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Yes, you are on the right track.
Submit your site to vacation rental websites/directories, write awesome content + outreach to people who might be interested in it, work with bloggers (maybe offer a discount) to stay at and review your property, try to find lists/stories where your property can be listed - i'm sure a bunch of your competitors are doing this so see where they get their backlinks from and figure out how they do it.
Yeah, then just let it be and keep doing what you're doing 
Just wait it out, don't think removing the comment will help you anyways as G still has it indexed... did your traffic drop or anything?
I'd skip step one and just have an additional pop-up/notification bar on A explaining the merger when the visitor is redirected from B. For pages that don't correspond, just redirect to homepage. That way you save a year of less-than-optimal rankings.
I would review the analytics of B and transfer all of the high ranking pages/content to A, set up 301s. Then do the outreach for link changing.
Match up relevant pages on their site to pages on your site and create 301 redirects from old to new.
Edit: DJ's suggestion also works. Downside is that there is a lot more maintenance involved in running two websites.
Ah, I see now. Try this out http://moz.com/community/q/block-an-entire-subdomain-with-robots-txt#reply_26992 - basically, when a subdomain is identified, it would pull a different file into the robots.txt location (which would contain the disallow: / syntax)
Read the remaining comments about getting the subdomain removed via GWT.
bloggingplatform.com/robots.txt
and
user1.bloggingplatform.com/robots.txt
can and should be different. If you disallow at the subdomain level, only the subdomain will be affected. You can search around for other examples of this but i'm certain it works (we have a development domain that is indexed and create subdomains for all clients that aren't indexed and done via individual robots.txt files)
_Are you saying that removing a lot of these bad links will actually result in poorer ranking? _
Potentially. However, it is necessary in order to get unflagged by penguin. I'm thinking that you have a lot of links with highly keyword targeted anchor text. In order to get out of penguin, you need to 1) remove bad keyword anchor links and 2) create new good brand anchor links. Once your ratio of brand:keyword anchor text falls below a certain threshold, you should start to rank much better (at least based on my experience with cleaning up backlinks).
Regarding the disavow, are you saying that if Google does not refresh Penguin for another 6 months I will not receive the benefit of the disavow until then?
Unfortunately that is most likely the case. I have experienced it happening faster but there is still a lot of mystery about the disavow tool and penguin. The most drastic changes in SERPs occurs during a refresh.
EDIT: Sean makes some great points and a new domain could be a potential solution.
Each subdomain should have a robots.txt file that blocks that specific subdomain. e.g. user1.bloggingplatform.com/robots.txt should have:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
There is a lot to consider here. For some websites that I've cleaned up, 27 of 87 (31%) links removed by webmasters is fantastic. Most of the time, a link from a bad site is just ignored since the webmaster just doesn't care about the website. In your case, it seems like a lot of the links that were removed came from engaged website owners which makes me question whether the link was bad in the first place.
RE effect of disavow... did your website receive a manual penalty? Or did your SEO determine that you were hit by Penguin? Those are the only two scenarios where you should be removing/disavowing links.
If manual penalty, then you will see results after you submit a reconsideration request and have the penalty revoked
If penguin, you may see results after the next penguin refresh.
Keep in mind that if the majority of your links are bad and are removed, you will probably not rank as well as you used to prior to the removal process.
Look at the source of the page and make sure the <title>content is as you want it to read. If it is, than Google is choosing to change the way it displays your title in SERPs. Unfortunately, there isn't much you can do. Just make sure your title length is short enough to be displayed fully in search results.</p></title>
Nope, a one hour downtime should not affect your rankings. Here is Matt Cutts on the subject.
A) Crawler may not even detect the downtime
B) If downtime is detected, crawler will check back later to see if it is a serious problem. Your site would be back up by then and shouldn't affect rankings.
If you plan on translating a part to another language, I would use the hreflang tag to tell search engines that two pages are identical, just in different languages. Then search engines can serve the correct version of the page to whoever is searching based on their language preferences.
If a nice chunk of your customers prefer English, I would look into creating a English version of your entire website.
What do you mean?
Like on site.com/pagea.htm there is a canonical set to site.com/pagea.htm? No harm in that. You should have a canonical URL whenever you want only one specific version of a URL.
Sounds like you were hit by Penguin and/or a manual penalty.. check his analytics and GWT accounts for more insight on that (i.e. when google organic traffic dropped).
