Google won't consider that black hat if you do it right.  I am not really a fan of microsites but they do have their advantages.  The reason most microsites don't work is because people just duplicate the content from their main blog to their microsite which will be considered duplicate content and it won't rank.

The reason I am against them is because Google has made a transition to ranking brands more and more.  If you build a microsite you'll need to SEO that too and ranking them can take some time.  Getting high quality, high authority relevant links is hard enough and at what point do you start to dilute your efforts.

I prefer the strategy of categories in my blogs.  For instance you could have a category called breast augmentation and one called tummy tuck (www.example.com/breast-augmentation/blog-post-goes-here)  This will help keep all of your links on your main domain which will help you build your domain authority and also, people can just follow the categories they care about.  Any link to your subpage will help your domain metrics and that is always a good thing.  Also, you'll be able to get your main keyword in every URL that way too.

The other side of that is that a microsite could potentially take up another SERP position and therefore help you get more clients.  You'll have to double your efforts (if not more) and if you get that authority high enough, any link to your site will help your main site rank better.

But, like I said, I'm not a fan of microsites.  I want people to go to my business and help my mains sites metrics.  Just my two cents

Darin.

I wouldn't change a thing.  You have 8 sitelinks which most companies would kill for.  You domain authority is a 30 and your page authority is a 38.  You get really good traffic too (>5,000/mo).

Your domain name is less important then people make it out to be.  Having a keyword in your URL can help but it doesn't have to be at the domain level.  Something like www.enchantingquotes.com/wall-quotes would do just fine.

I personally feel that "Enchanting Quotes" is much more 'brandable' then "Enchanting wall quotes".  Google is going more and more towards brands and you have all the signals of good branding.

Not sure if you saw this but we have "A Beginners Guide" here on seomoz.org

http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo/growing-popularity-and-links

Read this first and let us know if you have any questions about it.

Darin.

First of all, be careful about what you outsource.  I think the last thing you should be outsourcing is your content.  It's okay to get content ideas of places but to outsource your content is not the right strategy in my opinion.  Secondly, one or two blog posts a month would be enough to help your rankings.  Google likes freshness and if you provide it to them they will generally reward you.

Think about your user when it comes to relevance.  Your blog posts should have something to do with your industry.  If your site is about marble restoration and you start talking about cars then you might have an issue.  I read blogs that interest me and I go back to blogs that talk about topics that I am interested in on a regular basis.  Being all over the place isn't the best strategy for repeat readers.  What that means is that you could write about the history of marble, marble in famous buildings, cleaning and maintenance of marble, marble vs granite, why does marble come in different colors, etc?

Here is a little trick I use to get content for my client sites.  I go to iwriter.com and for $3 to $5 I can get a 300 word article on a particular topic. I use the article as a basis for the article I end up writing.  You can also use oDesk and for around $25 to $50 you can have people do internet research on everything you ever wanted to know about marble or historic buildings that have marble in them.

You own the business and at the end of the day, no one will know more about your clients (and potential clients) then you.  You have to write for the people who will want your services, not for the search engines.

I didn't dig deep into your site but here are some initial thoughts.  I’m going to be blunt but please don’t take it personally.  Take the information for what it is, just information and my thoughts.

Page Thoughts:

1. The actual copy on the page is a little hard to read and doesn't seem like it came from you.  You seem to be missing some words and the overall thought seems to be lacking.

Here are the last two sentences of your first paragraph:

"When you are represented by a Tampa Personal Injury Attorney with Kemp & Ruge, you get the individual attention you deserve.  represent you as your Tampa Car Accident Attorney, you will be getting a group of professionals who put their clients first."

For an attorney website, I would expect better than this.

2. You have a “link cloud” below your copy

“If you are even thinking about hiring an attorney for your personal injury case, please consult with an injury attorney.  Click here for your: Pasco County Personal Injury Attorney, Hernando County Personal Injury Attorney,Pinellas County Personal Injury Attorney, Hillsborough County Personal Injury Attorney, Tampa Personal Injury, Clearwater Personal Injury Attorney, Land O’ Lakes Personal Injury Attorney, Lutz Personal Injury Attorney, Odessa Personal Injury Attorney, New Port Richey Personal Injury Attorney, Spring Hill Personal Injury Attorney, Tarpon Springs Personal Injury Attorney, and Palm Harbor Personal Injury Attorney.”

