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One of our in-house marketers was in a similar situation about a year ago.  Here's what we can say.1) Find out as much information about the company as you can and take a look at their analytics.  Does one website drive traffic more than the others?  Is one more important to the client?  Find out what drives the revenue of the company and start there.  It might be more important to invest money and time from in the top website and trickle down...
2)  Subdomains would probably be the best, but that's not always an option according to the client, we understand.
3) Are all of these websites different brands or just different websites?  For example Burgers.com and Hamburgers.com.  If they're the same site, you definitely need to change them at least cosmetically.  Make sure that they have different call to actions, etc.  Think of it as an A+B test and go from there.  Be creative.  Make one website green and one blue, and always keep in mind duplicant content.

I would say share not only your stories but others from news sites in your niche as well.  Try to become a "Top Contributor" in those groups on LinkedIn and usually your stories will get more attention and interaction.

Technically most NAP (name, address, phone#) listing sites are directories such as yelp, yellowpages, etc. There are also usually industry specific directories which should be fine to submit to as well, such as AVVO for lawyers or healthgrades for medical professionals. After that is where it gets iffy, some sites like BOTW, DMOZ, joeant are still considered quality by most, but there are hundreds of thousands of other directories where submitting may get you in trouble.

It's showing up as available to me as well.  I agree with Ryan if you're interested in buying it, now is the time to do so.

Sounds like you rank for a lot more terms on desktop than mobile, and probably not as well for a lot of those terms. In addition, it could be that a lot of the mobile searchers are in your area, which tends to make you rank higher because of the localization.

It's up to you, but I have to agree that using different emails might be the best way especially if you think you might be losing the accounts later on.  
Handing them over might be an issue in the future if you only use one account.  Who wants an angry and nasty client, after all?

https://www.google.com/search?q=how+to+sell+anything

https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140124144839-21597783-how-to-sell-anything-an-introductory-guide?trk=corpblog_0214_ryanroslansky_publishing

I mean this article has 47,000+ views.  I looked at some other articles and it appears the links are followed as well.  They do rank and can apparently get a lot of eyes on them.

You should really look for companies that match what you need. For instance if you are a local company, you should look for someone in your area who has experience in your industry and success with other clients as well. If you have a larger budget and you don't necessarily care where the people you work with are from, you can check out the Moz recommended list http://moz.com/community/recommended and see if a company's strengths match up with what you are looking for. Every company will have different strengths, different strategies, different ways of tracking and to add value to your campaign. Contact a few of them and find who matches your needs the best.

Tom,

I would say it's not bad for SEO, however it might be bad for your customers.  What's the reasoning for the random order?  Was it A/B tested? Etc.

What you want can be done easily in a couple ways. If you want a separate view in Analytics then you will need to create a filter to show only traffic in /blog and apply that to a secondary view. You can also create a custom segment to only show traffic on the blog.

If you're new to SEO check out the Beginner's Guide by SEOMoz, that might help you out.
http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo

Also it's worth pointing out that the guy who wrote the testimonial has a PR of 1, which is just one level above the 0 where all sites begin at.

If this is something you will need on an ongoing basis, it might be best to create a new view in Analytics with filters to just show the blog data.

In this particular situation, with the domain changing hands I feel Google is a little more lenient. It sounds like you already have the right idea, register it an immediately disavow the spammy links that came in. 300 links isn't a lot to get removed either, but with the terms you mentioned I have a feeling removal will not be possible as you'll have difficulty contacting a person.

It's not bad, my main concern right off the bat though is why do you have footer information that's different from the header.  That just seemed weird to me and made it come off as spammy.

Also, if you're looking for a lot of sign-ups to your newsletter, I would move the newsletter from the bottom to maybe a subpage.  A lot of people are not going to look below the fold and see the newsletter so it's hurting you having it there.

ATP is correct, it's because of Bing's transition to https. Google will hopefully correct their reporting soon.

Ouch!  Our first thought is that having a lot of choices sounds ugly and frustrating, from a user experience side.  Remember you don't want to give your customer too many options, you want to guide them through the process and watch them through a conversion funnel.    
Why don't you just create landing pages and add those to the header?

As I said you can setup a new view with an include Filter to only include your blog directory and view the demographic data through that.

Another method you might try is under Admin > Content Grouping, This will allow you to group blog posts together and when setting up the report, you will be able to select the Content Group under Filters.

Auke,

If I could add my two cents in, I would work on turning your current customers into enthusiasts. There's always a way to create content and in the long term, if you create good content it's going to be shared.

