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Having that many redirects in HTACCESS will use a lot of resources, especially if you get a lot of traffic. Try to get the URL structure as close as possible to cut down on the extra redirects. If that is not possible, then you will have to take the time and manually redirect each page to the new one. 500 is not really that many, and could most likely be finished in a full day, perhaps 1.5 days.

After you get all the pages redirected to the proper page on you new site, make sure you submit and updated sitemap and fetch request to get things moving. If you notice a drop in performance after redirecting the URLs I would look into a rewrite map.

Have you tried more than one tool to verify they are indeed not showing up? Try a few other backlink watching tools, just to double check. Raven tools has a great link checker, as does Ahrefs.

Visit the actual page where your links were supposed to be placed, to see if they are still present, and inspect the link to verify it is "followed", and not a "no-follow"

Also, were the links that were acquired paid links? Could be that the linking site got hit with a penalty. This is all just speculation, based upon what you have said here. I would do a bit more research, to try and see if the links were truly removed, if they are followed, or if it's just not showing up in MOZ's link crawler.

Doubtful that one mention of the work or keyword phrase is having that much of an effect. Ecommerce store frequently have a higher keyword density, and I think Google can tell the difference. We have done work for multiple ecom clients, in which the competition would stuff the living daylights out of the meta and on page and still rank very high. Not saying its a great idea, just noting an observation.

As to your situation, I wouldn't bother with changing it. I would instead look at your on-page keyword density to avoid it getting too high.

Here, use this: http://goo.gl/cdPni2

You could always set a no-index rule for the tag pages in robots.txt and then submit all the URL's you want to appear through Webmaster tools using the "Fetch as Google" option. Another thing I would do is to only have the URL's you want to be indexed and focused on included in the sitemap, and the rest excluded. This should cut back on the strange or redundant URL's getting indexed and showing up.

Something like:
Disallow: /tag/

or

Disallow: /http://www.bestpracticegroup.com/tag/

Hope this helps!

There was a Panda update that happened on September 5th. For reference:

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-panda-update-19126.html

http://www.hmtweb.com/marketing-blog/panda-update-september-5-2014/

In the 1000's of sites we have submitted, all show an initial spike in ranking and indexing before things settle down for the long haul. It seems like Google does a "best guess" scenario, before they take the time to fully crawl and analyze all of the URL's and rank them accordingly. As always, resubmit the pages through all webmaster tools (Bing too!) so that they are always aware of the most recent updates. If you are planning on updating the pages frequently, I would edit your crawl request to daily in your sitemap. They probably won't do it anyway, but you can try

Use the fetch as Google religiously when you update. It is your friend

If you are looking for the fastest way to do this, just clone and backup your existing WP site and database, then move to your test environment and start building your new site there. That way you will already have all of your old blog posts in place, and save a ton of time, especially if the blog has been styled to look like the main URL.

For the blog, I agree with others in stating you should keep it as part of your main website. Doesnt make sense to have it on a subdomain unless you have to, like your old ASP configuration.

No problem, its actually really easy:

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/googlebot-fetch

Once you have selected your account, add the URL and then submit to index. I would do the homepage first and for that page, use the "Crawl this URL and its direct links" option. Then for the subpages do the "Crawl only this URL" option. It can also help to do the "Crawl this URL and its direct links" for any of your top level menu items to help speed things up.

"For example, i just checked a page and saw that some images weren't being indexed." Does your robots file allow specific access to those pages? If not, here is how you can set it to do so. This will also allow Google's partners to access your images. Add this to the bottom of your robots file:

User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Allow: /images/
User-agent: Adsbot-Google
Allow: /
User-agent: Googlebot-Mobile
Allow: /
User-agent: Mediapartners-Google*
Allow: /
Sitemap: http://www.YOURSITEHERE.com/sitemap.xml

As long as you properly redirect all pages to the https version, you should be fine. Google released an update a while back stating that secure sites could perform better in search results as it offered users additional security and trust. If you are going through the trouble of updating your site to an SSL, I would set the entire site to fall under the https, not just the payment pages. Google will like it, users will like it. The only drawback I can see is if your account is set up to use shared IP's, in which case you may have to make some modifications if required by your development team.

Here is the quote from Google on this subject:

"Security is a top priority for Google. We invest a lot in making sure that our services use industry-leading security, like strong HTTPS encryption by default. That means that people using Search, Gmail and Google Drive, for example, automatically have a secure connection to Google.

Beyond our own stuff, we’re also working to make the Internet safer more broadly. A big part of that is making sure that websites people access from Google are secure. For instance, we have created resources to help webmasters prevent and fix security breaches on their sites.

We want to go even further. At Google I/O a few months ago, we called for “HTTPS everywhere” on the web.

We’ve also seen more and more webmasters adopting HTTPS (also known as HTTP over TLS, or Transport Layer Security), on their website, which is encouraging.

For these reasons, over the past few months we’ve been running tests taking into account whether sites use secure, encrypted connections as a signal in our search ranking algorithms. We've seen positive results, so we're starting to use HTTPS as a ranking signal. For now it's only a very lightweight signal — affecting fewer than 1% of global queries, and carrying less weight than other signals such as high-quality content — while we give webmasters time to switch to HTTPS. But over time, we may decide to strengthen it, because we’d like to encourage all website owners to switch from HTTP to HTTPS to keep everyone safe on the web."

It's worth mentioning that if the SEO on the site stinks, an SSL will not rescue it from the bowels of page 10 ranking status.

Hope this helps!

As long as the page loads quick for users then I wouldn't put a huge focus on this. True that Google looks at page load speed, but I wouldn't put all your eggs in that basket. We have sites that show a 2.5-3.5 second load time, and they still dominate ranking results. Focus on creating a better experience.

One of the simple ways to speed up load times is to minify and compress CSS and Javascript files as small as possible, but be sure to check that the minification does not break areas of the site. We have seen improvements as high as 75% just from completing this step alone.

If you have a Joomla or WordPress website, here is a great plugin that will do this for you: https://www.jch-optimize.net/

This is based upon personal research, so take this with a grain of salt.

From what I have seen, they will use the desktop version as the basis for rankings and placement. If your desktop site placement is great, the mobile will be great as well.

For mobile, it seems like the only time this will change the ranking placement is dependent upon location, as mobile plays a big part of "where are you?" and serves up the most relevant results based upon where a user is physically located.

Most of what goes into making a site do great in search (for local biz) is relevant content and a strong citation profile. The desktop content authority should carry over into the domain/page authority of your mobile version, and you should not see much (if any) ranking fluctuation between the two.

Hope this helps!