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I had a Car Dealer Group in Virginia that gave itself a penalty because they had all of their websites (around 20) linked in the menu a couple times. Every time I removed them they would come back to the top of the search engines, and they would drop right back down when they added them back.
If you are worried about the site wides you could just nofollow them. I think Matt Cutts has a video on that.
Have you looked into the Link Detox tool? It supposedly helps you find the bad links that no one else monitors.
I've ranked a few sites with great onsite and nofollow links. There's some sort of trust/authority that is passed through them. That being said, dofollow links pass more authority.
The reason why all of the other SEO tools include them is because they work to show you as many links as the tool finds. They don't limit it based on what they perceive as valuable. They provide you the data to make the choice.
Unfortunately, no. Free product = No Service 
That's really interesting! How is it effecting your CTR? Higher than average? Lower?
Are you trying to rank it for the company name, or a keyword? Are you linking to it from your domain(s)? Do you list it when you write blogs? Make sure it is getting some link love.
Are you a Business to Business company, or Business to Customer?
Infographics: Facebook, Google+, Pinterest
Content: Facebook, Twitter, Google+
You could also make your content into a slideshow, and put it on Slideshare. It's an awesome way to generate some additional brand awareness. Forums are also an awesome way to build brand presence. You could do some command searches like:
"Forum" Product/Service
This happens from time to time on sites that I manage. I usually just check to make sure that it has been crawling since that date. If it has, then life is good.
If it hasn't, then I usually shout obscenities before trying to find the problem. The obscenities don't directly contribute to a solution, but it does seem to make me calm down a bit. Anyway, I digress.
Take a look at your webmaster tools, and see how well the site has been being crawled since that date. Is it all O.K.? If not, try to describe any changes you made in the weeks prior to that date.
First off, entrance path has no impact on your reviews. The only thing to watch out for his utilizing the same IP for multiple reviews, such as a kiosk in your store. So, sending them the direct link would be the ideal route to take.
Secondly, what's your goal for the reviews? Is it to have more reviews? Then it doesn't matter about the engagement. If you are trying to build up a brand presence, then you would be better off generating good content (How To's, Top 10 Lists, Little Known Facts, Etc.), and sharing that on your social networks. From there you could try coax some people into sharing it for you.
I hope that helps.
I was looking at it from more of a social media / inbound perspective. So, you might show up in the 7th-9th spot from Venice, but you wouldn't get much traffic organically - as you suggested.
One thing that have been successful for me locally is doing interviews with the event organizers. I ask them to post the interview on their social media, and link to it from their website. Most non-profits are more than happy to do that in turn for increased exposure. Running event organizers, especially for new events, are usually open to doing the same. I do this with car dealerships quite often, and pretty much everyone hates car dealerships.
You could do a mixture of local and informational content to get the best of both worlds.
The intent for content marketing is to educate your audience, as well as demonstrate yourself as an expert in the field. Writing about the local dog park won't exactly do either for you.
I'd suggest writing about what people are actually interested in in relation to whatever your client does. You can get ideas for content by going through different Women's Health Forums, and Yahoo Answers.
Just doing some quick research I see that there are tons of searches for long tail variations of "How often should I go to the gynecologist." When you boil that down to just your city there is far less, but it is still something women have shown interest in. Just off the top of my head I would suggest writing content for things like "What age should girls start going to the Gynecologist," "What to expect at your Gyno examination" and "When should you go to the Gynecologist."
One of the Chiropractors I work with posted a few videos on a specific treatment he does that not everyone can do a while back. He has had people travel great distances to get that treatment from him, and it even helped him get a foot in the door to be a Chiropractor for some of the Winter Olympic athletes. All from creating content he knew his readers would like to see.
I know what you mean. I work with pretty much all the vendors, and I can say that you should just be happy you don't have a Ford Direct site, which requires you to pay a "SEO Fee" to just change title tags.
Anyway, if you install the "Redirect Path" plugin on Chrome, which shows when you get redirected on a site, and what kind of redirect it is, you will see that the link to your dealership page from one of your VDPs on Cars.com is actually a 301 redirect. Basically, they are doing their best to keep any authority from going to that page that would help the link back to your site. They also link to the www. version of your website, which then gets 301'd to the non www. version of your website. If, and how much, authority is lost with redirects is highly debated, but I usually go with a 10% loss of authority. Basically, any authority that the link might provide is greatly decreased by these redirects.
