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Look at how a lot of squidoo lenses operate, they may have 0 or only a couple paragraphs of unique content, but by pulling in feeds from other sources suddenly you have maps, blog posts, images, videos, etc and are a somewhat unique source. Another thing to consider might be to pull in the scraped content with an iframe and make sure you have enough unique on the page to still be able to rank.
Why not just noindex the pages?
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.
Why not both? Some cases one method is preferred over another, or in fact necessary. As with non html documents such as pdf, you may have to use the robots.txt to keep it from being indexed or header tags as well. I'll also give you another option, and that is to password protect a directory.
There is no right or wrong here. It is how you feel comfortable laying out a site. A menu with every page on a site can be a disaster for a user experience, but if it's not that many then it's fine. You could do a single services page and then just add links in the context (assuming a paragraph or something for each term.) or you could do a secondary menu for instance on the right side of the page that links to the particular pages. Whatever makes sense to you and users, I won't speculate without knowing the full sitemap.
For the first question, if you have the time to make all the pages and are willing to do so I think it's a great idea. In most cases getting content right away is the hard and time consuming part so a lot of people will instead use blog posts to target the long tail keywords. I can easily see several posts about construction, maybe an unboxing of a kit, and a color chart sounds like a great infographic piece.
For part 2, google lowered the value of keyword rich domains long ago. Search in any major market for anything and I'm sure you'll see many many sites ranking above those that are keyword rich. I'm not saying being keyword rich doesn't help, but for instance search seo and notice some of the top results will be wikipedia, moz.com (which admittedly used to be seomoz) and searchengineland. These aren't keyword rich and they still rank well, if you like the name then that's what you should go with. Tell the seo company that if they want a keyword rich domain then they should make it into a second microsite and can build links to both, but make it clear to them that the main focus should be on the main website.
Even Moz's grader doesn't take all factors into account, but the biggest issue you are likely missing are links, could be external or internal or both. Make sure you have a few different keyword variations linking to the page, check the backlink profiles of a few of the top pages to make sure but I bet they have some anchor text links coming in that you are likely missing, giving them more relevance in the eyes of google.
You should be able to go to Goal Overview > Source / Medium and see where the user came from.
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.
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.
As Dinesh suggested, the Adwords Keyword Planner is a great tool. You can also use Google Suggest and related searches at the bottom (Ubersuggest or Scrapebox for more results,) then there's Soovle which pulls from many sources, and Google Trends also has related terms.
The secret is to get a googol links. Seriously though, quality over quantity. Try to get links in your niche. If you're a home builder then get links from home builder directories not general directories, if you're in a location look for those city directories and get local citations. Each industry is different, check out the links that your competitors and competitors from other markets have for ideas. You could spend a lot of time worrying about 15 bookmarking links, 10 classified links, and an article or some magic number, but I'd take one link from a relevant and authority website over all of this.
You should be fine submitting the subdomain link. I assume you have taken steps to have the links removed already?
Go ahead and do redirects from https to http, make sure canonicals are redone to http as well, make sure the sitemap is using http, and create a new profile in webmaster tools with the http version and submit the sitemap, go ahead and force crawl the main pages as well.
Check out parameter exclusion options in Webmaster Tools. You can tell the search engines to ignore these appended parameters.
I would vary them when possible. Most can be for the exact keyword but I think some variation is better as well, maybe even a few "here" links, actual links put as anchor text, etc.
1. I would call this a best practice, not spam.
2. Probably won't hurt, but not really a best practice. Check out http://blog.maxcdn.com/better-image-seo-canonical-headers/ explaining using images multiple times and canonical headers to point to the original source. I also see no problem with different alt texts.
I have changed a few without any negative impacts. Think about it, Google still knows where you are. However, if it's not really mandatory to change it then why do it? They aren't enforcing the service area, and do you actually service people at your location? Like can they come in and make an appointment or drop off a payment? I fear not having a physical address shown may affect CTR.
Do you have any examples of this Andy? I was under the impression that backlinks are exactly what gave you pagerank. I would assume those with higher PR you saw just had links that whatever indexing agent like OSE did not see, but Google did, and the ones with loads of backlinks were simply low quality or there were lots of links on the particular page.
"moving the blog to a sub-domain or separate URL"
Don't do that part, put it in a subfolder maybe.
Will you be switching the entire site over to wordpress or just the blog, it doesn't make much sense to be running 2 CMS.
Are there any links pointing to the page or domain containing homeless or is there word homeless on the page getting traffic?
I would map the analytics data to the major algorithm changes and look for spikes, check out http://panguintool.barracuda-digital.co.uk/ If it's a manual penalty you will see it in webmaster tools, but for algorithmic you kind of have to guess if you are hit or what not and to what degree you were penalized.