Some thoughts include:

• Create a content related newsletter.  For example if you sell athletic shoes, create a newsletter about athletes or if you sell dish washers, create a newsletter about keeping the house clean.
• Go all in on social media. Even if you sell dish washers, give people a reason to like your site.
• Brand yourself and speak at events. Most events will give speakers or sponsors links, if you're not afraid to be out there go out and speak at events. Look at Scott Monty the Ford guy, wherever he goes Ford is going to get a link.

Going back to your question though...I'd do some competitor analysis.  It sounds like you've already explored the number of links he has so why don't you use something like Browse SEO to explore his onsite SEO.

I hope that helps.

• Richard.

I agree with Tom that this is much of a business question if anything.  You need to ask yourself, what site has the best content and what site do you think that customers will go to first.

If you want to you can create, buypropertyanywhere.com and use each country as a subdomain or mini-page for example buypropertyanywhere.com/usa, buypropertyanywhere.com/bulgaria, buyproperty.com/china.

William and Shift already left great responses, but i want to add that the average human being looks from the top left to the bottom right, in saying that you might want to take a look at your design.  Naturally our eyes want to follow the blue and ignore the the right sidebar while your call to action is.

Alec,

The first thing that you need to do is take a deep breath and understand that you are not the only person this has happened to.

I would suggest the following steps:

• Review WebMaster Tools and see if you have gotten any kind of link warning from Google.
• You might also want to do a backlink analysis of not just yourself but your competitors as well.  Have they done something recently to pass your website?
• You said a lot of "Russian links" are killing your website.  Are these on Russian domains?  If so, you can try to contact the WebMasters of these sites and see what you can do.  If you want you could also use Google's Disavow tool.
• While you're doing all of this, I would also suggest double downing on social media.  Reach out to your customers and engage them.
• You might also want to refocus on content creation, especially content that is sharable.  If you can get new leads through things other than organic it might be what you want to do.  Maybe a good email campaign?

Those are some early thoughts, but the most important thing you can do is remain calm.  Starting a new website is a possibility, but I'd suggest doing the research and trying to focus on your initial customer base before you do anything.

We're fond of Zappos.  They have awesome linking both internal and outbound.
http://www.zappos.com

With questions like this, I tend to look at it not from Google's point of view but from a person's point of view. The spiders are getting smarter after all and Google always says to write content and create websites for people not the Spiders.

So to answer your questions, you might want to ask yourself these questions:

• How am I supposed to know that the links on my website are broken, because a site I was linking to is now down?
• How do I know that the domain I am now visiting was down for a month or even a year?
• How do I know said blog is being used for black hat purposes? It it has relevant content and helps me, that's all that matters.

I don't have an exact answer, but I would stay away from it.  Remember Google wants us to create websites and an online experience for people not search bots.

I would suggest start talking with your current customers and see if a newsletter is something that they would be interested in.  Maybe do a blog post on it, promoting what  will be in your newsletter or even use your social media channels.  It all depends on the level of conversation you are currently having with your clients.  
Even LinkedIn offers you the opportunity to see people's emails if you wanna steal those. Also don't forget to use your email to engage customers, not just push your items.  I recently saw an email that said in the header "first person to email me back with a reply to said question gets a $10 gift card", this will allow you to keep an idea of who is actually engaged with your email and reading it.

Screaming Frog's a great one, a few Google Chrome plug-ins I would use are:
ReDirect Path -> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/redirect-path/aomidfkchockcldhbkggjokdkkebmdll
Check My Links -> https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/check-my-links/ojkcdipcgfaekbeaelaapakgnjflfglf

If you use these in combination you will hopefully be able to find any errors in your new design.

It should always be a picture of you.  Take it from a social media point of view or even a cock-tail point of view as I tell my clients, your brand doesn't talk to clients you do, so you definitely want to put your face/picture out there.

I agree with Oleg. In theroy it's a great tool, but we've seen issues with it as well. It sometimes doesn't always work and it somtimes says things are "broken" when in fact the listings are correct.

What we suggest is that you use it as  a "brain storming" tool for where you should build links to your local listings.

I would say use hyphens in the urls.  I've never known there to be a ranking difference and in my opinion it's a best practice to use hyphens over underscores or plus symbols, and for readability for the user I think hyphens make sense. texas-plumbers reads easier than texasplumbers to a user, and for Google I would think it's easier to discern.  Imagine some titles where words could make completely different sentences by separating them at different locations.  http://www.boredpanda.com/worst-domain-names/ as some examples.