This, personally, sends mixed signals to Google about what your page is about. (You seem to have this on almost all your pages.) Internal linking is important, but how you do it is just as important.

3. At the bottom of your copy, you have multiple addresses on the page.  Again, I feel this sends mixed signals to Google and doesn’t really help users who land on this page.  Having a consistent NAP (Name, Address and Phone Number) will help both Google know that this page is meant for Tampa and users to get exactly what they are looking for.

Recommendations:

1. New copy/content on the page.  I would talk about what makes Tampa unique in the Personal Injury Law space.  Maybe talk about how the process works in Tampa when you get injured.   Talk about a little of the history of Tampa and why Tampa, specifically is a great location to live but that “even in paradise, injuries occur.” (Just throwing out ideas)

2. I would make this page a sort of landing page for your Tampa Office.  I would add schema markup for local business (http://schema.org/LocalBusiness) and include a Google map of the location to help people find you.  I know that it’s an appointment only location but this should help.

3. When you write your blog posts and mention the word Tampa, I would link, internally, to this page.  This will help set up a strong internal link structure with location information that will help Google know that this page is specifically for Tampa.  The keywords on your page and how outside sources link to it should do the rest.

4)In your footer, you have the locations listed,  I would make the Title of each location a link to that specific page.  The Tampa Office should link to the page we are discussing.

Like I said at the beginning, I didn’t dive deep into your site but these are my quick observations and recommendations.

Don't think of the word count as metric.  Think about your users (I know that's becoming cliche now).  Does a 200 word post help them with something or at least useful.  I don't know of many that are.  Sometimes that sort of short winded post may be better off on Google+, FB or Twitter.

Neil Patel wrote a really good article a year ago this time about the more words the merrier.  Over 2,000 words in a post seemed to rank it.  http://www.quicksprout.com/2012/12/20/the-science-behind-long-copy-how-more-content-increases-rankings-and-conversions/

Also John Doherty wrote on the MozBlog about the types of posts that get links and he did some analysis to back it up.

http://moz.com/blog/what-kind-of-content-gets-links-in-2012?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+seomoz+%28SEOmoz+Daily+Blog%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

Bing does technically use it but I strongly recommend against it.  If it is part of their algorithm there is no indication that it is a strong indicator.  Besides, why would you want your competition knowing what your strategies are.  If you think you need to use it I would consult your traffic through Google Analytics and Bing Webmaster tools to see how much of your traffic, if any, is coming from Bing.  If it is a high number then maybe consider it.  But again, I wouldn't worry about it.  Bing says it uses it....doesn't mean it doesn't use it to indicate spammers.

Look at Attorneys, there are like 30 or so categories like attorneys, bankruptcy attorneys, civil rights attorneys, civil trial law attorneys, malpractice attorneys, etc

Bing doesn't have any categories for "lawyer" last time I checked.

Is it possible not to be in the first 20 or 30 positions in the SERPs after executing onpage SEO actions (keyword optimization,  metatags, ....) even for keywords for which there's not "too much" competition?

Yes that is definitely possible especially if the on-page SEO has been done recently.  It takes time for Google to re-crawl the pages and credit your site.   Don't forget that SEO doesn't stop with on-page SEO.  Off page is just as important.

Is there a way of visualize the pages indexed by the google bot? (the pages especifically, not the number)  in order to discard indexing problems?

Yes.  In your browser use the site: to search for your site.

ie.   site:www.example.com (make sure there is no spaces between the site: and the website url)

If all of your future pages will be sub folders then you'll only need to track at the sub domain level.  I generally do the same thing you do but I ALWAYS track at the Root domain level.  Generally if you have different sub domains and want to track them separately then the sub domain radial is the best answer.  An example would be when you have different identities on your root domain at the sub domain level.  For instance, you want to track your blog at blog.example.com and you have an investor relations section at investors.example.com and you track them as separate campaigns.  Sub folder can be same scenario but at the sub folder level.  You want to track your blog at example.com/blog and the /blog is a platform or another installation of a CMS.  (hope that makes sense)  If you want to track everything that is on your root domain (both sub domains and sub folders) then choose the root domain radial.    Like I said before, I always use the root domain.  I think the other options are for specific scenarios only.

Let me know if you have any questions

Darin.

