSS feed of the events and submitting it to feed burner and other RSS sites. That may be a little complicated, but would also help speed up indexing.

How long?

As long as it needs to be to be good: informative, entertaining, thought-provoking, or in some way useful.
That said, the "SEO by numbers" crowd would tell you more than about 450, but less than 1000 words.

How good?

Shouldn't it always be your best? Sure, occasional fluff and filler is ok on your own blog once in a while, but when guest blogging, you should always make a good impression.
Think about guest blogging (and just about all links, really) as being a possible first point of contact with new customers/readers/whatever, and not just what it means for your rankings.  I think "content marketing" is the buzzword that people who use buzzwords are using about guest blogging these days.

Write the kind of articles that people will read and think "I want to see more of that" and actually follow your links.

Who should you go for?

Aim for the top authorities in your niche. But before contacting the site, really look at the quality of your writing and make sure it is up to their standards. Sure you could aim lower and be more likely to get your articles posted, but you would put forth almost the same effort without gaining as much from it.  Again it is an opportunity for publicity, in addition to an opportunity to get good links.

I have been seeing a lot of that kind of thing too, but not just with SEOMoz tools. I think something is up with Google in some way. My theories so far are - some kind of algorithm adjustment that has only partially rolled out, a change in how Google releases info to 3rd party tools, or the conspiracy theory: a change in how personalization is handled so that no search isn't at least a little personalized.

Considering Google's recent announcement about limiting search query and referrer data to Adwords tracking only, I am thinking it is an overall shuffling around of things at Google.

Here's a link to a question I asked about a similar problem where my non-personalized local searches were not looking as good as the various keyword position tools I use.  Kind of the reverse of your issue, but I think it may have a similar cause, whatever that may be: http://www.seomoz.org/q/local-searches-done-from-outside-of-local-area-better-than-searches-from-within-local-area

That should be OK.

Try to use your keywords in the photo descriptions and it may even be better.

If the pages are not used and not linked to in your site, remove them and 301 redirect the URLs to the new addresses.

You are right about the pagination and noindex, follow, but another solution which may be better is to use rel="next" and rel="prev".  See this for more info: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html

It is also there so users can block a site they just don't want to see anymore. It isn't related to your site specifically but is simply a "feature". There is nothing you can do about it aside from making sure your site isn't something anyone would want to block. If a user choses to block your site, they won't see it anymore. It won't effect what other users see unless several people block your site, then it may cause lower rankings. As far as I know, nobody has determined exactly how man people must block your site for it to effect search results for other users, but Google does claim to use that info.