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Google treats sub domains as a different site in a sense.. and hardly ever passes any benefit of the root domain to the sub domain. Usually, your root domain would rank higher than the sub domain.. naturally.. unless your sub domain has better seo on/off site.
If both pages were equal it would show both. but would have to choose which one would receive the better ranking.
301 redirect! set up a rule in your .htaccess file to redirect www.domain.net/default.asp to www.domain.net
A few related articles to help you if needed.
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=93633
http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection
Hope this helps you out! and if it does please mark answered 
It is duplicate content either way across the world wide web. For example.. a blog posts an article, I take that article and post it to my blog.. that is considered duplicate content. Use this post by rand to help determine when to use sub domains!
WordPress will not limit its ability to gain rankings.
A Few Google Guidelines for Places;
Do not create a listing or place your pin marker at a location where the business does not physically exist.
A P.O. box is not considered a physical address.
You also are not allowed to use more than one listing per business.. in example.. spread among the coastal locations you want.
Without a physical address, it is impossible to be on Google places legitimately.
I would just place your business in your home address. Make content specifically for the coastal locations you are interested in marketing too. Sorry but there is not much you can do about the local listing situation and how you would like it to be :[
Yeah do not use spinners! They are bad news, I have seen websites get destroyed by them. Mechanical Turk through amazon would be cost effective, I could also recommend using writers from textbroker.com
If you want to keep costs low, find someone on forums.digitalpoint.com to go through and rewrite all the descriptions. Post an ad describing your work needed and ask for a example of work by re writing a sample piece from your websites.
The cost of getting quality content will be less than the article spinner most of the time. Unless you have hundreds and hundreds of pieces needed to be re written.
I know a spinner sounds like the best method, but it will not help you out at all! You want results for the future, it is important.
As long as you wrote the article first, Google will know! It won't penalize you bcz people stole it.
A suggestion for the URL:blog/how-set-marketing-budget-your-smb/index.html
I would change this to: blog/marketing-budget-for-your-smb/index.html
I would keep the article title the same!
Also, try and get more social shares! I noticed your competitors articles got tweeted almost 100 times! These social signal will help you.
I am currently showing you in position #9 for that term. I took your content, did a word count and counted how many times 'marketing budget' was used. in the article you used it 8 times within a 969 word article. Your big competitor (INC) used the term 5 times inside a 1,162 word article. #1 position is INC.com followed by, Microsoft, About, Wiki.. These are all big players in the Google rankings and hard to compete with.
Due to the nature and competition of this keyword I am not going to suggest re writing.. I would setup a few more pages, with similar content about marketing budgets.. maybe not only for small businesses but for big ones, maybe tone down the use of the keyword, add some variations to it! Make about 2-3 new articles like this.
Track these new articles. They should have different titles, number & variations of keywords, URL's. Take note on which performs better than the others. After some time has passed.. take your better article and make those subtle changes to your article. Maybe change up some of the keywords, improve the URL and maybe put your keyword closer to the beginning of your page title.
(I do not want you to make these changes to your current article yet). I am not sure how it will affect it's ranking.
When you get your articles tracked and they start to improve on rankings, go ahead and link to your already ranking article from the new ones.
Hopefully over time you will be able to get back into the top 3!
You should take note of all these spammy links and put them into a spread sheet. I would also ask for the webmasters to remove them as well. Try contacting them through two different methods. Such as support ticket or through a contact us email. Document that as well.
In case you get penalized you will have the work already done in trying to get a reconsideration. I wouldn't sweat it too much though, Google is working on perfecting their algo to identify this type of problem & situation.
A rewrite wouldn't be a bad Idea, being that it is from two years ago. Are the websites that out rank you have fresh content? Google likes fresh and this could be a reason why you dropped. If you could screen shot the article and upload it to imgur.com or just provide me a URL I would like to look at the piece of content, maybe I can give you a reasonable cause as to why it dropped.. also a search term would be nice too!
I would not trust cheaper SEO's across sea's, they will often just use automation software and build un natural links. I am sure you can find a hand full that will legitimately build links such as sharing pieces of content from your websites & also content that they write. I would put your funds into content creation and come up with a strategy to get that content seen. Post to all social networks, and then use some of your content to specifically do guest blogging.
I would make sure each website has its own Facebook page, Twitter, Google+ & Maybe even Pinterest. You can also share your content through websites like Reddit, Digg and even Squidoo.
This could be a result where your back links were coming from websites that have been de indexed or banned. Those websites were affected by the updates of Panda most likely. I am not a expert on the subject because I have not had to deal with it directly.. But the dates your links started going down looks about right.
Refer to this page for more info about Google updates: http://www.seomoz.org/google-algorithm-change
Yeah I don't think SEOMoz has a video evaluation.
Some tips for adding video.. Host it yourself! and make it so people can embed it.. this will gain a link from the website. You can also make / submit a Video sitemap.
Refer to these posts:
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/video-sitemap-guide-for-vimeo-and-youtube
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/hosting-and-embedding-for-video-seo
Oh I see what you are asking, I'm sorry. Yeah he should beable to provide that for you, if you have access to the websites plugins.. look for "gold cart plugin" it mentions it has Google Base integration. That plugin may provide it for you. Took a look at your page source and figure that plugin handles your products!
Hope that helps!
See if you can work with this: http://www.google.com/intl/en_us/products/submit.html
Check the page source and CTRL+F and search "canonical"
Is the "Errors" actually listed under
or
???
If you implemented the plugin and changes after your last crawl, I would wait until SEOMoz re crawls your site and makes a fresh report. If you click the number of errors, warnings or notices found with canonical, it will bring you to a page where it finds it. if you hover over the "Tag value" it will give you the true canonical path!
It could also be a theme problem! You may have to edit your page / post templates and any others that are effected.
Hope this helps!
I agree with Klarke on this.. Those programs are not worth it!
If you really want to pay for some part of your SEO process, I would invest in content creation.
You will have to remove them one by one unfortunately! Yeah I took a quick look at your link profile and you have links from health websites and stuff like that. Unrelated to your blog! Just keep working on building a better link profile.
If you created them you should try to remove them. If that is not the case, try to contact the webmaster of where your links are.. it's a long shot but some will remove the links. Gather a list of every link that you think is doing you wrong and use that list as a guide for removal. Do whatever you can and as much work as you can to get them removed and document your methods used.. whether it by emailing, on site support, snail mail or phone call.. make sure to write it down.
You may be able to get a reconsideration but I doubt it unless Google Webmasters specifically left a message about bad links. You will have to keep guest blogging and building links naturally to out weigh the bad. You could start over, grab all your past blog posts and save them, start a new blog.. go back to fix your guest posts to point to your new domain. That may be the quickest way and better unless your site is still bringing in allot of visits. It really depends on your current situation. I'd say for me.. if my website was bringing in 250 people a day rather than 1,500 per day from before.. I would try and save it.. anything less than that I would probably spend my efforts to create a new website with best practices.
You could use a XML sitemap builder like http://www.xml-sitemaps.com, I just tested it and seems to work alright.
Make sure you are truthful about how often you update your website with content. This could be daily, weekly monthly and so on. Second, I would let the sitemap builder determine importance of your pages, it should make your home page the most important.
WARNING: Using the above service will let you work with only 500 pages, if you have more than 500 pages on your website do not use the sitemap it generates.
You can find other services by searching "sitemap generator"
The best way would be to use http://code.google.com/p/googlesitemapgenerator/ but configuration and setup is required.
Good Luck! Hope this helps.