When Moz stopped doing consulting, we put together a list of recommended companies in order to drive that traffic there and then to great consulting companies. This allowed for context for the visitor -- compared to direct redirection where a visitor might think they stumbled into some weird click scam -- and for us to give a link and specific information.

So I want to suggest checking out the webinar we had yesterday on speeding up your website.

I also wanted to address your comment about your crawlers and localized rankings possibly messing up your rankings. This is not the case. The crawler that looks at your site in Moz Analytics is different from our rankings crawlers. They do not connect. They do not influence rankings as the bots only record the information in the SERPs based on your keywords; they don't click into your site. Does that make sense?

They should be roughly equal, unless one has a drastically higher domain authority and amount of backlinks.

I'd go in and change the structure in WP and then 301 the old URLs with the redirect. Then your new posts going forward will only have the cleaned up URL structure and the old ones will be properly 301'd for all the SEO goodness.

Everyone's 301 redirect suggestions are correct. However, exact match domains may not be worth grabbing all of them for SEO. There's been lessening returns.

No, because search engines look for the last time that page file has been updated, not any recorded dates. I find it's pretty helpful, especially on blogs, to leave the date for users so they can evaluate if the information is relevant or the context of when you posted it.

I do think it's worth exploring other plug-ins and working in the nuts-and-bolts of site speed. Even though WP plug-ins are very helpful, it's always good to know the details of what's happening as much as possible. I'm not exactly sure how W3TC works -- I've never used it or any other site speed plug-ins personally for WP -- but it's possible it can't optimize everything or that it's working the best it or any plug-in can.

Looking at your site, I noticed a couple things:

Your site speed is pretty slow. You can use pingdom.com to check your site speed. This is a great study by Jon Colman about site speed and how much it actually affects your site. I noticed that you're running WordPress, and here's some tips on how to speed up your WP site. Google definitely factors in speed, and this could be affecting how the bots reach your site (or don't reach it) and account for the flux week-to-week. You are correct in that it shouldn't be that dramatic of a change week-to-week.

I also noticed that your homepage was a little overly optimized for keywords. As search engines start getting more semantic, you want to optimize more for the user. Definitely don't kill all the keywords, but balance is the key. Read through the copy as a visitor, not just the SEO and industry expert.

It would be great if you could leave your site URL and some examples of what you're looking to rank for so we could dig in.

Did you do any recent changes to your site that may account for ranking changes?

Yes, search engines definitely know that subdomains are hooked to your domain, and there's evidence that search engines will count links toward a subdomain to your domain. However, there's speculation that those links are slightly discounted in the level of authority they pass -- they are a stronger signal to your subdomain -- and it's still best practice for your SEO to put your blog on a subfolder instead of a subdomain.

Yes, we do. Unless you click the checkbox that says not to crawl subdomains.

Unfortunately, we currently do not have a batch tool for OSE. We do offer an API for Mozscape data, which you can then important all the data at once into a spreadsheet or another tool you've built.

I agree that the easiest way is to build in SEO features to your submissions. Making sure that the title translates into an H1 tag, etc. One of the reasons why YouTube became such a success, pre-Google purchase, was because every time you upload a video to YouTube, you do some SEO work: tagging the video, upload a transcript (if prompted), adding a description, etc. If you make the user interface easy to do this, you'll be ahead.

When it comes to complex schema data, I wouldn't worry as much. Most forum/article submissions rely on long tail traffic. Spend time optimizing the best traffic drives or the pieces that get the highest social shares, which might also work great on searches. It's okay to cherry pick the work when you don't have time to do it all.

Google is super fast when it comes to the main, most important stuff on your domain. It's still indexing stuff from the old SEOmoz.org domain because we have a ton of pages! and frankly, some of them aren't very popular. We also made the decision not to redirect every single page and killed a ton of them. The less popular pages are lingering (though with the right 301 redirects, we're still getting that traffic to the still important to us pages) with SEOmoz.org, either waiting to be indexed at Moz.com or tossed out as they no longer exist.

For dealing with people who are scraping your site, make sure you have canonical tags implemented on your pages for your shiny new https site. Most scrapers steal the code, so they grab those too.

If they were recently randomly generated by some errand code, you can let them die and 404. The only time you want to redirect a page to another is if that page 1) is getting traffic or 2) has backlinks. Since you're dealing with a code error, those two are very unlikely and you can be confident in just killing the pages.

You are correct that our tools will report the link and the link equity from it. We don't discard or discount paid links. Google has taken major effort to do this -- much of it very manual, human reviewed -- and we don't have that kind of bandwidth.

That said, we do have something exciting in the works, hopefully, releasing no later than early Q1 to more comprehensively look at the quality of that link. Stay tuned.

The information changes to a completely 2015 page are set to go live this week. But, I do happen to have the hotel link: book your 2015 hotel room.

FWIW, Wired recently did a study that showed if you're coming from the UK, it's best to buy your flight 53 days out.