I think that someone on your team should have a good understanding of Analytics.  If SEO and tracking is important to you then you should have someone internally that can vet the process the agency is using.  But if you don't, then I would ask a few additional questions. to the one's above.

"Now that you have an understanding of what we do as a company, what are some of the tracking goals you feel we need to be measuring going forward?"

"Besides Google Analytics, what other tools do you use to help track progress and metrics?"

"Do you have a Google Analytics certification and when was the last time it was updated?"

"Do you offer custom dashboards so we can look at an overview in "real time" vs just when we meet?"

"How often are metrics updated?"

"Can you show us an example of some custom reports or Analytics setup you've done recently?"

Things like this.  What's really going to be the determining factor is how comfortable you are and how much you actually trust the person giving the info.  The good and bad thing about analytics is that it's straight forward.  There is no "secret sauce" per se. So you may very well get the same sort of answers from each of the agencies.  I have a phrase I tell people all the time, "Always go with the guy you feel you can trust and whom you feel will do everything in their power to get it right if something goes wrong."

You'll also want to find out if they "interpret data". Having tracking setup is one thing, but being able to give you recommendations on what sort of content to write or what to expect from the data is key.  I would ask questions that pry some of that out of them.

"What sort of recommendations have you made in the past based on the data you've found inside of Analytics?"

"Describe a time when you had bad news for the company you worked with and how did you help them overcome it?"

Hope that helps.

Since the Penguin update this year, the anchor text portion of a link will matter less going forward.  Without getting too technical they basically turned off part of their algorithm to see if the results were better when they didn't account for anchor text.  It got better, "more robust" results so they changed the algorithm to interpret and use anchor text to better determine how relevant a given anchor might be for a given query and website.  (Sorry, I got a little technical there.)

Bottom line is link structure, quality of the link and relevancy of the link matter more than the actual anchor text.  Keep to relevant sites with good page and domain authority (use SEOMoz Toolbar to determine this) and you'll be fine.

From my understanding, on your campaign there is a section called "Traffic Data".  That is updated when the site is crawled.  You'll see a little box on the bottom right that says "Last Data Update: 01/07/2013" (for today's date).  I'm not sure why that is like that but I tried to look on help hub and didn't see an actual answer either.  http://www.seomoz.org/help/traffic-data.

The stats should come out tomorrow and be updated with your new keywords but if they are not (actually either way) I recommend http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/rank-checker/

There is a version of moz that allows for white label Reports but not the ability to allow someone to log in and rummage through the data.  You can create special reports for them and have them sent automatically.

To upgrade your account to the white label ability, you can go to your subscription tab and upgrade there.  If you just want to create reports that are customized, you can go to your campaign and select create report.

Just understand that the $99 version allows you to create reports but not white label them.  Only the $199 and up packages allow you to fully white label.

A mix between 2 and 3 is best but I'll answer your question "What kind of impact can number 3 really have on rankings? If your position 7/8 could it be possible to see position movement from content changes?"

I generally don't write content with Search Engines in mind first.  That is a secondary thing.  I try to write quality content and THEN use the keyword in the URL, Title Tag, H1 and atleast twice on the page (once bold using ) and in Alt tags (I've seen really good results with this).   If the topic you are trying to rank for is your keyword then naturally you will have the keyword in the page.  I have pages that rank for a keyword that isn't even on my page anywhere (We're #9 in Google for it)

The big thing is try to stick to one keyword per page until you start ranking for it.  I've seen a strong correlation in rankings when I do this for new or low domain authority sites.  A good start would be to look at the On-Page Reports that we have here at SEOmoz. Don't worry with keyword density to much.  It needs to be on the page but I don't think there is a magical number/percentage at all.  I haven't seen much correlation between having it a certain density. I also want to stress that User Experience (UX) is really key.  It won't help you rank right away but I can tell you from experience that it will keep people coming back and down the road help your domain and page authority.  Write good content first, make some seo tweaks second and you'll be fine.

Currently Google Authorship only supports one author per post as far as SERPs go (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2013/08/relauthor-frequently-asked-advanced.html) but I would recommend adding bylines for all authors on a post so if/when Google allows for multiple authors you have everyone show up there.

1. Does this company page get considered as author?

Technically no. Authorship is meant for individual people whereas Publisher is meant for Brands. However, Publisher may show up withyour Google+ logo if a person who follows you is signed into their Google Plus Profile.  You should have set up rel=publisher to identify cardekho as the publisher of the site and whomever is the author should have a byline.  If there are multiple authors then each author should have a byline.  Google will only support one image in the SERPs however and it will generally be an author.

