Thanks, Dr. Pete.  They actually do have a lot of footer links from clients that I have advised against but.... you know how clients are.  Perhaps that is/was holding them back and the addition of more internal links coinciding with their small jump in ranking was a simple coincidence

agreed - mine was simply my opinion as well  There is no wrong answer.

You mean 301, right?

I would say a category page as redirecting to a different product, no matter how similar, could make for a poor user experience.

I have a client who ranked #3 for a very important and highly competitive keyword phrase.  Using the 'Compare Pages' tool in open site explorer I could see that we were far better optimized than the two websites that were out ranking my client.  Our PA was higher, the MozRank was higher, more internal and external links (and the external are all high quality) more linking C blocks etc.. etc... not just the page but the website, in general, was better optimized.

The one thing I did notice was that although we had more internal and external links, our ratio was far heavier to the external side than the ratio of either competitor.

So, at a loss of what else to do, I went through the website and beefed up the internal links to the specific page in question.  I didn't over do it, just moved up from about 6% to about 12% (one competitor was at about 20% while the other was about 65%).  Six days later we are number two rather than number three.

Coincidence?  Should I beef it up even more?  Has anyone ever come across anything like this?

Thank you for your comments in advance.

Agreed

I have never had any issues with hyphenated domain names and I have used them many times.

You are totally correct, Adam  I simply use DA as a guide line for whether or not the website, as a whole, is 'OK' - not as a definitive rule.  You certainly can get a spammy link from a high DA website but I haven't found that to happen very often at all.  I suppose I use it in the way that I used to use toolbar PR - not as a rule, but a guide line.  Thank you for your insight.  Again, you are totally correct, I should not have been so vague.

Cheers, and thumbs up

I would suggest taking the time to go through them.  Check the domain authority and the actual content on the exact page that links to your website.  Suspicious does not necessarily mean that it is a bad link - although most of them probably will be.  If the page that links to you has content that is relevant to what your website is about and if the linking website has decent domain authority, I would put that link in the 'keep' pile.  Even if out of the 120 you only end up with 25 links that you keep, it could make a difference in the positive.

Where I work we provide both template and custom solutions with templates being, obviously, more affordable.  Although we do very well with the customs our templates sell far more and of those there are, of course, templates that sell better than others.

We have never had any issues between websites that decide on the same templates.  Never.

Due to my practical experience with different properties using the same templates I have to say that I disagree with the assertion that the html and css (and jquery and everything else) that goes in to the template construct would be considered duplicate content.  I have always believed, and still do, that "duplicate content" refers only to the subject matter that is published on the website.  Nothing else.

I believe that you are safe with this.  So long as the delivered content, that is the content that a visitor will see/read on site, is different from site to site (not just a little different but actually different) than you should be perfectly fine.  Are you seeing issues of some sort?  What brought this about?