Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Judging from the various things mentioned  in your question the "company" you hired is nothing more then a spammer. If their entire "SEO campaign" is to deliver xx directory links a month then fire them right now.

On the other hand if they're submitting your sites to highly relevant directories that would make sense to a user looking for your company PLUS doing other forms of link building then yes keep them (this doesn't sound like the case)

To answer your page authority question - the page authority is showing up as "1" because OpenSiteExplorer needs time to find these need links and evaluate them accordingly you should see their true page authority by the end of the month.

-Brent

One of the things mentioned at SMX this week was the new "alternate" "hreflang" tag.

Put this tag at the top of your US site:

rel=”alternate” hreflang=”en-GB” href=”http://www.example.co.uk/” />

rel=”alternate” hreflang=”en-US” href=”http://www.example.com/” />

This will tell the engines that yes you have two "duplicate pages" but this is the correct language for each.

More on alt hreflang here: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=189077

I would imaging that Google will rely on profile authority (how many people "like", "tweet" and "plus one") things they share.  The new Page Rank of social profiles almost. Then will come the paid mentions (just like paid links) and all that garbage.

Hi Jason,

What was your reasoning for swapping to .net? It sounds like you need to keep your aged domain and 301 all your newly purchased domains over to it.

-Brent

Hi Kyle,

Did they build the Wordpress template themselves? The pingback is a little suspicious, download the plugin called TAC and see if it brings up any hidden code. I had a similar problem where I was working on a site that was using a free theme and had a 302 in the header which made the site struggle in rankings. As soon as I figured out that it was in fact the free theme causing the issue I got it removed and traffic 10x'ed (not much as they were getting like 5 visitors a day) in roughly a week.

It's hard to help without seeing the site but let me know what TAC reports and if it's clean we'll dig deeper.

-Brent

Your best bet if possible would be to put the blog as part of your clients site. This will allow all the backlinks acquired from their awesome content to help the authority of their overall site.

As far as any strategie for blogger in general there isn't really anything special that needs to be done that you wouldn't do on Wordpress.

Hi Jason,

Yes i'd swap back to the .com, also try and keep the link structure the same as your old site or you will lose all your current search engine traffic.

-Brent