2. Would this company profile marked as rel=author help in any ranking benefit as an individual Author profile helps in search results?

Again this should be a rel=publisher schema markup issue.  Having authorship show up in search results does tend to lead to higher click through rates but for pure ranking factor as related to Authorship, I think the jury is still out.  I still think domain level metrics are more important then author stats.

I just checked a few of mine and they are still there.  There are some changes in the format but for the most part they are all there as before.

Have you checked your schema markup to make sure it's accurate and hasn't changed?

Did you check in an incognito browser?

Have you checked if other brands in your industry have/don't have a knowledge card?

Those are some things I would check.

One of the tools we have here on SEOmoz is Rank Tracker but it's currently down because of Googles API update.  It should be up in next few weeks or so and you'll be able to run real time rankings on a give keyword and site.

That is just the initial crawl to help get you started.  (generally 250 pages or so).  Depending on the day of your campaign setup, that is the day of the week that Roger will run all the reports under your campaign.  If you started your campaign on Monday, then Monday will be the day that Roger will do his thing.  If you started on Tuesday, etc...

If you don't have more pages crawled after your first full run, then let us know and we'll see what it is.  Generally it is a linking situation if Roger can't see all of your pages.  But, I would let the reports run before I started to diagnose anything.

Your first thought is correct.  You should use them to show hierarchy of content.

Directly from Google's Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide (page 20)

http://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en/us/webmasters/docs/search-engine-optimization-starter-guide.pdf

"Heading tags (not to be confused with the HTML tag or HTTP
headers) are used to present structure on the page to users. There are
six sizes of heading tags, beginning with

, the most important, and

ending with

, the least important (1).

Since heading tags typically make text contained in them larger than
normal text on the page, this is a visual cue to users that this text
is important and could help them understand something about
the type of content underneath the heading text. Multiple heading
sizes used in order create a hierarchical structure for your content,
making it easier for users to navigate through your document."

There isn't a limit to any of the header tags as far as I know.  You are correct that most of us suggest that you only use one H1 tag.  I generally don't put a limit on a page of the number of H2, etc tags I use.  Remember, you are building your pages for your users and not for Google.  Use your header tags to help people navigate information on your page.

I'm a little confused by your description but I'll give you my thoughts.

You said that a 'website' has "multiple domains".  I assume that means a brand/company uses separate domains for each of their locations.  (ie examplesalondallas.com, examplesalonaustin.com, etc)   You also mentioned "different location based salon websites".  I'm assuming also that these are actual "brick and mortar" locations.

If these are the case then yes, each location should have it's own Google+ page.  Local SEO and organic SEO are both influenced by this.  You can also build citations separately for each location that way too and build more authority.  When you setup your separate Google+ pages, you can also add custom links to your main Google+ page as a reference to Google and users in general.

I love the screaming frog tool that Matt recommended but we do have a crawl tester here on moz.com

http://pro.moz.com/tools/crawl-test

You can perform the crawl up to twice per day.  It will tell you that you'll get results within 24 hours but I've never had it take more then 4 hours for a regular sized site.

Hope this helps.

Darin.

Search Engine Land did a write up a few years ago about a 30% increase in CTR for results with structured data. http://searchengineland.com/how-to-get-a-30-increase-in-ctr-with-structured-markup-105830

Here's an actual Case Study by Jason Jersey of SEOVoom on Structured data on CTR and Rankings in general http://seovoom.com/central/structured-data/

Matt Cutts covered your question in Webmaster Help http://youtu.be/OolDzztYwtQ

My personal thoughts:

I think anything you can do to help the search engines know what your site is about and how it is structured will ultimately lead to more traffic.  Matt's explanation is pretty good in that it the structured data may help you show up in certain places that you normally wouldn't show up because you didn't have it before.  NewsArticle Schema is a good example of that.  But don't let these sway you either way.  I use it as much as possible.  I also recommend using data highlighter in Google WMT if you haven't done so.  It helps Google even more.

