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Having the rich snippet is not a guarantee Google will use the information. We see that all the time especially with author tags. Providing the information to Google is just telling them it's available, as they tweak their results it tends to move around a lot. It sound like you checked webmaster tools to see how your mark up is perceived with Google.

That shouldn't be unless the web developer set all client urls in the same profile, but that seems like an incredibly backwards way to do things. I'm not even sure if that is possible.  If that was the case you would still see all the other clients with a user account. If you get Admin rights for a particular profile it doesn't give you access to the other profiles.

Ranking factors I would look over, how fresh is your content and how fast is the site? I would also run your site through copyscape to see if there is someone scraping the site.

I would also look over your link profile if there are too many spammy exact match anchor text links. With that I like to go back and compare my GA data to major shifts in the algorithm. It helps to identify what issues need to be fixed.

My suggestion is to ask the owner to make them a non-follow. Technically for a Banner Ad that is the Google's recommendation.

My thought on seeing if you were penalized. Use webmaster tools to see if you have any manual penalties. If not I would go back to Google Analytics and filter Organic Search and look at the traffic for the last three years if you have the data. If there was an algorithmic penalty you should see a drop off in traffic. If there is I would also look to see if there were other changes made to the site during the period to rule out on page issues.

Here is my thoughts based on experience.

First the links don't disappear from Webmaster tools. You will still see them there. A reconsideration request only helps if you got hit by a manual penalty not algorithmic ones. If your traffic dropped after the disavow list was supplied it could be that you told Google to kill some valuable links and now you are missing that link juice. Though with that the  flip side from mantra of causality and correlation that Rand preaches. Google has been rolling out some changes so your traffic drop could be unrelated.

I would go back to the disvow list though and see if they put some links in it that shouldn't have been flagged as spam and resubmit the list.

One thought is to Check your GA code, sometimes we see sites (mostly Wordpress) accidentally install the old code and new code on the same page and get wacky metrics like that. If that is the case you should see an extremely low bounce rate.

Yes,

Resubmit the total file with the "good links" omitted. It takes a little time but Google will start giving you link credit again for them.

Later this month I am guest teaching a class on best SEO practices for web designers at a local College. I wanted to see what topics others would include if you were doing an overview.

I think the second is probably the issue more than the first. I would format the markup in your footer to match the format that Google Lists as well as a thought.

The other suggestion is the recent negative review might have some temporary negative weight.

Here is my only thought on that (and you may be correct),

From his data screenshot and what he said this site has already escaped numerous Panda updates. The drop doesn't coincide with a published change. It could be a small tweak sunk them, but if it was Panda wouldn't this be an end of May hit?

No there was no response from Google. From what I've gathered from research on the issue, if the issue is an algorithmic penalty there is never a response. You are just altering your site's profile and when the search engine choses to use that information it affects your health in the index. If you receive a manual penalty with an email to your webmaster tools, it's more severe and you need to also send a reconsideration request through the web master tools.

Gregory summed it well, my only add on to it in setting when adjusting the geographical settings also adjust the intent. So if you have a German in Berlin searching for "my service in Newcastle" they won't be served the ad if they out of the actual area, if you don't want any non UK PPC visitors.

I think you have a solid plan, my only thought is not to use the 302. It won't pass link juice over from that home page (Probably their most important) onward to the official site. I would either just 301 right away to the new site, or do a placeholder on the homepage explaining the merger with links to important pages on site A.

It's always a good practice. It also depends if you are using a CMS that has an automatic 301 for the WWW vs the non for the site. For simple sites that's the only real reason that you would need it. I still like to have the tag, the major search engines have been recommending it and I usually do whatever makes Google happy if I can.

You can see if you have duplicate content if you subscribe to Moz in their campaign tools. If not there are a few free tools that will allow you to as well.

Nope, as far as I know. Matt Cutt's commented on it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsSwqo16C8s

The only time I could see it was useful if you were doing some black hatish stuff and didn't want multiple domains on the same C Block that were related, but I'm pretty sure Penguin/ Panda is catching that sort of thing now.

Just echoing Dmytro I would noindex, also this can help resolve duplicate issues as often the "Tag" and Search pages can create duplicates or pages the spiders have trouble with. If you are using Wordpress Yoast has a nice feature to help automatically care for this task.

So there are two types of penalties, manual ones as you have dealt with and algorithmic ones.  So clearing a manual penalty won't necessarily clear the algorithmic one if there is an issue. If I was going to find a smoking gun it would be links like www.juryverdictalert.com that have what look like a banner ad to the site but haven't put a "no-follow" to the link. It looks spammy to have hundreds of links on low word count pages all point to you from one domain.

The other things. You rank #1 for "Verdict Videos" so that doesn't look like it is algorithmic- it could just be bad targeting. I get that is your title tag, but I didn't see the keywords in anything more than an h3 and I couldn't find a single anchor text backlink that is live (I used Ahrefs). Not that you want to go crazy with that, but you would expect it somewhere.