This is just Cars.com, but I would guess the others are similar. Do these links register in your Webmaster tools?
I actually specialize in automotive seo, but haven't really thought about it. Anyway, I took a look at your cars.com link, and it registers as a PA of 1, which means it has very little authority being passed into it. The reason why you aren't seeing these links is because the pages in which they reside have such little authority that the Moz spider does not locate them. I've also never seen one of these links in Google Webmaster tools, so I would guess that they don't consider them very authoritative links either.
Consider this, though. You are paying for that service, so those links are Paid Links. It's also possible that search engines ignore them because they know this fact, and don't bother indexing them. The only way to really get an idea of how important search engines feel those pages are would be to look at server level crawl stats. Unfortunately, Cars.com would never share that data with you, and your rep would probably just give you a blank look if you asked.
If you have any questions about your dealerships SEO you can PM me.
1. It's all about how diverse the keywords are. If the difference is just "pizza bag for sale" and "pizza bags for sale," then one page would be enough. Try to group your keywords together into like groups. The number of groups you have is the number of pages.
2. The best way to utilize these pages would be to use internal links from these posts back to your main/money pages. As long as you are writing content about something, and not just a rehash of your money pages, then you should be perfectly fine.
The recovery days after you complaining is probably a coincidence. They would have to get really lucky that your site just happened to get indexed right after they fixed something.
What dates did you see your traffic decrease? From when to when? That's the best way to figure out what kind of penalty you may have received. If it doesn't match up on dates, then we can help you diagnose what happened from the work logs that the SEO might provide.
Cody
The grading tool is used as a 10,000 foot view of the page. It analyzes to the webpage to look for the proper usage of exact keyword phrases throughout the webpage. It is not designed to analyze for synonyms or variations of keywords.
If you wanted to score a good grade for the variation you specified, then you would need to through that exact phrase in your Title, etc. Keep in mind, though, the grading tool is not an indication of great SEO, just an indication that you have used keywords in the locations most highly correlated with positive results.
You want to properly group your content together. So, if the section of your website is "Career Resources," and all of these categories are in that section, then I would use the first URL structure. It makes internal linking between these pages seem more natural, since they are in the same "silo."
The other benefit of the first style is if you used breadcrumbs. By having no unifying sub-directory, as in the second URL structure, you are unable to push all the authority to a single page, which then pushes authority back down into specific categories. Well, you still could, but your URL structure would contradict your breadcrumbs, and it would probably be harder to program the website to naturally build breadcrumbs.
If you recently added them, then you need to wait for the next index of your site. If the next index has already run, then it is possible that your pages are not relevant enough to trigger the reports
If both of those cases are not true, then it may just take a bit for it to work. You should have an idea of what they should be graded based on just reading the other reports, though.
We have a client that has his products listed on 20+ different websites, including 4 of his own. Also, he only has 1 of everything, so once he sells it then the product is gone.
To battle this duplication issue, plus having a short internet lifespan of less than 4 weeks, I was wondering if it would be a good idea to canonical the products back to the category page. Kind of like using canonical tags on your "used blue widget" and "used red widget" pages back to the "used widgets" page.
Would this help with the duplicate content issues?
Is this a proper use of a canonical?
I've had websites get rid of penalties, with a lower case "p," just by getting rid of their site wide links. When we got rid of the links the rankings jumped from the 100's up to the top 5. When the site owner put the links back up the site dropped back into the 100's. We went back and forth several times with the same effect, so I'm positive that it was related.
Just an FYI, we pushed to get rid of the links altogether because every site had the same products, and sending them to a different website made little sense. Also, the bounce rate on these referrals was over 50%, compared to a site average of around 20%, so the web visitors didn't enjoy it either.
There's been many case studies where penalties have been passed with 301's. That may not always be the case, but it is something that can potentially happen. You may be better off working to fix your link profile.
How much did you change the layout of your homepage? Google has specific aspects that look at the layout of pages, mostly looking at the placement and density of ads. You could be feeling some ill effects from that.
You have your keywords in the most important places, so having a paragraph about the magazine would only make a small difference. When did you launch your new site, and when did you notice the drop in rankings?
EGOL is absolutely correct.
Google typically looks at who published it first, as well as the authority of the sites that house the content. You could be running into problems because Amazon is going to have much more authority.