A blog is just a list of articles and posts anyways, so it sounds like you're actually writing a blog anyways.

Aliasing would make the urls a little easier to digest, you also might want to look at .htaccess rewrites to get rid of entire folders that you don't need:

http://www.awarablogs.com/group/index.php/easyblog/entry/employee-engagement-is-a-key-driver-of-modernization-and-innovation-

In this example I would be getting rid of index.php, easyblog, and entry since group is what you are using for your blog.  There are many reasons to get away from this platform, I took a brief look and besides the folder structure each blog has 3 h1 tags, the logo, awaragroup - blog, and then the post title.  As Andy suggested, Wordpress is great for blogs and is free, and might even be easier to use than your current system, so long term I would look to make the changeover.

It depends on the purpose.  Remember the Golden rule of Google, is to think like a user.  So if you think your content is spammy, Google will probably think it's spammy.

If you're listing words just for keyword purposes I would say yes, however if you're listing the cities you serve probably not.

Bob,

I would suggest creating great content and then using social media and email to spread the content like fire. A term that we stole from Jay Baer is content is fire and social media is the gasoline to that fire. For example why don't you add an important piece of content to your email signature or email it to a few influencers in the community. They might find it important and want to share it with everyone or even link to it.

This is very common in Wordpress.  Have them change the template, and if they want it to still look the same then just call the style as a class.

James,

It sounds like you're looking for an unnatural black hat strategy.  As mentioned by the other people who answered the question I would suggest maybe putting that money in a content strategy.  Remember that when it comes to black SEO, it might seem cheap and easy to get links, but if you want something to last for awhile content creation that's evergreen is the way to go.

If they don't have links built to them, I don't see any benefit in redirects unless some are typical spelling errors for instance.  You might be better off picking a few and making specific product microsites that link back to the homepage.

I seem to agree with everyone else.  You definitely want people to remember you for what you are and who you are.  That's why you want to use the same image across all networks.

Are you trying to check a lot at once? if not, just use the site: operator, i.e. site:abc.com/page

I can't even access your content on the site.  I see home, mobile, and desktop as text and when I click desktop it just highlights mobile again, so nothing changes.

Well you're removing bad links, I would also suggest creating awesome content.

You work in the adventure and traveling industry so target bloggers who have been to your location or would be interested in going. Offer them free visits, in exchange for a review.

As the other guys said, just go ahead and do the redirect. It would at least help if someone is looking up the new attorney by name.  To address the other part of your question, that page that you redirect will not be "blank" as you are telling Google with the 301 redirect that the page has moved.

Great question that all of us have probably asked at some point, but as Vadim pointed out whenever there's a question in regards to content always ask yourself are you doing this for the spiders or human.  If you go with the spiders you might have a short term win, but in the long term you should always think about the human when creating content.  These rules/thoughts should always be asked if you have any SEO hesitations.

These will likely clear when whatever tool you are using crawls them again and realizes the links aren't there anymore.

We agree that Facebook posts are seeing less and less featured time on people's walls, but it's important to note that interaction with your posts does increase Facebook's  EdgeRank.

Are you interacting with your viewers and engaging with them?   Creating great content and posting it is a quick way to get more views with your posts.

Yes, you will want to redirect it. Be careful though as a lot of times this isn't done correctly and creates a loop. There are multiple ways to do this including but not limited to DirectoryIndex or a RewriteRule

I'm a strong fan of Wordpress, install Yoast plugin and make sure you put links in your blogs.  Even a related posts plugin like YARPP will help with more internal links to other blogs.  Wordpress usually needs a few SEO tweaks, but is a great CMS for being SEO friendly.

If you have a relevant category I would redirect them there.  If not, just send them to the homepage.  You don't want to see 404s and neither do the people visiting your site.

I tend to agree with everyone's thoughts here. The idea of "starting generic and cheap" is a great thing to do. It's often best if you start off bidding on a "broad" perspective compared to a phrase match or exact match bidding philosophy, to get a better idea of how people search for you.

Be of the understanding that you will lose money the first 3 months, but just like anything this will allow you to research and better fine-tune your strategy.

Also PPCHero.com is a great blog to read for PPC tips, tricks, and overall advice.

It sounds like this is for PPC? Instead of call extensions, you may want to try call only campaigns. We've had huge success with these with local service area businesses.

Great answer Oleg, I would just like to add that on top of the social presence that you should also be looking at NAP listings for the company.