I would focus on building more links to the brand name and modifying any current links to improve the anchor text ratio. If he has a manual penalty, you'll need to submit a reconsideration request.
If you share website info, I can take a look.
If there is that many, I'd hire a freelancer to find/organize them all for you. Give them all the names/addresses/phones possible along with a spreadsheet to populate and have them search for and find all of the citation listings.
Yes, she is talking about the title tag, not meta description. And I believe she is referring to this - read the full article here
As you can see from the image, the title is cut shorter in the new version.
I'd be wary of that - many will just employ old school link building tactics that may hurt your rankings more than help. I'd ask them to share exactly how they plan to build links and to provide some samples.
I'm going to assume that you are in a low-competition area (otherwise you'll have a tough time competing on that budget) in which case you can just do on-page optimization + use a service like getlisted.org. Many times, just having complete and consistent information across all of the major local directories is enough to get you ranking locally.
Your "SEO Expert" is wrong and the content is indexed. This is most notable in FAQs... clicking on the question drops down the previously invisible div with the FAQ answer. Both the question and answer is indexed by search.
Here is an example... searched phrase is in an invisible div but still appears in search.
Create pages specifically dedicated to those cities - [Client Services] in [City Name] - [Brand]
Just know that you are at a disadvantage to companies that are actually local to the area and will need to have a much more authoritative backlink profile & content.
keep the url, change the name/keywords. nobody can really tell you what to expect.. if the competition is stronger than you for the new keyword, you might lose your current rankings and not be able to compete on the new term. Or if the competition is weak, you could start ranking for both terms.
Do some competitor analysis and compare the risk/reward of changing keywords.
Dreamweaver does funky stuff when you go from visual to code. Try opening the xml sitemap in notepad and copying/pasting from there and see if you get the same problem.
But based on my experience with that site, you should be fine.
yerp, the hack is cloaking the links and only showing them to bots. In the future, you would want to do a "Fetch as Google" from within webmaster tools to see what Google sees.
Do they have a manual penalty notification? If not, don't remove/disavow/nofollow links.
Were they hit by Penguin (check their analytics history)? Are their anchor texts predominantly keyword heavy? If not, don't remove/disavow/nofollow links.
you should have 1 sitemap index and 2 sitemaps.. 1 for English and 1 for French, and the index that links to them both.
If a page has an equivalent, include the rel="alternate" meta data. If not, don't include any meta data (just do the generic ones = loc, freq, priority)
Its tough though, because you are essentially trying to optimize for 15 keywords/locations on one page.
I've had success with creating "Directions from" pages - 1 for each location/area. I'd talk about the general area (specific problems that area may have), say if we have worked with any clients in the area (and give a testimonial if you have one), and give directions in laymen terms + an embedded map. Maybe your client wouldn't consider these "bullshit"?
There shouldn't be any problems with paginating to a subdomain and you can paginate in that manner. Just know that your reviews.am pages most likely won't rank anymore and backlinks would be consolidated to the first page of the sequence (in your case the product page).
It's a clever workaround, i'd go for it.
Close... you still have them all grouped into 1 event though.
You need to remove the [itemscopeitemtype="http://schema.org/Event"] from the and move it to the level (and repeat for each )
Matt Cutts just released a video that addresses this exact question - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L3HX_8BAhB4
I've had those too and they are quiet annoying (love seeing 0 errors hehe). I just mark and fixed and hope it doesn't show up again (usually stops appearing after doing that once or twice).
If anyone has another other insight into this, please share!
Schema microdata is a type markup that results in rich snippets (bonus details in SERPs).
Other rich snippet markups include RDFa and Microformats
If there is no direct way for the crawler to reach the page, it won't be indexed + if the page is so hard to reach, it probably wouldn't pass much authority onto your site.
I'd still get the link if it's on a good website for potential referral traffic but wouldn't worry about trying to get it indexed.
What is the URL of the website? What CMS are you using? When/how often do they change? What do they change from/to?
Need more details.
Pageviews is on the same page.
Not sure what number you are trying to get? A session = visit from one user where they don't go idle for a certain length of time (default = 30min). So if a person visited your website, didn't do anything for 1 hour, then refreshed the page, that would be 2 sessions. But aside from that instance, a session usually is a visit.
