Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I use http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/ as well its well worth the money. you want an accurate site map and you can always edit the text file if you are handy in xml.

Google is probably not happy with your link building, I would try to contact some of the links that are not relevant and ask to be removed. I don't know if that will be the best way to spend your time considering the 28,000 new links in 3 months. Maybe some positive social signals would take some of the suspicion down, I think to make 28,000 links seem natural your would have to be trending and going viral on the social networks but even some small work may help.

You google plus page is not correctly linked to your home page. You need an actual google plus plugin on your page so that people can 1+ your business page. Other then that they would actually have to find your page through google plus and vote for it there.

I think you are having confusion between google places and google plus. they do work together very well but they are not the same thing. Log into your google account and search for google plus and google places then make the adjustments accordingly.

the yahoo penalty should have nothing to do with google unless you have in someway violated rules that pertain to both. Most likely is that you tried to login to your yahoo account too many times with credential that were different then the ones that your former SEO company had and the temporarily suspended it. contact yahoo directly they should be able to send you a card to prove your ownership directly to the business address to straighten it out.

Hope that helps

Your social media is going to be no-follow as Richard pointed out so don't worry about it. however if you do stumble across a do-follow social media account you may have a problem. Pinterest was at one time a do-follow site until it was spammed heavily. I'm not sure if even a do-follow would prompt duplicate content but  would just make sure if your putting similar content up that its on no-follow platforms and that it is relevant.

You can try adding the keywords in the meta field I also know that bing is really favorable on EMD's Exact match domain. So you might want to try and do a blog post on your site with the url containing the keywords you want to rank for. Bing and Yahoo are less sophisticated then google so you can get away with EMD's Meta keywords, higher keyword density. That being said don't go crazy on keyword density that will hurt you with google.

NEW CONTENT USE EMD's Trust ME

Ask them for case studies or successes they have in similar situations. I would ask if the can give you print outs of some of their organic improvements straight form google analytics.

If you are redoing the whole website for better ctr, that makes no sense. your CTR from organic traffic will mostly be determined by your meta descriptions and how well they are written. Remember any words in your meta desc will show bolded when they show up in the serps.

Also your ranking position will have a lot to do with you ctr.

As far as user experience yes a redesign may benefit you conversion rate or your average order value. The only possible way a new web design could improve click through rate is if many of your users are using google preview to see your site before clicking and even then it would have to be pretty bad to deter them from clicking based on a small preview.

Are you sure they are not trying to increase relevance for +click through rates for ppc?

Overall I understand why you are wary. You site seems pretty fine to me and if your already ranking the only thing they should be changing is meta descriptions for a better click through rate, or at least that's the best starting point.

And redesigning the whole website you can best believe their is a possibility of losing some rankings temporarily or even long term. You may also improve but I would really just ask them to start with the meta descriptions which should be written as keyword focused ad-copy.

I had some great ideas for a response but the previous three were pretty much everything about the subject i could say. ( I thumbs upped them all)

I would mention that you are getting in murky water making organic growth prediction a year in advance for an unknown company with no data. I wouldn't do it.

With that said If I had to I would apply theory of business law and go with a case study and press a correlation.

ie so so and in a similiar industry spent this amount of money on content development and marketing. With GOOD SEO and the same budget you can see a similar growth.

Like bryan said use google insights as back up. I would even use data form google keyword tool data as well. You can argue that if you get high enough on ranking you will earn a percent of that organic traffic. Main point i would stress is correlation between $spend combined with your seo skill correlates to such and such growth.

Even still that's hard to concretely present but it's a starting point.

Bryan is exactly right exact is going to be the most targeted. broad can get good impressions and  but might have bad ROI. If you are going to do broad make sure you do add negative keywords. Example you are selling sprint phones you could add it as a broad keyword in the same adgroup but you would want to add some negatives as well like: I hate sprint phones or sprint phones suck. That way you won't get impressions that aren't relevant. Anytime you get irrelevant impressions, they don't get clicked your ctr goes down and you quality score goes down. when quality score goes down your cost goes up. So just do it the right way and save money.

What you really should be thinking about is best practices for your overall account structure. meaning make sure your ad groups are built based on best practices. that will ensure users are sent to the most relevant pages and that way you don't waste money. Also google will look at account structure and relevance when evaluating your account wide quality score, which will factor in to the quality score they assign each keyword.

Your smart by focusing on quality score. In my opinion that is where most people waste money. It is critical to really understand how the bidding and adwords auction systems works every time a query is entered.

I forgot to add this reference about the 404's

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/08/farewell-to-soft-404s.html

Quick response- yes a large portion of soft 404's is not going to make google happy. It can be confusing to users and google knows that so they don't like it for pages high in their results.

the real question is not can soft 404's hurt, it is was it the soft 404's or the duplicate content issue on a grand scale. I would be most worried about the dup titles on that large of a scale.

My opinion yea soft 404's can hurt you, but probably not as much as 31k in duplicate titles.

sounds like you addressed both issues, nothing to do but fetch as google submit w links and wait  for the indexing to happen.

Good luck

Ask them for case studies or successes they have in similar situations. I would ask if the can give you print outs of some of their organic improvements straight form google analytics.

If you are redoing the whole website for better ctr, that makes no sense. your CTR from organic traffic will mostly be determined by your meta descriptions and how well they are written. Remember any words in your meta desc will show bolded when they show up in the serps.

Also your ranking position will have a lot to do with you ctr.

As far as user experience yes a redesign may benefit you conversion rate or your average order value. The only possible way a new web design could improve click through rate is if many of your users are using google preview to see your site before clicking and even then it would have to be pretty bad to deter them from clicking based on a small preview.

Are you sure they are not trying to increase relevance for +click through rates for ppc?