There was a post by Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Roundtable about Google reducing Rich Snippets by 15% or so.  Matt Cutts basically said that it would remove snippets for low quality sites.  I personally think they are getting ready to ramp up testing for AgentRank and giving snippets to "authority" authors (just a hunch/guess as I predicted in 2011, after their patent update, that AgentRank (aka AuthorRank) would roll out in 2015.  http://www.vzpro.com/2012-seo-prediction/)

You should have a Google+ Local page for each of your locations.  Let me explain how I would do it and you can make the best decision for your company.

On my main url www.example.com I would have separate pages for each location.  ie. example.com/location1, example.com/location2, example.com/location3, etc.

Google recommends:

"Website & Phone: Provide a phone number that connects to your individual business location as directly as possible, and provide one website that represents your individual business location.

• Use a local phone number instead of a call center number whenever possible.
• Do not provide phone numbers or URLs that redirect or “refer” users to landing pages or phone numbers other than those of the actual business."

https://support.google.com/places/answer/107528?hl=en&rd=1

I would highly recommend having separate phone numbers for each location.  That way you can comply as closely with Google's guidelines as possible.   If you don't have separate numbers for each location, you can still build your pages on your site like I mentioned above, but I wouldn't build Google+ pages for them.  (You can but I would get separate numbers before doing that.) I would also stay away from having all those numbers forward to one main number.  The number that you have in your Google+ page should ring at that specific location.

One you set all that up, you can then add badges to each of your pages on your site with the Google+ page you have built.  I personally do a lot of work for lawyer sites and we always post information about the local city on our "non main" Google+ site.  For instance, if my main office is in Dallas but I have an office in Fort Worth, my Fort Worth Google+ page would talk about things going on in Fort Worth.  I would also post some important information that you may have shared on your main Google+ Page.

Here's a little trick too.  If you have multiple Dentist working in your office, they can have their own Google+ Page too and it can rank in the search results.  Google said,

• Some doctors may share the same office address with other doctors. If the listings have different doctor names, they are not duplicates, even if they have the same phone number. The same goes for lawyers, insurance agents, etc.

https://support.google.com/mapmaker/answer/1731387?hl=en

I would use this to my advantage and try to fill the SERPs as much as possible.

By having separate phone numbers and URLs for each of your locations, you can build citations to each of those and get 11 links from yellowpages.com, 11 links from yelp.com etc.  It's a good practice in my opinion.

I've linked to a basic version of one I've built and use for my clients.  It's not ALL of them but the ones listed are free.  You'll still need to find directories in your local area that will help them but it's a good starting point.

http://bit.ly/1cjMc7R

You can also use a service like Yext.com for more but there is a fee to use them.

Also, here is some resources for citation building best practices.  These are from getlisted.org a company owned by Moz.com:

https://getlisted.org/static/resources/

One thing that is important is to see how they track their activities/success.  I'm finding more and more SEO agencies are not very versed in Analtyics, goal tracking and balancing busy work vs productive work.

A lot of the questions I ask are based on where you currently are in your website project?

Do they have a process for tracking the amount of work going into the project on a monthly basis? How will the two of you define success?  What is their content process?  What is their overall philosophy on link building? How do you analyze the data and report it to us?  How often will we meet to go over the data?

What case studies or references can they present?  Have they done work in your specific field before?  Do they have other clients you may be competing with?

What is their onboarding process like?  How long does it take to really ramp up the project?  How many hours per month or how many resources will be allocated to our project from the agency?  How are turnaround times for questions that we have along the way?  Who will be our account manager? How much time do you need from our internal team to help with your efforts?

Is there a contract? If so, what is the opt out policy if we feel the work isn't being done? How long is the contract?  Does the contract itemize what is being done on a monthly basis?

I personally don't know of a test but these are questions I would ask.  I would want to make sure the team handling my website is VERY versed in analytics and tracking.  I think this is very overlooked by many companies whom hire agencies.

I haven't watched the video in a while but I know Rand did a whiteboard Friday on this a few years back. Link attached to the Moz video.

how-to-choose-seo-company-whiteboard-friday

I happen to like to fill out the "extra" stuff.  My philosophy is that you never really know who will be looking at that particular profile.  It's not that much extra time to do.

What do you skip and what do you add?

As I mentioned, you never know who will be looking at that particular profile but if time is an issue I like to add at least the images and description as the images can be titled with your keywords and the description is sometimes used as your meta on certain citation sources.

Assuming you are talking about DA from Moz here.

