A CNAME is a DNS record that says that domainA.com lives where domainB.com is. That means you then do another lookup on domainB.com and get its A record. Somewhere down the chain you have to have an A record. An A record is what ties a domain to an IP.

The problem here is that a CNAME is not the same thing as 301. If you go to the CNAME as mentioned above, your browser will still say domainA.com. We use a CNAME because we have a load balancer with AWS. So our site resolves to a CNAME that resolves to the load balancer address but it still shows up as www.ourdomain.com. We have dozens of URLs like this pointed to the same hosting configuration and each domain is seen as the original TLD. This will cause duplicate content problems for your client.

The correct solution is to set them up with an A record pointed at a web server and then have your web server return a 301.

Why do you NEED a blog? More importantly, why do you need a blog for what is a highly technical (and probably arcane) topic?

Blogging is not for everyone and everything. Blogging is for where there is some form of dialog or constant change where you can generate fresh content people want to read on a regular basis. I have one website where a blog makes a lot of sense. It lends itself to lots of artsy-deco blogs and we have some talented young ladies who have found a niche in writing that. Their readership isn't stellar, but combined with social media efforts it works decently well. I have many other websites where we have no blog and never will, because attempting to blog about those topics would be pointless because nobody would ever read them. Instead, we put the information out and then market the sites as best as we can.

It sounds like you're a bit too niche here. If all you do is SEO, and don't offer, say, online marketing, you're really missing out because SEO as a job by itself is really hard to sustain. Offer to set up an Adwords campaign or offer to do some work on their social media. Maybe they need more local efforts. Do they show up on your phone if you search for what it is that they do? I find myself using Google Now a TON for local because Google makes it stupid easy to find. Websites, maps and phones numbers (with one click to open up my dialer and call).

Offering more services should help keep your clients happy. Especially if they don't have the time (or drive) to work with you on SEO.

Have you journeyed to Seattle and tried meditating in the Moz break room while holding a Roger plushie until security escorts you out? (sorry, I couldn't resist)

First off, you need to better organize your site. It's not horrible, but the URLs are all over the place. Blogs are smashed together onto single pages. Content is disjointed.

Second... pervy quest? What? You need people to take your site seriously and dangling the prospect of NSFW imagery isn't going to help that (and might get you added to some domain filter lists). Don't play up the "naked" part. There are plenty of legitimate reasons to use that word.

Third... what is the site about? It's not obvious from a quick glance at the front page. Theory of Everything? That's cool but... what was I doing here again? You need a better design (too many stock images and cut out the rotating images as it distracts from the page) and you need some focus. All the content needs to pull in the same direction. What is it they want visitors to leave with? (besides a crystal bauble)

The bulk of his argument could be summed up as "Fresh content usually wins". It has some merit. But the rest of the article could be taken as saying "Game what you can now and move on."

SEO is a subset of marketing. It always has been and always will be. SEO is where you market to the search engines.A major part of Google's problem is we don't have any idea what constitutes what they like anymore. So his guess about it all being about freshness sounds good until you find searches where that's not true. But you CAN produce quality content and still lose the SEO game. But you can lose the SEO game and still win the war.

The danger for this guy is that he seems to advocate link spam. He heavily caveats it but offers no real reasons not to engage in it. I have no doubt link spam still works. The question you have to ask yourself is "Do I want to build something on top of that which Google is trying to actively destroy?" If you can live with being a flash in the pan, go for it. Make your money and then watch as Google throws it in the garbage. And hope that the next time around they're just as gullible.

You could go rip the entire site to your local drive using a program like Black Widow. Then you could use something like Notepad++ to search the entire directory.

Rule #1 in SEO Outsourcing is this

There is no SEO Secret Sauce.

Put another way, there is no proprietary SEO knowledge outside of Google and they aren't selling it. This means that any company doing SEO work on your behalf should be providing you a report of what they are actually doing. If they balk at it, shut them down because it's the surest sign of a scam.

Rule #2 in SEO Outsourcing

NOBODY cares about your site like you do.

Even if I am paid by you to care, I still won't care like you do (or should). I am constantly amazed by people who are shocked by poor SEO going on under their nose by people they paid. There are multiple tools available (paid and free) to you to check on your website. And if you have a feeling that your website is being harmed, do your own research. While a good SEO will try to provide meaningful metrics about what their efforts have generated, they will always put the best spin on it (that's not an ethical lapse, just human nature). Look at your own metrics and make your own decisions. If you don't care about your site, don't be surprised when an SEO you paid runs it into the ground.

The only way to know for sure is, after having linked your GA to Adwords, is to look at server logs and look for the following (in bold)

www.yourdomain.com/somepage?gclid=XXXXXXXXXXXX

This is how Adwords passes the session on to GA. If you click on your own ads you should see this show up when you finally arrive at your site (if not check configs).

the amount of sessions of Paid Search (in channels) and  AdWords sessions don't match up (The number of actual PPC clicks is substantially higher than the Paid Search sessions)

This is normal. Because GA relies on JS code there will always be missed sessions. Some people have JS turned off, while others have plugins that block GA from loading and sending data back. Server logs are the only real way to know true traffic.

Depends what you're aiming for. The largest difference between mobile and any other browsing experience is real estate. You're extremely limited on a normal mobile browser vs any other venue. In this realm, the iPad is generally not considered mobile. You tend to get the same browsing experience you would get on a full computer.

Another difference is that no iOS devices support Flash (that includes the iPad). Adobe has also announced that they are dropping Flash support for mobile devices which leaves support for Android tablets in the future in doubt.

I've found that many sites do this, primarily for tracking reasons. Typically they'll do the tracking and then bounce you to a clean URL.

As long as the page is on the same domain and the end URL is relevant, I can't see how it would impact quality score.

The simple answer is no. Let's say you have page A and 301 it to page B. As soon as Googlebot gets the 301 (might take a bit longer but for argument's sake we'll say it's instant) it drops page A and indexes page B. As the ranking process moves along (which is slower than indexation) most, if not all, of the PR that A had is now moved to B.

Google can't read your htaccess file (Apache will not show any page with a period as the first character in the filename for security reasons) and I've not heard of any long term penalties from changing URLs. Just realize that there is a gap (days or weeks) between the time that Google notes A moved and B is ranked like A was.