You can further distinguish new vs returning visitors under Audience > Behavior > New vs Returning
Doesn't look right...
Each event should only have 1 start date... looks like you grouped all of them together.
Look at this example and mimic it for each event date:
<divclass="event-wrapper"itemscopeitemtype="http: schema.org="" event"=""><divclass="event-date"itemprop="startdate"content="2013-09-14t21:30">Sat Sep 14
<divclass="event-title"itemprop="name">Typhoon with Radiation City
<divclass="event-venue"itemprop="location"itemscopeitemtype="http: schema.org="" place"=""><spanitemprop="name">The Hi-Dive
<divclass="address"itemprop="address"itemscopeitemtype="http: schema.org="" postaladdress"=""><spanitemprop="streetaddress">7 S. Broadway
<spanitemprop="addresslocality">Denver,
<spanitemprop="addressregion">CO
<spanitemprop="postalcode">80209
<divclass="event-time">9:30 PM
<spanitemprop="offers"itemscopeitemtype="http: schema.org="" offer"=""><divclass="event-price"itemprop="price">$13.00
<aitemprop="url"href="http: www.ticketfly.com="" purchase="" 309433"="">Tickets</aitemprop="url"href="http:></divclass="event-price"itemprop="price"></spanitemprop="offers"itemscopeitemtype="http:></divclass="event-time"></spanitemprop="postalcode"></spanitemprop="addressregion"></spanitemprop="addresslocality"></spanitemprop="streetaddress"></divclass="address"itemprop="address"itemscopeitemtype="http:></spanitemprop="name"></divclass="event-venue"itemprop="location"itemscopeitemtype="http:></divclass="event-title"itemprop="name"></divclass="event-date"itemprop="startdate"content="2013-09-14t21:30"></divclass="event-wrapper"itemscopeitemtype="http:>
You are fine - no need to worry about duplicate content.
Only way it would be is if EVERYTHING is identical.. which it doesn't sound like it is.
Don't think either would be different from an SEO standpoint.
i'd go the /catering/locationname/ route for cleanliness/breadcrumb structure. Unless you are going to create other service pages for each location (e.g. /locationname/menu/, /locationname/reviews/), making locations a subcategory of catering would be the way to go (and can list them on the /catering/ page)
What happens when you remove all of your other rules and just have the 301 redirect?
Whichever page you put the link on... fetch it as google (through your Google Webmaster Tools) and see if it shows up in the HTML source. If it does (and the link is not nofollow), then it will be crawled (as long as your page can be reached) and indexed.
As Linda mentioned, you'd probably want HTML knowledge and know how to use FTP to access your files.
But unless you are only going to use a plain HTML site, you'd probably need to familiarize yourself with the language of the site. PHP is very commonly used and is what Wordpress is coded in (and if you do work with Wordpress, you need to learn how to modify themes)
If you have a canonical set, you don't need to worry about any parameter handling. Analytics will still display the full URL (with the query string) because it doesn't look at the canonical url.
To sum up...
Could you share more details?
What do the duplicate content examples look like? http vs https? www. vs non-www?
If the content is replicated on 2 domains, yes that is duplicate content and you should consolidate to one site via 301 redirects.
.com is king but if they are doing well with their .ca domain, I wouldn't mess with it.
Do they have the resources to manage two websites? Having a .com would help them rank in US better over a .ca - ideally the sites would be nearly identical (changing up small things like CAD vs USD, contact address/phone possibly, etc) and then linked up with hreflang markup.
Very solid idea - track email response times, phone call wait times, etc. But I think it would be very hard to implement while preventing spammers.
Phone numbers and email addresses can be spoofed with ease. I personally get phone calls/emails claiming to be Google and to "confirm" business information for rankings. If there was an official setup like that, the two could get confused and people taken advantage of.
Likewise, if they receive a call/email from "Google" and choose not to respond because they are used to spammers, they would be unfairly dropped lower in rankings even if they have great CS.
But I'm with you... Google definitely needs to give small businesses a fighting chance against the big boys. Just needs to be extremely well thought out.
To be fair, they were clear they wouldn't just boost rankings just because you submitted a page.
They would instead look at all the sites that were submitted, look for patterns on what makes them great and try to develop an algo tweak that would help similar sites rank.
Could you imagine if they form actually functioned as a "submit good site > site gets better rankings"... they would drown in requests.
