It is my understanding the search volume and keyword competition are independent.  For example, many people purchase socks, but the potential for profit is relatively low which limits the pricing competition.  In contrast, awards for medical malpractice could be quite high, but the search volume for a rare medical procedure could be very low.

Best,
Christopher

I agree.  Each should target it's purpose.  If they are the same, fine, if not, fine too.  My excerpts are usually longer than my meta descriptions and for that reason alone they are typically different, but it's not my objective to make them different.

Best,
Christopher

Hi Dana,

" ... you are right, one of the fundamental questions I still have is how does a bot behave when it finds an orphaned page like one of these? Does it just revert back to the sitemap and move one? Does it automatically go back to the last non-dead end page and move on from there? What does it do?"

Bots are not really like a single spider that has to crawl around the web that can get trapped when entering an orphaned page with no back-button.  When a bot enters a site, it creates a list of all the internal pages that are linked from the home page.  Then it visits each page on that list and keeps adding more linked pages to that list.  Each time it adds more pages to the list, it only adds new unique pages and does not add duplicates.  It also keeps track of which pages it has already visited.  When all the pages have been visited once, and no new pages are discovered that are not already on the list, all of the pages have been crawled.

Best,
Christopher

The other domains are ours, yes.

Oh, that's a horse of a different color.  If you have multiple domains on one account, one domain will be the primary domain and the other domains will be virtual domains.  If you look at the file structure on your server, all the virtual domains will be sub-folders under the primary domain.  You need to create a robots.txt file in the primary domain that blocks the spiders from discovering the other domains through the sub-directory structure.  Otherwise, all the virtual domains will be duplicated, once via the primary domain and again via the virtual domain.

Best,
Christopher

You should be able to resolve this with robots.txt and .htaccess files, but one more thing I've learned to do is to use a domain name for the primary domain that I do not plan to submit to Google for indexing.  For example, I'll use arbitrary color names like silverblue.net as the primary domain and then the domains I intend to index will be virtual domains.  This isn't really necessary but it helps me keep all my domain names straight in my head and avoid the issue you described above.

Best,
Christopher