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Thanks All. It looks like I have a LOT to do! We shall see how that plays out. If anyone has any other suggestions, please let me know.  I am trying to figure out the best plan of action before I get started.

301's are not difficult for me, but handling the code for a logic to re-route requests for "URL" to "URL/" is something I dont know how to do. I can manually 301 or rel canonical my CMS pages on Magento everytime, but that defeats the purpose or the automation in htaccess I am trying to get working. thanks

Thank you, I knew about the paid and organic likes I just didn't know where the netlikes fell in and how it was calculated to which you nicely showed me in private

Hi David, EGOL is right in that you first need to discover the policy of the 3rd party review site regarding reusing their content. If they allow this, they may have some type of widget you can just add in-page to showcase your reviews there, but if republishing their reviews isn't allowed, you could run into problems. Regarding Google, they do not want testimonials marked up with rich snippets, but I'm not 100% sure how they feel about 3rd party reviews that you are republishing on your website. I've not seen any word from them on this.

Provided that there are no links to http://clientname.com/products/ and obviously it's not part of the breadcrumbs you're fine though you may want to consider adding these pages to give you a point to all products (of a list of categories of products), etc. But no ... the structure itself isn't inherently going to cause problems.

Trying hard

Good question, isn't it? I wish somebody knows exact answer, but I'm not friends with Matt Cutts From what I heard, read etc, my understanding is that Google knows websites, who are selling links, by simply reading the content and links on that website. Example: if website has a page with prices for articles with links or press releases, Google bots can read that content and understand what the page is about. Then they look at how many of outgoing links on website are do-follow, how often they appear, diversity of those links etc. Basically, if 99% of outgoing links are do-follow and they are all to different domains, the picture is pretty clear. If picture is not clear enough, bots would send a request to manual action team.

Hi Schmeetz, I've had a rough time getting reviews to work for schema as well. The structured data testing tool can give you a positive when something's actually missing that'll stop Google from displaying your stars. The nice thing is, if you're using structured data, Google will update their listings as soon as they recrawl the page, so you can test things fairly easily. Use Google Webmaster Tools to "Fetch as Google" and "Submit to Index" to get a page with new code recrawled within an hour or so. I don't think you need dates in order to get star ratings on SERPs. I haven't needed them on my company's site. But, I noticed that all of your markup is using content tags rather than marking up actual content on the page. My guess is, that's the issue, that Google doesn't trust content that isn't seen on the page. Have you tried marking up the actual content? _Note: _Google will also sometimes blacklist domains from displaying reviews. This isn't an issue for you, but for others reading this: you can test it by searching for "site: [product URL]". If Google displays the ratings then, it's not a technical issue, it's a blacklisting issue. Test out marking up visible HTML text and let us know how it goes! Best, Kristina

Hi Emily Sorry to hear your site is not being crawled. The crawl is successful, however, your site is completely in javascript with no HTML links we can follow and unfortunately, our crawler only understands HTML. For more insight, please check out this post about our crawler here: https://moz.com/devblog/why-didnt-moz-crawl-my-site/ Hope this helps!

I don't think you need to worry about it. I think what this blog was talking about is more people who do spam content way down the page under the footer kind of thing. I think if you build a good website which has content below the fold I wouldn't be worried at all. I have clients who rank for some very hard keywords and for conversion we have less above the fold so it's pushing them to do one of our call to actions. Always remember google wants you to build a website which users like not a website that google likes.

Sadly there really isn't one. I know it doesn't help but the 301 shouldn't have been done in the first place. Changing URL's and doing 301's always impact on rankings in a big way. You will be best to 301 the new domain back to the old one and try to stay away from doing it. Also keep in mind every time you do a 301 you will only get 70-80% of the benefit of the links going to that domain.

I agree with Miriam, make sure that you have enough citation strength/listing withing for each location, as well as making sure you're listing is linking to your individual location page on your site. This is by far the biggest differentiator in my experience.

Hi. I wouldn't use "noindex", so images are actually getting into Google's image search etc, but canonical sounds fine.

The client will not remove the content until we have new content ready to go. He will not leave these pages blank, despite our advice that no content is much, much better than duplicated/plagiarised content. We don't have the resource to write all this content within a short space of time, so we're going to have to run the risk of a penalty as the client is not budging on this.

Hi Brian, I think your approach will definitely provide some benefit, as long as you're focusing on quality, relevant links and your blog content is related/aimed at the same audience as your website. The more relevant the blog is to your website as a whole, the better the link value would be. I'd also work, of course, on your on-page optimisation, and answering/anticipating consumer questions with help pages which are as clear and precise as possible. Hope this helps!  Zoe