DA stands for Domain Authority and the new version just released.  In a way it's a measurement by Moz that gives you perspective on how well the site should rank because of it's authority.  Kind of like PageRank from Google but instead it's based on Moz's data pulls.

You can learn all about Domain Authority here:  https://moz.com/learn/seo/domain-authority

And see the update to Domain Authority 2.0 here:  https://moz.com/blog/new-domain-authority

Hope this helps

Any time.  Feel free to comment on this post if you have any further questions and I'll be happy to help.

Moz will archive your data for up to 3 months.  That means it will save the data in your account if you are inactive but only for the past three months. If you reactive past that time, your campaigns should still be setup but the data will no longer be there.   Also, Moz won't run any of the reports during the inactive time.  But you will have access to the data should you renew in that three months time frame.

One thing you can do is download the reports that you currently have setup as a reference point for future campaigns per se.  That way even if you take longer than 3 months, you personally will have the data store in a CSV or PDF format.

FYI, I don't work for Moz so this advice is from previous experience and not directly from Moz.

This is simply my opinion and has no "data" behind it. FYI

I personally like to write with Guest Author and authorship markup. For two reasons

1. If I've written a great article, I want people to know I wrote it to help my "brand"

2. I don't agree with the article.  I do think that Google will monitor your writing but only in what will be something called "AuthorRank" (or something along those lines) If you become an "authority" in a field with your "authorship" and you write a new article, why wouldn't Google want that to be up in the SERPS.

Google's been talking a lot about brands lately and I think this only the beginning.  I would "Guest Blog" to be my brand out there.  Besides, If you are guest blogging on the right site, it should build you traffic to your site and some of those people will naturally link to you.  I don't see the point in the other way unless you are a copywriter and only write for other people.

Just my thoughts. Hope it starts the conversation for you.

No penalty but you have to be careful with duplicate content.  The issue with this is going to be branding.  If you get a follower of Site A then they probably won't follow site B (it's possible but doubtful)  I create "competition sites" all the time to compete with me.  Unique content and making sure that you don't have the same product description for same products can be a hassle but well worth it.  Branding is big though.  Think about Chemistry.com and Match.com; both are owned by the same company (IAC)  I think it's a great strategy and has worked well for us.

Two things to think about with SSL.

1. Google looks at is a trust signal.  It shows you are actively trying to protect the users that come to the site.  Google had an article on this in 2014.  https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2014/08/https-as-ranking-signal.html

2. How users perceive the site.  I personally take less advice from sites with no SSL.  Mostly because, to me, it's a sign they aren't up to date.  But also, it can deter certain people from making purchases and subscribing to your list without it.

There is "technically" a slowing down of the site with SSL, but with proper installation and configuration it's not much. There is encrypting/decrypting overhead when the site uses SSL.  The word "slower" doesn't mean snails pace.  It is usually a few milliseconds difference if configured correctly.

Simply adding an SSL cert isn't enough. It is technically a site change and you'll need to do some things to inform Google that the site has change.  I HIGHLY RECOMMEND doing the upgrade to HTTPS during a time the site doesn't have much traffic.  It can take a few weeks to implement correctly in the SERPs. You can read more about it here. https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6033049?hl=en

Wow....where to begin...

Where are the 75k violations coming from (SEOmoz, Google, etc)?

To you comment: "(homepage alone has over 300 links)"

Google has in it's Webmaster Guidelines that you use around 100 or less links on a given page

To your comment: "each product is its own wordpress blog"

If everything is a Wordpress Post you should be able to canonical all those pages pretty easily.  I use the Yoast Plugin for Wordpress SEO.  It's amazing what it can do.  All you have to do is install it and go to that post and set up the advance portion of the plugin to canonical to the appropriate page.

To your comment: "why not try to nofollow the product pages which are the ones causing so many issue"

This should be resolved with the aforementioned canonical recommendation.

As far as links on a page, I'm a fan of only having links on a page that are are logical or "relevant" next steps for the user.  If my page is about baby shampoo, links to shopping cart, contact us and main things are relevant; but so are towels, bathtubs, baby soap, etc.  Try to keep the links to a minimum and really try to help the user.

Have you guys submitted your products to Google Product Feed?  That may help with traffic too.

I could keep writing for hours but it's a start.

I think it definitely does.  I have a website that only has a link from my Google Plus page and that page has a domain authority of 20 (It's only about two months old).  Moz's dofollow link to my homepage of my website gave me a boost in rankings.

