Welcome to the Q&A Forum
Browse the forum for helpful insights and fresh discussions about all things SEO.
My only experience with them is getting e-mails from Disqus when they've added another generic comment to my blog, linking to a competitor. This has happened about a dozen times over the past several years, so they either do this a lot, or happen to work in my niche a lot (which, by the way, is usually well behind the curve in the digital marketing realm).
They might do fantastic work in other realms, but this alone would preclude my ever working with or recommending them.
This is by far the most likely explanation as far as I can see. Thanks for checking it out Takeshi!!
I looked at this page and others that have come in like it, and cannot find the links.
Yes. A trackback as if its a link from Wikipedia. I can't find any record of the link being on wikipedia however. Its all very confusing.
Edit: Added a screenshot of the (temporarily) approved trackback. At the bottom the link "North Carolina" points to the wikipedia article mentioned above.
Example:
URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Dobbs_(North_Carolina)
Comment: Awesome web sites...
we arrived across a neat internet site that you could possibly like. Just take a look if you need...
It looks like a comment, but when I approve it goes under trackbacks. I'm assuming wikipedia doesn't have an army of blackhat spammers hitting up blogs to increase their rankings 
I've been getting some very interesting spam on my wordpress blogs lately: trackbacks on wikipedia articles that are obviously spammy. By that I mean that the comment on wikipedia are obviously spam and the link to my blogs are removed before I even arrive at the page or get the notification. The trackbacks are posted on valid wikipedia entries.
My concern is that this is a move by an unsavory competitor to try to get my sites in trouble. I can't really see how this would be effective though. All I can come up is that it might eventually get my domains banned from being linked to in wikipedia. I can't think of any problems this would cause in google or other SE's.
What could be the purpose behind such a spam campaign?
Any feedback?
When I redesigned our main site the navigation looked something like what you described. I cut our main navigation options down to 5, with no flyout navigation. I had to debate the other stakeholders about this choice, but I finally convinced them it was the way to go. Our conversions doubled when the new site rolled out.
One of the tenets of good UX is: Don't overwhelm your user with too much choice.
I think if you can find a way to significantly reduce their menu, you'll not only improve the SEO but you'll make for a better user experience as well.
Another thing to consider about flyout menu's is "How will this work on mobile and tablets?" The scary answer is "Usually not at all".
I guess what I'm rambling towards is that I think you should probably reorganize their navigation to reduce the number of options, get rid of the dropdown aspects, and move the secondary dropdown menu items onto an on-page secondary menu on the pages themselves.
The algorithm on all search engines is going to be a black box to SEO's. The best we can do is run experiments and extrapolate theories from the data. When I've tried to look into this specific subject, I never found any really good, trust-worthy reports on how exactly the Yahoo or Bing algorithms are different than Google. If someone else can show this, I would be stoked and owe them a beer.
That being said my impression is that the Google algorithm is more advanced and more tricky than the other two. If my assumption is correct, it could be that your process of removing links that Google finds questionable is hurting your rankings in the other engines that don't detect bad links as good as Google.
What you should focus on is what all the engines undoubtedly value in common:
Links from high quality sites that are relevant to your page
Creating content that people share, spend time on, and don't bounce off from.
Vague and cliche, I realize, but old tired truths usually are. ![😕](https://moz.com/community/q/assets/plugins/nodebb-plugin-emoji/emoji/android/1f615.png?v=4jds23d1a2r ":\")
There's nothing in the pasted code that shows why the crawler thinks your site is inaccessible. You should check for the existence of a robots.txt file in your sites root folder and make sure its not blocking access. You can also check the .htaccess file to see if thats blocking access.
In terms of the rel canonical, there are a couple things I'm noticing:
Good luck!
Let me give you an example of one of the best "like" campaigns a friend of mine recently launched. They're in the office furniture business. Snooooooze. Here's what they did:
1. Announced a contest to win a top-of-the-line office chair.
2. To enter, you had to submit a picture to them of your current office chair, the more awful and woe-begotten the better.
3. They posted all entries to an album on their facebook.
4. Their fans were asked to "like" the chair that was the worst off and most in need of replacing, whichever photo got the most likes won.
5. The photos went viral because they were funny, and the contestants and their friends were spreading the word.
Edit: Obviously, I'm suggesting you try to come up with something like this haha. I'm not just rambling on
Actually in cases like your example above its more an issue of an ambiguous URL rather than actual duplicate content.
The thing to do in the example above is to choose which version of your site you want (with www or without) to always use, and then set your server accordingly. In Apache this means using your .htaccess file.
If you decide to always display www (my preferred way) then this should be in your .htaccess:
<ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine on</ifmodule>
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www. [NC]
RewriteRule ^ http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301]
If you want your URLS to not use www:
<ifmodule mod_rewrite.c="">RewriteEngine on</ifmodule>
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.(.+)$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^ http://%1%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301]
Let me give you an example of one of the best "like" campaigns a friend of mine recently launched. They're in the office furniture business. Snooooooze. Here's what they did:
1. Announced a contest to win a top-of-the-line office chair.
2. To enter, you had to submit a picture to them of your current office chair, the more awful and woe-begotten the better.
3. They posted all entries to an album on their facebook.
4. Their fans were asked to "like" the chair that was the worst off and most in need of replacing, whichever photo got the most likes won.
5. The photos went viral because they were funny, and the contestants and their friends were spreading the word.
Edit: Obviously, I'm suggesting you try to come up with something like this haha. I'm not just rambling on
The keywords meta tag is deprecated and not used by any of the major search engines, so don't even worry about that.
As for a general strategy you should focus on a keyword or two for each page and optimize for that. When you link internally in your site, use the keywords your optimizing for in the anchor text. When acquiring external links try to do this as much as possible. Don't cannibalize yourself by trying to optimize for the same keyword across all your pages.
I wouldn't worry about making landing pages in order to get them ranked - thats what your main pages are for. Use landing pages to test out what converts best with A/B testing, and as end points for your PPC campaigns.
Either take EGOL's advice and spend it on internal resources, or spend $6k contracting with a legitimate SEO services company. They will deliver far better results than shady press release businesses and east asian blackhats.
Have the new server prepped (your site uploaded, db's ready) before you switch the nameservers and there should be repercussions at all AFAIK. As the namerservers get updated around the world they simply point to your new server that is already there ready to go. The improved site speed will be a big win.
You could do this with one or two clever regex commands, the composition of which I can't think of cos its too close to quitting time on Friday. But yeah you don't need 9000 rules.
There is a nominal value in submitting your press release to places like prweb.com. I've successfully used their site to get a few backlinks that helped out, albeit only a small amount.
Another tactic is to use HARO to get your organizations message published.
The true value of a press release is in its news-worthiness. If your PR is just thinly veiled advertising, its not going to be worth much. If your PR is exciting and new, it can go viral and a press release service can help with the first steps to getting it there.
Without a doubt add it to the main site under a folder like /blog. As John Barth mentioned, using it as a subdomain will pass all the domain authority value to the subdomain and not your main site, so its functionally equivalent to hosting it on a different domain.
From their dashboard there is a link on the right hand side of every domain that reads "Manage". Click that and select Add or Remove Owners. And on the next page at the bottom click Add Owners, then add your google account email.
I agree with your process. Its almost impossible to have too much information up front, because its hidden assumptions that are often the cause of delays and projects going off schedule.
"Then, six months or a year later, other changes had to be customized."
But here I disagree. IMHO this is the best reason to go with a well-known CMS. When that point comes in the future where a change has to be made, would you rather have a custom built web site that only the original developer knows well (if they even remember) or a popular CMS with thousands of developers around the world?