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I know I can do this in OSE page by page, but is there a way I can do this in a large batch? There are 200+ PDF's that I need to figure out what pages (if any) link to the PDF. I'd rather not do this page by page, but rather copy-paste the entire list of pages I'm looking for. Any tools you know of that can do this?

Our company is moving our press release section over to Business Wire.  Business Wire will be hosting the press releases on their servers http//ourcompany.newshq.businesswire.com, but we want it to display as if these are hosted on our site www.ourcompany/press-releases/.  This is where our press releases are hosted now.  They are recommending using a CNAME redirect to essentially mask their URL and display ours.

We don't want to lose out on the search value that our press release area has built up over time.  Will the CNAME redirect cause any SEO problems?

Is there a penalty for implementing a rel canonical between to pages that don't have the same content?  I was told that you should avoid using a rel canonical if the pages score lower than 50-60 on the Similar Page Checker: http://www.webconfs.com/similar-page-checker.php

The overall theme of the pages I am considering this for are similar but the actual content is different.

Yes, that's exactly what it is. Our company uses them a lot for print collateral so the URL is easy to remember, not long, etc. No content lives on the vanity URL, it just get redirected to somewhere else. Thanks Keri.

Ok. That makes sense. The way our company would use it is having a microsite for specific, focused topics - large enough that warrant their own site.  They are clearly part of our overall brand, unlike the Disney properties example.  On each of these sites, there will almost always be a link back to the main/corporate website, usually in the footer.

Do you think having one or two links on every page pointing back to company.com would be sufficient to notify search engines that the two are associated, and ultimately give some search value to the subdomain hosted microsite from the main domain?

Are there any studies or evidence supporting any of this?

Based on this post from 2009, it's recommended in most situations to set up a microsite as a subdirectory as opposed to a subdomain. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/understanding-root-domains-subdomains-vs-subfolders-microsites.  The primary argument seems to be that the search engines view the subdomain as a separate entity from the domain and therefore, the subdomain doesn't benefit from any of the trust rank, quality scores, etc.  Rand made a comment that seemed like the subdomain could SOMETIMES inherit some of these factors, but didn't expound on those instances.

What determines whether the search engine will view your subdomain hosted microsite as part of the main domain vs. a completely separate site?  I read it has to do with the interlinking between the two.

Also, there was an article from 2009 that said one of the reasons you might want to set up a microsite under a subdomain instead of a subdirectory is if you wanted to dominate the entire SERP with your company's page.  This assume that a single domain or subdomain could rank two pages on the SERP.  If this is true, this makes using subdomains for microsites even less desirable, correct?

If I set up a vanity URL that just 301's to the main site, do the search engines look at the keywords in the vanity URL when determing how to rank the site.

For example, if I set up a vanity URL of www.coolnewtechgear.com, and redirect it to www.company.com/products/, would the search engines view the keywords of cool, new, tech, and gear and associate that with the page it's getting redirected to? Or does it ignore the vanity URL and only look at the content of the page itself?

I don't see "FIRST" in any of your sitelinks.

Thanks. Our site has similar rankings for some queries as well.  Is this a change with the engines that has occurred recently?  I've read articles on SEO Moz that say the max is 2 and have also been told the same from our agency.

I have read in many places that the maximum number of results that will be displayed on the SERP from a domain or subdomain is 2.  Is this still the case?  I have seen many instances where there are well more than 2 results from a domain displaying on the SERP.  For example, search 'cvs pharmacy' on Google. There are 7 results from the cvs.com domain. Is it the case that the search engines will display more if it's a branded search?