Google Webmaster Guidelines suggests you should "Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don't add much value for users coming from search engines."

There is nothing "bad practices" about allowing a non-existent page to 404. People often times forget that a 404 isn't a signal that something is broken and needs fixing, its just a status code that returns "Not Found". Sometimes it makes sense for things not to be found on your site because they were never there in the first place. 404s eventually stop being crawled and indexed.

You shouldn't just bulk redirect things to your homepage though. Its always best to have a 301 point to the most relevant page based on what the original page was. If there is no most relevant page, have you considered 301-ing them to one step up in the site navigation? (i.e. a category page or hub page)

I more or less agree with EGOL. Directory Submissions are a thing of the past and are likely to get you in trouble nowadays. Getting backlinks is becoming harder and harder everyday. You need to diversify more and make sure that all those links to you look as natural as possible. It's not a bad thing to do linking yourself to get that initial push but the best possible linking strategy is a naturally occurring one. Make sure you use all relevant social avenues open to you... Facebook pages, G+, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, StumbleUpon, and so on as long as it make sense for your site to be there and you keep up with posting. Hopefully those will generate natural links back to your site as people learn who you are and grow to like your site.

In some cases, the capitalized version and lower case version of a search won't return the EXACT same results in the SERPs (sometimes a result will shuffle a bit [though not by much from what I've seen]) but Google does understand that "Example" and "example" are the same word much in the same way that it knows a singular and plural of the same word are related, i.e. "Shoes" will show up for a search of "Shoe" and vice versa.

If you also take into account the regular shuffling of the SERPs every time Google so much as blinks, there is the possibility that when the rankings data was pulled for your terms they were done so in a fashion that shows two different numbers that were both correct at the times they were pulled. Plus, in the past week (week and a half?) there was a decent bit of volatility in the SERPs that lead people to believe there was an algorithm change happening so for all you know that may have put an odd hiccup in the numbers as well.

Worse comes to worst you could always do a bit of testing to see if maybe you stumbled on a previously unknown traffic/rankings difference. Shouldn't be but with 500+ algorithm changes a year, you never know.

This is a very common issue. When you publish a new blog post with tags, and your tag pages are index-able, you are essentially posting the same content to two or more places on your site. The two easiest options are either don't use Tags or make your tag pages Noindex.

In the upper right-hand corner by "Campaigns & Tools" there's the symbol that looks like a Head with a few lines next to it. Click that and in the dropdown is "Billing & Subscription". On that page you'll find a link to Cancel.

Spammy domains have been known to overuse the Hyphen... but using Hyphens does not make you spammy

Matt Cutts had previously stated that Google recognizes the Hyphen as a separator and the Underscore as a connector... i.e. "red-wigdets" gets read as "red widgets" while "red_widgets" gets read as "redwidgets". For keyword purposes, a hyphen is technically better but the difference is likely negligible. Also keep in mind the EMD update. If your core term is "cheap red widgets" and your domain URL features "cheap-red-widgets" then the EMD has made the previous positive name correlation into a less powerful signal.

Matt Cutts 2011 Underscore vs Dashes in URLs video http://youtu.be/AQcSFsQyct8

Matt Cutts 2009 Underscores or Hyphens in URLs video http://youtu.be/Q3SFVfDIS5k

Matt Cutts 2005 Dashes vs. Underscores blog post http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/dashes-vs-underscores/

Social Bookmarking does still work but not as well as it may have in the past. It can still be a viable way to get traffic to your site but not necessarily always the most qualified traffic. Personally I'd say to stay away from any social bookmarking tools that will automate things for you because that will be a bit of a red flag if you're too spammy with adding your links. A more natural approach to getting your pages added to social bookmarking sites is the better way to go. Just don't expect it to magically increase you rankings, conversions, etc.

As per the Google Places reviews guidelines (link

Conflict of interest: Reviews are only valuable when they are honest and unbiased. For instance, as a business owner or employee you should not review your own business or current place of work. Don’t offer money or product to others to write reviews for your business or write negative reviews about a competitor. We also discourage specialized review stations or kiosks set up at your place of business for the sole purpose of soliciting reviews. As a reviewer, you should not accept money or product from a business to write a review about them. Additionally, don’t feel compelled to review a certain way just because an employee of that business asked you to do so. Finally, don’t post reviews on behalf of others or misrepresent your identity or affiliation with the place you are reviewing.

So I'd suggest not offering free visits in exchange for trying to get reviews (positive or negative).

In most cases Google is smart enough to understand that a page relevant for "Wood Desk" could or should show up in searches for "Wood Desks" and vice versa. As such, it's not really necessary to make sure that you shoehorn in all of the plurals and singulars of your core terms. Worry about it more from a Human standpoint. Making the title more human accessible will help with clickthroughs, visits, and so on. Forcing multiple variations of the same word into a title in order to attempt catching every variable will probably make people skip over you. And ultimately, getting the qualified traffic is what much of SEO is about.

Social bookmarking sites can be crawled and indexed by the Search Engines whereas most social media platforms likes Facebook and Twitter are not usually indexed and links are nofollowed. Starting a blog and regularly adding original content will help your site. Linking should be as natural as possible. Don't buy into any of those linking packages out there as they are likely to get you algorithmically penalized.

If there's no footer, why not at the top of the page. Something along the lines of "Located at the intersection of street and road in the center of Town" with a nice, obvious Click to Call?

I've found that people like bullet points... gives them quick information without needing to read the rest of your content. Of course the problem arises of duplicate content when you use the same bullets over a large amount of products or all you do is change a word or two between every page. If the bullets are all the same then what's the value of them to the user? Bullet points (like all content) should be relevant and fresh. They should highlight the specific advantages of that product, i.e. what makes it special/different/unique/important/worth buying?

For a local shop that has their Google My Business set to indicate they serve customers at their location (as opposed to a delivery radius or areas served), Google will base the businesses shown in a search on either the Location the user specifies or will base them on what they know about the given businesses of the area in relation to the query plus any geolocation information of the user in question. So there isn't exactly a radius bubble that you would need to fall into for those specific kinds of situations.

Now, for an industry like landscaping, cleaning companies, food delivery, emergency auto repair, tow trucks, etc. They can set a radius they serve within or they can set specific areas. So a locksmith might set a handful of postal codes as the regions they will drive to in order to fix your locks. While a Pizza Delivery Service might choose to set a radius of 25km for their service area because they might not be able to reliably deliver outside that.

All of these things can be set up in their Google My Business account.

I know from personal experience that Google will show me things easily 100 miles away from my location if there is nothing in between that fits my search.

https://support.google.com/business/answer/7091?hl=en

My favorite answer... Canonicals. If your trade partner's site places rel="canonical" tags pointing back to the original source of the content on your site then there shouldn't be any duplicate content issue. Of course Canonicals are suggestions not directives so the search engines reserve the right not to follow the tag if they deem it irrelevant. Using the tag in this way will essentially pass all the equity to your site and rank your page instead of your trade partner. Your trade partner would basically get no benefit of having your content as far as Search is concerned. The better option for everyone would likely be to write unique and relevant content.

There are no issues with connecting multiple sites to one email account in analytics and WMT. Would get pretty hard to handle if everyone needed a brand new email address for every single site they tracked.