Most profiles pages don't have dofollow links in general, so when you do get one it can be powerful.  If everyone on the site gets a dofollow link from their profile I would probably think it would diminish the value of it.  Since most of them that do offer dofollow have some sort of threshold (like Moz does) I tend to believe that it bears more weight.

Just know it isn't just a simply yes or no question.  If the site that is giving the link is a poor site, then it an actually hurt you, just like any other link.

There are a few ways to do this.

1. You can create individual pages for each city/town (ie. lake worth, west palm beach, wellington, royal palm beach, jupiter, etc.)  So for example...  www.westpalmbeachdentist.com/dentist-wellington

You'll have to make sure you have unique content on each page and unique title tags and meta tags

2. You can add a listing of cities you serve and you can link to your pages using a multitude of anchor text.  For instance if you have your homepage as www.westpalmbeachdentist.com you can link to it using the anchor text "Lake Worth Dentist".

The first one works really well and you can if you set up a campaign in SEOmoz you can actually see those pages rank individually.  You'll add the keyword (for example) "dentist wellington" and when your page www.westpalmbeachdentist.com/dentist-wellington shows up in the top 50 you'll know.  Just keep up with Google WMT to make sure you aren't showing duplicate content.

Short Answer:  Set a canonical url on the pages to the root domain version and noindex the subdomain pages.

What this does is avoid the duplicate content problem.  Generally, those subdomain pages won't rank anyway because the same information is on the "main" site.  You can still build links to those subdomain pages and do a strong internal link structure to help the "main" site rankings.

The only negative to this is that the pages in your subdomain won't rank.  That's not necessarily a bad thing but just know they won't.  But, if the pages are truly duplicate content, they won't rank anyway.

Is there a none of the above option?  .com is still king and will always be.  Until a major brand uses one of them as their MAIN url, it won't happen.  If Overstock.com couldn't make O.co stick, then I don't see ANY of these working very well.  I think a Brand may use them for a specific purpose but it won't be anything significant.  If I had to guess I think .shop would work.  I could see nfl.shop or something like that catching on.

I happen to think that your link profile needs to be robust to your internal pages.  Think about user experience here.  If someone is on another blog and writing about red apples, would the person want to go to the home page of a farmers website about red apples or a sub-page about red apples.  I just think that is natural.  If they go to the homepage of your site then they will have to find the page on red apples.  I can image that your bounce rate would be pretty high if that was the case.   I don't worry to much about percentages on any sort of link building campaign.  I don't know if 10:1 or 15:1 or 1:1 is correct.  I can tell you from just about everything the search engines do that percentages don't matter.  It's about quality.  As a general rule of thumb, its going to depend on your type of website you are building.  If you have an e-commerce site and the link is from some where talking about sites as a whole, the link to your home page is fine.  But, if the source of the link is talking about a particular product, then I think that link needs to be to a particular sub-page talking about that product. Again, don't get caught up in percentages.  If you have high quality link prospects then you will naturally be varying your link profile.  If you are using automated links then you won't.  Hope that helps a little.

Have you taken a look at your links provided by Google WMT (Webmaster Tools).  They will give you a robust list of links coming into your site.

As far as "blackhat" and what not.  I wouldn't jump into worrying too much about that (of course be worried but don't go crazy over it)  I would definitely start a positive link building campaign.  If you dive into the links that Google will provide you on WMT then you'll be able to see the quality of the sites that the links are coming from.  The SEO Toolbar we have here is great for determining if the site is worthy of your time or not.  Also check out Link Finder on here.  It's a great tool and I don't see many people talking about it very often.  It's a great place to start.

I would spend about an 80% - 20% time ratio of getting good quality new links vs working to get rid of old links that are "truly" bad for your site.

That would be rel=publisher but I haven't seen it show up for searches when I'm not signed in to my Google+.  Meaning that I believe (no evidence) that it only shows up the company logo when someone who is searching is signed into G+ and already follows the brand.  Not 100% on that.

You can check to see if rel=publisher is markedup correctly in Google's rich snippets testing tool.

http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets

I have it for my homepage,  http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets?q=www.vzpro.com  You'll see half way down the page that there is a place that shows Publisher markup

Many sites that will have a >60 DA are going to be very particular about the guest posts they allow.

Many sites will not allow more than a few links on a guest post.