Overall I understand why you are wary. You site seems pretty fine to me and if your already ranking the only thing they should be changing is meta descriptions for a better click through rate, or at least that's the best starting point.

And redesigning the whole website you can best believe their is a possibility of losing some rankings temporarily or even long term. You may also improve but I would really just ask them to start with the meta descriptions which should be written as keyword focused ad-copy.

-Wordpress is hands down the most powerful and easiest to use blogging platform. It's open source and the developers involved is immense and it's still easy to use. Almost as easy as setting up a social media profile, maintenance is simple with the plugins available too.

-Magento on the other hand is one of highest regarded E-commerce platform and it is not known for it's blogging capabilities. Hence the WP plugin.

So really it comes down to your main purpose and where you will spend the most time. If it's blogging go with wordpress and add a e-commerce plugin. If your main purpose and demand on time will be E-commerce (updating and adding products, changing inventory) Then stick with Magento and use the wp plugin.

For your name I would suggest using your business name and or any keywords you want to rank for. (do keyword research!) Bing is still big on EMD's (exact match domains) which means you will get a pretty good seo advantage by naming it what your main keyword will be. Google does also but has recently lowered EMD's ranking influence.

You can also just have the blog be an inline part of your site. It would be a page on your site and still be on your server and would appear like this www.syls.com/blog. That would be best if you want external and internal links pointing to certain products to help there rankings. You could also use a subdomain like blog.syls.com which would put you on different server. This would allow you to link to your products and they would be considered external. Google is smart and will figure out the relation pretty quick so having 100 links pointing to your main page isn't going to do the trick.

Most likely an inline blog on the same server would be best for you. If any of your blog content gets linked to that way your site will get some link juice. The more you blog the better off you will be. That being said it needs to be good content google will penalize your for publishing crap content (scraping, duplicate or keyword stuffed crap). That being said you can always use a platform like content.ly to outsource making good relevant content and then make what you can in addition when you have time. Start out small learn your niche make some content and get better, google will take notice eventually and if you do a good job and become more relevant your rankings will improve.

Quick response- yes a large portion of soft 404's is not going to make google happy. It can be confusing to users and google knows that so they don't like it for pages high in their results.

the real question is not can soft 404's hurt, it is was it the soft 404's or the duplicate content issue on a grand scale. I would be most worried about the dup titles on that large of a scale.

My opinion yea soft 404's can hurt you, but probably not as much as 31k in duplicate titles.

sounds like you addressed both issues, nothing to do but fetch as google submit w links and wait  for the indexing to happen.

Good luck

I couldn't agree with Matt More!!!

That is a great explanation of what tiered link building is, but the key is that no matter how well you execute on your automated link building you can rest assure that one day maybe not even in the near future Google is going to send you that webmaster tools penalty notice that you don't want!

There are many pro's out there getting penalized the idea that someone relatively new to automated link building is going to execute it flawlessly with out any penalties, over the long term is not too likely.

That being said there are link acquisition tools like Ontolo(prospecting) Buzzstream (mainly task assignment, record keeping and some prospecting) that can be used with Open Site Explorer that can be a powerful means to build links in a much more natural way. Yes you may have to do some forum. commenting, profiling, sharing, bookmarking and guest posting. But if your really want it and want it long term there's going to be some hard work involved.

I would stay far away from SENuke

Good luck.

Bryan is exactly right exact is going to be the most targeted. broad can get good impressions and  but might have bad ROI. If you are going to do broad make sure you do add negative keywords. Example you are selling sprint phones you could add it as a broad keyword in the same adgroup but you would want to add some negatives as well like: I hate sprint phones or sprint phones suck. That way you won't get impressions that aren't relevant. Anytime you get irrelevant impressions, they don't get clicked your ctr goes down and you quality score goes down. when quality score goes down your cost goes up. So just do it the right way and save money.

What you really should be thinking about is best practices for your overall account structure. meaning make sure your ad groups are built based on best practices. that will ensure users are sent to the most relevant pages and that way you don't waste money. Also google will look at account structure and relevance when evaluating your account wide quality score, which will factor in to the quality score they assign each keyword.

Your smart by focusing on quality score. In my opinion that is where most people waste money. It is critical to really understand how the bidding and adwords auction systems works every time a query is entered.

I forgot to add this reference about the 404's

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/08/farewell-to-soft-404s.html

You google plus page is not correctly linked to your home page. You need an actual google plus plugin on your page so that people can 1+ your business page. Other then that they would actually have to find your page through google plus and vote for it there.

I think you are having confusion between google places and google plus. they do work together very well but they are not the same thing. Log into your google account and search for google plus and google places then make the adjustments accordingly.

the yahoo penalty should have nothing to do with google unless you have in someway violated rules that pertain to both. Most likely is that you tried to login to your yahoo account too many times with credential that were different then the ones that your former SEO company had and the temporarily suspended it. contact yahoo directly they should be able to send you a card to prove your ownership directly to the business address to straighten it out.

Hope that helps

Your social media is going to be no-follow as Richard pointed out so don't worry about it. however if you do stumble across a do-follow social media account you may have a problem. Pinterest was at one time a do-follow site until it was spammed heavily. I'm not sure if even a do-follow would prompt duplicate content but  would just make sure if your putting similar content up that its on no-follow platforms and that it is relevant.

You can try adding the keywords in the meta field I also know that bing is really favorable on EMD's Exact match domain. So you might want to try and do a blog post on your site with the url containing the keywords you want to rank for. Bing and Yahoo are less sophisticated then google so you can get away with EMD's Meta keywords, higher keyword density. That being said don't go crazy on keyword density that will hurt you with google.

NEW CONTENT USE EMD's Trust ME