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Thanks for the great answers! This is very helpful for me.

I work with a lot of arts events on a minimal budget and I normally move the old website to: www.website.com.au/2011, www.website.com.au/2012 and make the current year www.website.com In this way you're still getting benefit from having a large website, the archive of the previous events is still there, artists still have a presence and people still find the website in the SERPs, navigate to the homepage which is the current event.

Regardless of whether the traffic converts, there's no harm to having non-converting traffic. If it generates links or social shares then it's adding value in that way. As long as the content itself doesn't suck, and reflects positively on the firm, then I would keep it. There's probably a good argument to be made for reducing volume of blog content and devoting those resources to larger content pieces like whitepapers, downloadable guides, etc.

If the page no longer exists and you remove the robots command for that directory it shouldn't make much difference. Google could start reporting it as a 404 since it knows that the files used  to exist and there's no longer a robots command to ignore the directory. I don't see any harm in leaving it there, but I also don't see many issues arising from removing the robots command.

wellness, You'll want to use 301 redirects from the old pages to the new pages to tell search engines that the values assigned to the old pages should now be assigned to the new ones.  Here's the info you need to to that: Moving your site - Webmaster Tools Help Redirection - SEO Best Practices - Moz

I'm lucky, my business partner is a developer and he is fantastic with code. Hence why I have such a good content manager system, especially for SEO purposes. I'm not a fan of WordPress or Drupal so Google's Tag Manager will come in handy if and when I have to deal with a website using those systems again.

Thanks Ricky, Another couple of things you should consider given the issues you face (and clean up the multiple Places listings first) are to set up a couple of sub-directory location pages and contact pages. So, list Loxahatchee on your Places/G+, but then set up a West Palm page and contact page, a Palm Beach Page and contact page, etc. for those areas you want to draw patients from. On those pages optimize the content for those locations and state you server "the area." Also consider schema or other markup for Place. As to title tags, Jesse is right that they actually are relevant - they are just not relevant alone - and if you can have the location in the url (sub directory) and in the Title tags and H1's, you are on your way.   Good Luck to you.

Thanks for that Ricky.

Probably it sees them, but remember what happen when Google try to cache a Facebook Page or Profile: this is the cache of the Facebook page of Moz: Google see it rendered; But the text only version sends to the Facebook Page itself not to the only-text version of it. That's the visualization of the FB Walled Garden. Hence, if it can create association between links shared and the profile sharing it, that must be not using the link graph but co-occurences IMHO.

I think the two answers above pretty much cover it. HX tags aren't a huge SEO factor so I wouldn't lose sleep over them.  Fashion your titles for users and if your page is about X Keyword.. GREAT  put that into the title naturally.  H1 is the only tag I wouldn't have more than one of.  H3+ could be duplicated on product titles and whatnot but again it isn't a huge SEO ranking factor anymore. As far as font sizes I'd make them pleasing to the eye.  Google reads HX tags as they're intended to be used: Large titles at the top of the page in H1 are more relevant than multiple H3 tags with small text down lower etc. Don't worry about making them "Exact match" so much as making them describe what is on the page.  Hopefully it happens to be describable with your keywords of value but having them make sense is the most important goal. Hope that helps!

Category pages can cause duplicate content, but major categories do often have search value, so it's a trade-off. Typically, it makes more sense to go after duplicate URLs (like product options), search filters, sub-categories, and things like that. It depends a lot on the scope of the problem, though. My gut reaction is that technical SEO isn't the core problem, though. Ultimately, search traffic doesn't just happen these days. You do need links and social mentions, and you need to actively market and promote yourself to start ranking for non-brand terms. There's no on-page trick to that. Something like schema can help your listings stand out, but it's not going to magically help you rank for terms you don't currently rank on. Without understanding the site or industry, it's really tough to give advice on where to start, but trying to control how link equity flows through your site only makes sense when you've got a solid amount of link equity to work with. Actually, I wrote about this general issue a while back - you may find it useful: http://moz.com/blog/whats-better-on-page-seo-or-link-building

It does feel good cutting the dead weight and letting irrelevant articles go. I am also listing what can now be updated and rewritten for a future post before the redirect is put in place

Alright, thank you for the replies! I'll tell my clients to sit tight for now until things calm down.

Hi Matt - Publisher is for brands, while Authorship is for people. You should put the rel=publisher code on your website's most important page (usually the home page) only, and establish a two-way link between that page and your brand's business page on Google+. You should verify Authorship for each one of your bloggers, as well as authors of other content on your website where it is appropriate to have an author byline. You cannot use your business page on Google+ to establish Authorship. Each author must link their personal Google+ profile to your website (under the contributor section on said profile.) It looks like you have a multi-author site, so you can either link your website content back to each author's Google+ profile using the email method or rel=author markup. I hope that helps!

Thank you for sharing this blog post.

Thanks Phil, That was my guess, I just wanted confirmation, and between you and the folks at Wistia sounds like that's the most plausible explanation. Thanks everyone for taking the time to help out with this!

What a thorough response!  I'm in the Option B scenario.  The old content has nothing to do with my site so I don't need to redirect the old URLs.  I will just wait out Google crawling those 404s. Thanks!

Mark - I agree with Dennis. You have some competitive metrics but best case scenario you are mid to bottom of page one currently, in terms of expectations.

Thank you, i did look at this particularly how the competition was typing the keyword on the page and they all still use the umlaut, but as for the url structure it could be an idea for me to make changes so it would be http://www.cirrusresearch.de/produkte/schallpegelmessgeraet/ yea thanks, i may look at changing this structure slightly, but i am still not quite sure that would be a reason for my current ranking to be so poor

I've had the same issue with a few pages of a clients' website. I've also heard that it may be the title that is used in DMOZ.