Generally domain.com/blog is the best option. Using that structure will help you build the value of domain.com.

I prefer Rackspace Cloud. Their system is highly customizable and their Admin panel is easy to use to get yourself up and running. Support is always there when I need it, never had to wait more than a few hours for non-emergencies and they hit me back with live help when it's urgent. Pricing will depend on what you need. Dedicated or non-dedicated is really the big question here.

Yup like Highland mentioned, using your robots.txt for this isn't a good idea. The robots.txt file isn't guaranteed to work anyway. The only sure fire way to get it working is to move all the URLs from the old structure to the new one, then 301 all the old URLs into the new URLs. The 301 minimizes loss to your SEO.

Ditching your domain is a little drastic. The question is really how bad are these links linking to you. You don't have you answer this but did you buy links at some point? If you did, start by checking those.

"I'm going down the route of initially trying to manually remove links and then follow on with disavow." - that's the right path. Keep at it and submit yourself for reconsideration requests if you received anything in Webmaster Tools.

To get back on the path to growth try checking into Broken Link Building. It's an easy way to get a few links and considered a White Hat technique. You'll be able to increase your links a bit here to help boost your organic growth and get back on track.

From clicking around I feel like the site needs to put a bit more effort into building trust. Here's a good article with some suggestions and ideas that you can build off (not my website)

http://yoast.com/7-ways-to-increase-sales-by-creating-trust/

Something they don't include in here is an "About Us". There are so many websites out there offering the same product at similar prices now. I generally go to the website with the most grounded message.

Another idea would be to try and make the website feel more local. Local SEO and marketing is big right now, and people like thinking they're buying locally.

No you don't need to submit a reconsideration request if you haven't received anything. Chances are you got hit by a combination of Penguin and Panda. They may have just refreshed one of the updates on the 8th. Looks like no one really knows exactly what it is. Because you're changing your link structure around, check your Webmaster Tools 404 errors to make sure something is buggy.

If you added /rental-type/ to setup the keywords and the pages both pages for regular rentals, condo rentals, townhouse rentals, for Baltimore are unique then don't bother changing your structure around. You're better off optimizing the pages further if they need it, then checking the pages linking to you to see if something has happened to them. If you have links from someone caught selling links, you wouldn't have seen a penalty but their links wouldn't pass as much SEO juice.

Yes the URLs like this

domain.com/rental/123456-123-Street-City-State-Zip

are better than

domain.com/rental/123456

I'd make that change right away if you're just using an ID to reference properties.

It's really best not to change your URL structure around. If you really need to, then definitely make sure you have 301 directs all pointed from the old links to the new ones.

The permalink keywords in the middle don't really apply as much weight as they used to. Using /home-rentals/ and /rentals/ won't immediately relate the pages to those keywords anymore. So with that, set your structure based on the different sections of your site so they don't conflict rather than inserting keywords. So example: "domain.com/search/california/" doesn't conflict with "domain.com/category/california/"

I need to see your pages to give you a better response on the last question. With permalinks, it's always good to match your page title with the page's main keyword. So if the title is 123 Street Ave then the link should be /slug/123-street-ave/. The slug is whatever descriptive keyword for that type of post is. It would be /search/, /category/, or no slug at all.

That doesn't answer your question for the SEO decline though. Chances are you've been affected by the recent Penguin 2.0 update. I'd start by checking my links and seeing if any of those sites got hit. Also check your webmaster tools and see if any notices have popped up.

Sounds like you're seeing the affects of Penguin 2.0 which just came out. I'd start by investigating your links and seeing what happened to those.

Besides that the URL would be handy.

Yeah Analytics will contain all their top keyword and you can check their placements with the SEOmoz rank tracker or just searching those keywords in Google yourself. Make sure to pay attention the current websites

,

to X, and meta tags. When doing the new site, use the same tags.

I also recommend getting a second opinion. Look up someone you work with regularly or even post to SEOmoz and get someone to take a second look. It's normal to miss something so a second set of eyes is handy.