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.
I don't see why not, I can think of many examples where the business name does not match the website address.
https://www.google.com/search?q=how+to+sell+anything
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.
If you hover over the tab in Chrome it will show you the full title.
I would want to have as few as possible. You have to ask yourself whether or not all those folders are actually needed. As far as indexing, it's more about the hops than the number of backslashes. For instance if a crawler has to go to /denim-jeans then to /py then /c then /c109 then /np then /108 then /p then /3834.html it will likely have some indexing issues, but if the next hop after /denim-jeans is from a link that goes to /py/c/109/np/108/p/3834.html then it likely wouldn't cause any issues for the crawler, but again it's a nasty structure and you have to ask yourself if it is all really necessary.
Something like http://oocharts.com/ might be what you are looking for. Not sure how much control you want them to have.
Because this is how Alexa gathers data. If even one person goes to your site with the Alexa toolbar installed everyday for a year, while no one has the toolbar installed that goes to your competitors site, then you will have a higher Alexa rank even though your competitor may actually have 100x your traffic. If the toolbar isn't installed, Alexa gathers no data.
It's just a naming convention, so for strictly navigational purposes it doesn't matter what you call them as anything will work.
Perhaps you and people who frequent your site have the alexa toolbar installed?
You won't get a penalty from changing them, however a rankings drop is entirely possible. Try to keep your main keywords in each title and you should be fine.
As Gary said there are many factors included in local search such as the optimization of that page, natural ranking, local citations, etc. If you want to see how you are doing, click the "Map results for solicitor london" link under the 7 pack and go to "list all results." This should be your rankings for local.
Check out the page cached in Google and go to text view.
Fetch as Googlebot in Webmaster Tools
Web Developer Toolbar with cookies and javascripts disabled.
User agent switcher with your string set as Googlebot so you can determine if different content is being shown to users than bots.
I would hope that you have enough unique content on the page for it not to be considered duplicate, but yes this is a best practice. Other items that might help would be just take as much of the quote as you need, as in don't blockquote a whole wiki article, add your own original content as well, and don't forget to link back as well.
Do the pages really need to be indexed? I would say in your case it makes sense just to no-index them. At worst, Google will probably just hide some of the pages in the search result anyway, so save them a step.
Did a search for site:thinkstrategy.com prescription, check out the meta descriptions. Look at the cached version of the page, links and everything are there. Looks like whatever is infecting you is showing users one thing and crawlers another.
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35255?hl=en
The Content Keywords page lists the most significant keywords and their variants Google found when crawling your site. When reviewed along with the Search Queries report and your site's listing in actual search results for your targeted keywords, it provides insight into how Google is interpreting the content of your site.
The significance of each keyword reflects how often it's found on your site's pages. Click each keyword to see a sampling of pages on which it appears. Both keywords and their variants are listed in order of frequency of appearance.
If unexpected keywords, such as "Viagra", appear on this page, this could be a sign that your site has been hacked.
Do you want to provide a URL? Google search a page and view the cached version, it definitely sounds like something is injecting these words and likely links as well.
It's right in your code, it does exist.
rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Transport Jobs » Submit Comments Feed" href="http://jobs-transport.co.uk/submit/feed/" />
You may have comments hidden/disabled for the page but the feed for the comments is still there.
To answer your question, it's fine do queries for "digital marketing manchester" and "website design manchester" in whitespark to see if you get different citation options for each category.
As David mentioned, I would not do multiple listings within each citation that's a bit spammy and overkill, plus it might send an alarm to the citation you're building.
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.
I believe it is used to target not necessarily search terms in another language, but users who have an interface in another language.
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:
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.
As long as the search engine can read all the text, I see no issues. Modern designers put text in multiple tabs or partially hidden until expanded all the time these to create a better user experience. It is generally only hidden from the user using css and is fully visible in the code.
If the folder is there for no reason, get rid of it. Rewrite out the entire directory. Try this:
In the .htaccess add:
Options +FollowSymLinks -MultiViews
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^rosenthal/(.*)$ /$1 [L,NC,R=301]
I don't think it hurts to have it on other pages, but as it really only shows for branded searches at the moment, definitely have it on the homepage.
Definitely a duplication issue as they are 2 different pages. Pick one way and stick to it, probably remove is the easiest. I would do redirects first, but set canonical as well as a best practice. There is a great guide here:
http://www.kodecreations.co.uk/google/remove-trailing-slash-magento-urls-duplicate-content-issue/
It even includes instructions on how to stop Magento from generating urls with trailing slashes.