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Noindex is the way to go for category pages. I also don't let G index tags and archives.

Eblan, 301 redirects are the way to go.

Be aware that when doing 301 redirects you might temporarily lose rankings (if the internal pages rank), but in your case I would expect not only a quick recovery, but a rankings improvement due to a better URL format.

You should do both. External and internal links are valuable if the content around them is relevant and unique. Depending on the quality of the external blog, that link might be more valuable.

I thought you were mainly interested in keyword research and not about on-page SEO. In that case, Irving's answer is good.

For your title tag, you could also use the lawyer's name to keep it more natural i.e.: "DUI Attorney in Dallas John Doe" or "John Doe DUI Attorney in Dallas TX"

Worthy:

1. High quality guest posts (great content on great blogs)

2. Infographics

3. Q&As

4. Link from social media

5. Relevant broken link building / A few press releases

Worthless:

• Directory links

• Blog commenting for links

• Buying links

• Profile / forum links

• Links pages

To come up with good local keywords, you have to think as if you were one of his potential customers:

I don't usually search like "Dallas, TX dui attorney" but instead "dui attorney in dallas" or "dallas dui attorney" or "dui lawyear in dallas tx".

Come up with all possible variations and see what works best. I would even recommend you to set up a test adwords campaign using exact matched keywords and see which ones have the most traffic. You can also use phrase and broad match to find new keywords.

Have you received a message from Google (through webmaster tools) regarding unnatural links? If yes, then you might have been manually penalized. The disavow tool might work well in your case - only disavow spam links like the one you mentioned -.

If you didn't receive the unnatural links message, this tool might still help, but instead (or in addition), I would concentrate in earning high quality links.

To be sincere, I haven't found any good site for this. If you are looking for high quality blogs, I believe that a more personalized outreach effort via twitter and/or email can deliver the best results.

The EMD update was applied to lower the added benefits of having an EMD. I would only see an issue on domains like www.aReallyLongExactMatchDomain.com or with www.key-wo-rds.com. That being said, I do recommend using the brand instead of keywords.

To answer your question, I would personally leave good quality domains as they are, even if they are an EMD.

I have in mind doing 301 redirects.

Thank you for your comment, I'm highly considering this move.

Yes, for sure panda, that's what webmaster tools and analytics say. The blog does link to our main site, but only from the /blog home page. I did this on purpose, I didn't want hundreds of internal links with the same anchor text.

I'll have a look at our privacy policy on the blog and might replace it with the one from truste.

Regarding the business resources page, I agree that the content doesn't offer much for Google to see, so I might consider "noindex" for it.

Traffic loss, most of our organic traffic from Google. We are doing well on Yahoo and Bing (improving every week actually).

The poor links you see come from negative SEO done against us in may '12. Thankfully most of those comments are nofollow.

Thank you. Please keep the ideas coming!

Hello guys, our website was pandalized on 9/27/2012 and we haven't been able to recover since then.

I've fixed as much as possible when it comes to poor content, and we have been getting high quality links consistently for the past 3-4 months.

Our blog had some duplicate content issues due to categories, tags, feeds, etc. I solved those problems before the past 2 refreshes without success.

I'm considering moving the blog to a subdomain, more than PR, I'm interested in recovering from panda, and let the blog grow on its own. What do you think about that?

No, the 6000 come from foreign websites, many of them are Chinese (.tw). I think that Google should know better, a company that has been running a website for 6 years in not going to build links that way so quickly. It just seems that anyone could do that to their competitors.

Hello, our company's website goo.gl/7Q56G lost all our rankings after the EMD algo update. Our domain is NOT a EMD.

At the same time, I found that we have about 6000 new, extremely low quality spam backlinks with the same anchor text ("loan"). I saw some of those a few weeks ago, but didn't really pay much attention because I didn't believe Google would think we build those.

I didn't get any messages on webmaster central. If this occurred with the EMD update, is it because of the low quality backlinks?

Most of the real spammers, brokers (we are the actual funding source) are now dominating the top 10 for our main keyword "merchant cash advance". We were in the top 10 for the past 4 years, why would we get hit so hard now?

I really appreciate your advice.

Hi,

Your website is visually appealing, it has a good structure and it's easy to navigate.

Having said that, I would change a few things:

1. Product descriptions are not unique, you can find the same text in many other websites. You can expand on the manufacturers description or create your own (unique) product description.

2. It seems that you are not taking advantage of social media. I would incorporate Facebook, Google+ and other types of social media sharing buttons in each product page as well as in your homepage.

3. Your about us page is empty, you should correct that. I would also add some text to your homepage; talking about your company, the products you offer or why your customers should choose you.

4. I don't think you need to link that many times to your homepage, you have at least 4 links to the homepage from the homepage itself. "Shop Categories" doesn't really need to link to the homepage.

5. The keywords meta tag may not hurt, but Google doesn't give it any value. I would take it out.

6. Not really a problem, but you have tons of js files loading in your header, you could combine and optimize all in 1 file.

7. You sitemap lists many pages with priority of 1, and a "daily" change frequency. You might want to correct that.

I just took a short look at your website, and those are just a few things you can do to improve your site. You could also run promotions and post them on daily deals type of websites, run giveaways, etc. in order to attract traffic and links.

-Dave