ThompsonPaul has a good suggestion which is test your pages with "Fetch as Googlebot" to see what they see.

Short answer to your question is no. Google will not pay attention the Facebook Like Box pictures because the codes comes up as javascript (raw code). Whether Google sees it or not is really dependent on how the source is written. For the Facebook Like/Group box, Google won't count them as individual links on a page and see it as one javascript widget.

Hello,

We know that buying links is bad and can get you in a lot of trouble. What about paying to have RSS feeds syndicated by sites like this:

http://feedfury.com/submit

Thanks,

Alex

Thanks for the responses. We understand that they are flying just enough below the radar to get away with it and at the end of the day, news is just information.

What we'd like to do is identify any black hat techniques they're using. Then we'd like some suggestions on some white hat techniques that we can implement to try to rank ahead.

I spoke to my partner and we understand this is a lot of work. We've decided to offer $500 to the best response. We're not looking for a full audit, just suggestions and information that anyone is willing to share

Thanks again to everyone that already jumped in with speedy responses.

Hello,

We're looking for suggestions on how to handle a copy cat spammer. Another website (therichest.org) has been directly coping our posts and re-writing them just enough to fly under the Google radar. They end up outranking us and we've optimized, hired seo consultants, and run every test/review possible and everyone agrees that we should outrank them at the end of the day. However, that's not the case. Here's an example:

Google: nicole porche net worth

therichest.org ranks 1st. The webmaster is waiting for us to post and the moment we throw up a post, they copy the post.

Our link is: http://www.celebritynetworth.com/richest-celebrities/models/nicole-porche-net-worth/

It would be ok if we were able to get a clear idea on why they outrank us but no one is able to give us a clear answer on why. They're also using some kind of strange redirect system with these domains:

http://celebrity-salary.com/

http://celebritysalary.org/

http://www.therichest.org/celebnetworth/

http://www.richestcelebrity.com/

http://www.celebrity-networth.com/

http://celebritynetworth.org

We also noticed that their FB likes sit high in the 3-5k Likes range which doesn't make sense when their FB groups have less than 100 followers.

*mini update after talking to my partner - we'd like to offer a $500 bounty for the best response. It'll be for anyone that can help us try and identify any black hat techniques they're using, and offer some white hat suggestions for us to optimize ahead.

Hmm, the URL loads ok now. Could have something to do with the feed. Thanks for checking up. We'll have to do some investigating.

Thanks for following up so quickly.

It's been happening for a few days and it's the group of links:

http://www.celebritynetworth.com/watch/D5GrrPEN9Oc/tom-mccarthy-floating/

http://www.celebritynetworth.com/watch/8nMT69kjNvY/dirk-responds-mocking/

http://www.celebritynetworth.com/watch/zX6ZOL6kCVY/shane-mosley-trains-for-pacquiao/

There's a few pages of these. Everything seems fine through web. I've had the server admins check the logs and they don't see any page errors coming in for those links. Is there anything else that can cause Google to show 404s on working links?

Hello,

Google webmaster tools is returning our URLs as 404 errors:

http://www.celebritynetworth.com/watch/D5GrrPEN9Oc/tom-mccarthy-floating/

When we enter the URL into the browser it loads the page just fine.

Is there a way to determine why Google Webmaster Tools is returning a 404 error when the link loads perfectly fine in a browser?

Thanks,

Alex

Hello,

We rank fairly high for a lot of terms but Google is not indexing our descriptions properly. An example is with "arnold schwarzenegger net worth".

http://www.google.ca/search?q=arnold+schwarzenegger+net+worth&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

When we add content, we throw up a placeholder page first. The content gets added with no body content and the page only contains the net worth amount of the celebrity. We then go back through and re-add the descriptions and profile bio shortly after. Will that affect how the pages are getting indexed and is there a way we can get Google to go back to the page and try to index the description so it doesn't just appear as a straight link?

Thanks,

Alex