The system works to identify the most relevant page to that keyword, and then grade it. So, by not identifying your target page as the one associated with the keyword you have one of two problems:
1. Your appropriate page hasn't been indexed by the Moz Bot.
2. Your appropriate page isn't as relevant as that one.
If your website isn't being indexed properly then you need to adjust your internal linking. If it is being indexed, then you need to take the steps to make your targeted page more relevant to the keyword. Start with the URL, Title and H1.
It's because they utilize canonicals to specify the url that should get all of the authority. Both of your examples have this:
<link rel="<a class="attribute-value">canonical</a>" href="[/nike-dart-10~2](view-source:http://www.zappos.com/nike-dart-10%7E2)" /><script type="<a class="attribute-value">text/javascript</a>">
I totally agree with Scot
By expanding the descriptions on the photos you can also help diversify the words on the page. It may be that you are over-optimized right now, and adding extra words will actually bring you in balance.
The title tag is a little long, like Dana suggest, but that's how I'd break it down. I'd also incorporate keyword rich internal links between all of those pages.
I had the same experience on a few sites. Ranked #1 for over a year, dropped same day as penguin, but bounced back the next day.
Kentaro is correct. Google does have a page layout aspect to its algorithm. The known aspects are the frequency and placement of those ads. If a page is too ad heavy, or if the ads are placed in a way that destroys the user experience you can rank lower.
If your page looks like this you could have problems:
ads ads ads
ads content ads
ads ads ads
Where do you typically rank for your main location? How are the searches spread out? Does everyone just search the main city expecting good results, or do they search individual cities?
In my industry people just search the main city, which is why I ask.
I work with around 50 companies, and that's typically what I see. My #1 listing will just get changed to a Places listing, but it will still be in the #1 position.
Are you in a major city? Is your distance going to cover other cities?
Did you check the site function prior to the past few days? The Google update targeting clustered domains has messed with the site search function for right now.
Anyway, if it isn't being indexed then you probably aren't in any trouble right now. I'd still work to get the 301 redirects in place, though.
How are the duplicates being created?
Best solution would be to redirect the pages you don't want, but a canonical should be sufficient.
I'd just contact everyone that is linking to that page, tell them that the company no longer sells the product, but that you do and would love their link. If they don't have any links on that page, then go upstream from there, and try find a relevant page that does have links to it.
How well is the URL optimized? How deep is the page located?
Is it like miamibelts.com/new-york-belts or is it like belts.com/new-york/new-york-belts?
How many internal links are going to Miami Belts vs New York Belts?
If the searches are taking place right on your site, then I would follow,noindex the search pages. That way the bots follow to the specific listings, but doesn't get gunked up by all the duplicate search entries.
If the website you are looking at is the one in your profile, then I'd look at improving your content so that it is easy to digest. Right now you have really long articles that aren't broken down with different headers. So, I can't quickly scan it to see if I even want to read it.
Anyway, a blog alone isn't going to succeed. You need to create a social media presence to gain attention for your blogs, and make them super easy to share/like/tweet/+1. That way they can potentially go viral.
I would look at moving your link profile to include a lot more benign links like your bare url or things like "click here." Typically people try to stay below 20% with keyword rich inbound links, and you appear to be a lot higher than that.
Anyway, I would look to see if manual action was taken on any page on your website. Several websites reported getting the warning off an individual page, but many others got it for a site wide penalty. If you can't find one you might want to move forward with getting more benign links to not be over-optimized.
Google won't confirm anything, and they gave their typical "we do 500 changes a year" response.
You probably have already done this, but do you have any keywords that are more actionable? Such as "IT Service Reviews?" I just did a few quick searches for those high level keywords, and they keep producing research based results (i.e. Wikipedia, etc).
Anyway, the best tactic is to take a look at the top 5-10 prospects for your specific vertical, and see what they are doing. If they you can find a pattern in those title tags, then you can determine your strategy based on that.
Sounds like we need to do a crowd source test! Someone get a domain, and let's start hitting it with blog comments to see what happens!
I'm a little confused. Are you guest blogging or leaving comments on a blog?
I have a couple businesses that target major cities, and their suburbs with multiple pages like this, and I've had great results.
For local results they can be worth the effort. However, in my opinion, you would be better off investing the time and money into content or usability testing.
A couple years ago directories used to be a decent technique for improving your rank, but have since been devalued through algorithm changes. SEOMoz probably maintains them because they can have an impact in local results as some of them can count as citations.