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Awesome!  By adding the following code to my .htaccess file, and placing it in my public directory it works.  Didn't work from the root directory which I figured out later.  I think related concerns are solved now.  Now to see how the results show on the next crawl. 

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} /index.html?$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)index.html?$ "/$1" [NC,R=301,NE,L]

This is where it goes a bit over my head as a programer, which I'm not, but we would need to dive into the code a bit.  I'm not sure I can be of help with details, but from what I'm understanding is as follows.

I understand that if a product is in stock, it shows the page, if the product is not in stock, rather than that pages information changing to say it is no longer in stock, you get redirected to or the page changes to a new page that simply says it can't find what you are looking for.

If I'm right, you need to change the code so when a product is not found or no longer in stock, instead of pointing to this dead page returning zero, or instead of just having that page deleted (in turn being 404), have the page change content or redirect to another page saying it is no longer in stock.

I'm not sure I'm clear here, but what I'm saying is, have it direct to a page you created yourself that says you are temporarily out of stock, rather than the program automatically generating a 404 page.

I hope this helps send you in the right direction, otherwise I'm no programer so can't give you exact instructions, but maybe someone who knows e-commerce programming can help here.

I ran the SEO web crawler and it finished already.  Successfully crawled all pages.  I still have to wait for another week to get the main campaign updated and see results there, but I believe it may work too now.

I guess I solved my own problem after being directed to robots.txt by Jim.  I found that the Wordpress plugin for SEO xml sitemap creator was the problem because it created a virtual robots.txt file which sent me on a wild goose chase looking for a robots.txt file which didn't exist.  Creating a robots.txt file allowing all seems to be the solultion, incase anyone else has this same problem.

Thanks for sending me in the right direction.  I went on to research rel=publisher and found http://www.vervesearch.com/blog/seo/how-to-implement-the-relpublisher-google-authorship-mark-up/ which details the steps and more. I've now setup my Google+ business page and just need to wait for the post card in the mail.

This makes some sense.  It's always helpful to be active online and search engines seem to prefer pages that are active and have up to date content.  I found this out by accident years ago just updating my website constantly, not for SEO purposes, but because I like to keep my website current.  All the time, it's been helping my rankings and I didn't even know it.

You should suggest to your various authors (if they are different people) that they post updates, as minor an update as it may seem, it is still a content change / addition / update.  That's what matters, along with driving visitors to your Google+ page via Facebook, Twitter, various social network websites and email blasts.  I have all my websites including social networking, linking to each other.

So, regardless if it's true or not, it's a good idea to  keep Google+ pages update frequently, because if it's not true now, it maybe later on, and you want to be ahead of the game. 

Thanks Klarke, this is very reassuring to know.  I'm going to try both as you suggest and see how it appears.  I just setup my Google+ page.  I read that Google Plus pages do appear and SEOmoz itself shows up in the SERPs, so I'm assuming it does work.  I'll try both as you suggest anyway.