It would take the same amount of time to check all the things you mentioned if you just did it yourself.  Not sure hiring someone for this makes a whole lot of sense.  I do some out reach every day and it's well worth the time. Especially in the beginning as you'll get to understand what it takes to get a successful blog post published.  You can then write an SOP (standard operating procedure) to get it done by someone else.

Below is a link to a Whiteboard Friday ( a little dated but still relevant ) where Rand talks about guest blogging strategies.

guest-blogging-strategies-whiteboard-friday

Each location you have should have it's own landing page/url.  I'm not sure how the search engines would handle more then one of the same type of schema on one page but I know for SEO purposes two separate pages is much much better.  You'll be able to add citation links to each of the pages that way too.

Matt Cutts mentioned it's better to have one url per store too.

• quick dislaimer:  I've only done international seo for a site that had sub domains and sub folders. Never cross-domains.  So take the recommendation below with that in mind.

Hey Paul,

I generally translate "equivalent" as "this page (X) is the same as page Y but in a different language or intended for a different region".

When you said, "This is being done to prevent North American pages from being served in the UK, Spain pages from being served in Portugal, or any other combination of possibilities..." I wanted to let you know that you might not need to do anything in your sitemap.  I don't know exactly how you set up your domains or translations if any so I use caution with that statement. But, if one of your sites is meant for Portugal, you can set geotargeting in Search Console to accomplish this.  Even if the content is the same on another site but that other site is set to a different country, you shouldn't have a problem with duplicate content.  That geotargeting is basically a signal to Google that you want users in Spain to see the Spain site and people in Portugal to see the Portugal site and these two pages won't be competing.

Where you would want your href lang is on translations of those sites in the perspective countries.  So let's say the Portugal site has an Portuguese, English and French version (the main languages in Portugal) then you would set alternate href lang tags for all the translations on that site.  But if your site dedicated to Spain also has an English version, you wouldn't need to cross reference the Portugal site if you use geotargeting.  (Hope that makes sense)

Alyda Solis, who is an associate here at Moz, has a really cool tool on her site that can help you build the syntax.  https://www.aleydasolis.com/english/international-seo-tools/hreflang-tags-generator/

These are really good.  I'm going to dive into them tonight.

On top of moving the subdomains (there are 3) we've also built a new site on a new platform and moving all those pages from there too.   They had page IDs vs Search Engine Friendly urls.  They've been online since 2002 so there has been a TON of work that has gone into it and I just want to make sure I can make the move as smooth as possible.

Thanks again for your help and I'll keep you posted.

Google will probably treat them like any other domain name.  Emds aren't a real issue.  Thin content emds are.  Personally I won't be getting any of these gtlds unless its a really great name and really works for my business.  Not to mention that you'll need to build the domains authority to help you at all.  Unless you can magically get direct traffic (which I highly doubt) your efforts and time are better used on your main domain.

Also, just for terminology purposes, these new gTLDs are not sub domains.  A sub domain is something like blog.example.com or pro.moz.com.  red.shoes is an actual domain name.

I think you are already seeing that Google is treating these two as the same.  I've had this issue with a legal blog and a lawyers main website.  We took the blog from it's own domain and put it under the main lawyer website.  We did see a dip in traffic for about two months but it quickly recovered and we ended up with more traffic as the overall site seemed to be more authoritative under one roof.

During this merge, I would also check for "thin content" and/or content that is no longer relevant and/or getting traffic.  We tend to use the opportunity as a sort of spring cleaning of the site.  But, since your sites are pretty identical, a good thorough examination of all the content on both would be beneficial.  Make sure you map the "old" site and keep a sitemap just in case something goes wrong.  We used a Google Sheet/ Excel to map domains so in the event something went wrong with the the 301's, we had the opportunity to correct everything.

I know there are risks with moving the domain, but I think the positives outweigh them by a long shot.

There has been a known issue with keyword tracking with SEOmoz and Google.  I think the campaign rankigns are working but not the rank tracker tool.

That being said, can you give us a keyword and site to see if we can have same results.

Do you have any personalization set on your search? What browser? (Are you signed in or have you added a location?)

Make sure you are using the non personalization search string when you do your search.

For keyword phrases:

http://www.google.com/search?q=keyword1+keyword2+keyword3&pws=0

For single keywords:

http://www.google.com/search?q=keyword&pws=0