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You really can't have too much content from an SEO standpoint. I would try and simplify the message on the homepage though. It's a bit much for a user to follow. To do that, I'd figure out the main keywords I'm targeting, then shave down the text but keep all the keywords in play. Make sure all the remaining content supports those keywords while delivering a message to your visitors that's simple and leads them to a clear call-to-action.

Anything with "Windows 7 activation code" will eventually get hit by Google whether you decide to report it or not. It might take a day, week, month, year but Google will eventually find their links spammy and do something about it. That's really the gamble with black hat. How long will it take Google or someone to kill the project? The idea with blackhat though, is you burn the domain or burn whatever the project is once it's no longer profitable. If you plan on working on the same brand for a long time, whitehat is really the only way to go.

They'll see a short boost now, but once they get hit, it'll be a huge hassle to fix everything.

Sounds like something built in early 2000s. Tables won't hurt your SEO directly but it will have a negative impact on pagespeed/load and content optimization. Tables use a lot of extra code that makes it sluggish. I generally always recommend a re-program into DIV/CSS. It's faster, optimized, you will see an SEO benefit.

If your client really doesn't want to do the recode, what I would do is setup all the tags, clean the menu, add any rich snippets that apply, then let them know that's the farthest they'll be able to go without upgrading into DIV/CSS.

This is a tough situation and one I've seen many many times. Basically your boss wiped out all of his backlinks. Depending on how long everything has been down, he might have a chance of recovering them by reverting everything back to the way it was. Generally, it's best to leave a domain as is and work on building the new brand alongside the old pages. Redirect relevant pages from the old site to the new site, and put up a banner or countdown from the old site's index to the new one. The new domain is PR0 and new so it has to get built up. The fastest way to do that is to leverage the old domain to boost the new one, then make the full redirect once the new one has picked up some steam.

Just like the 2 suggestions, it's really best to keep both sites. Move forward with the new site and re-brand your company but don't scrap the original website. Add a banner, write up, some news explaining the re-brand and point the original site to the new site. You'll create a backlink and if the person is genuinely interested in what you have to offer, they'll follow to the new website.

301 any page that are relevant from the original site to the new site. If both sites have a products page then you can point it over. Google will naturally figure out what you did and start passing any relevant benefits to the new site.

Yup Google offers to help websites all the time. They've been known to reach out for everything from getting a publisher to help with beta test widgets or adsense to something more custom like this. I suggest you give them a try and see if it works for you.

If the new website is related to the old website, redirect as many individual pages to the new site as possible. Match up the pages and that'll create the most seamless way of moving the site from the old to new. All your old traffic will end up in the right place on the new site. Benefits there include any SEO or inbound links will pass pagerank over to the new site as well giving you a bit of a boost.

If the old site has nothing to do with the new site but it's your new brand, company, or project that you want to draw attention do, just do a straight 301 redirect and explain that it's a new project somewhere on the page. Any existing traffic from the old site will follow through and learn what you're currently up to on the new site.

If the old domain has no traffic, no SEO, no inbound links, and really doesn't have anything to offer, keep it parked.

There might be a link or something directing the crawlers to your site's IP address instead of the original domain. There is potential for getting flagged with duplicate content but I feel it's fairly unlikely. You do want to fix this though, it would hamper your backlink efforts. These steps will correct this issue.

1. Setup canonical tags on all your pages. This lets Google know that 1 url should be linked for this page whether they're on the IP or domain.

2. Set your host up so that anything that directs to the IP is automatically redirected to the domain. This can be done with your hosting company, or through .htaccess, or through PHP. I suggest you do it with the hosting company.

3. Check through your site and make sure no links point to the IP domain. If there are no links pointing to the IP, the crawler shouldn't follow.

It's really best not to change your URL structure around. If you really need to, then definitely make sure you have 301 directs all pointed from the old links to the new ones.

The permalink keywords in the middle don't really apply as much weight as they used to. Using /home-rentals/ and /rentals/ won't immediately relate the pages to those keywords anymore. So with that, set your structure based on the different sections of your site so they don't conflict rather than inserting keywords. So example: "domain.com/search/california/" doesn't conflict with "domain.com/category/california/"

I need to see your pages to give you a better response on the last question. With permalinks, it's always good to match your page title with the page's main keyword. So if the title is 123 Street Ave then the link should be /slug/123-street-ave/. The slug is whatever descriptive keyword for that type of post is. It would be /search/, /category/, or no slug at all.

That doesn't answer your question for the SEO decline though. Chances are you've been affected by the recent Penguin 2.0 update. I'd start by checking my links and seeing if any of those sites got hit. Also check your webmaster tools and see if any notices have popped up.

From clicking around I feel like the site needs to put a bit more effort into building trust. Here's a good article with some suggestions and ideas that you can build off (not my website)

http://yoast.com/7-ways-to-increase-sales-by-creating-trust/

Something they don't include in here is an "About Us". There are so many websites out there offering the same product at similar prices now. I generally go to the website with the most grounded message.

Another idea would be to try and make the website feel more local. Local SEO and marketing is big right now, and people like thinking they're buying locally.

Just like the response from the Google Webmaster Central post, I'd say the drop is more from Google's recent algo updates then poor traffic. Chances are, the traffic is mostly bots or blind click traffic and from what people are saying - from Russia and China. I wouldn't worry too much about that. Just make sure they're not linking spammy links to you and if they are, request a removal or disavow if necessary.

When it comes to link building, take what you can get. Whatever people deem link worthy, focus on that. Start with Category pages and see if websites pick those up. In my experience, content pages are easier to link build for and create great deep links. If you page breadcrumbs or some sort of navigation passing the user back to your homepage and category pages, those content pages will pass pagerank so it really doesn't matter what pages you build links for, just build links.

Remember, stay white hat if you want you site to stick around. Google will eventually detect black hat links - forum/comment spam, forum signatures, links in social media profiles. You want good links from reputable sites.

ThompsonPaul has a good suggestion which is test your pages with "Fetch as Googlebot" to see what they see.

Short answer to your question is no. Google will not pay attention the Facebook Like Box pictures because the codes comes up as javascript (raw code). Whether Google sees it or not is really dependent on how the source is written. For the Facebook Like/Group box, Google won't count them as individual links on a page and see it as one javascript widget.

Since you lost those backlinks, you probably won't be able to bounce back to exactly where the site left off before those penalties. Did you get a manual action or was it done by the crawlers? Also, did you get a partial or full site penalty?

First double check your Google Webmaster Tools and see what the status of the penalty is and make sure that's removed. There's a Manual Actions area they added in the last few months which lets you see the stats and details of actions taken against your site by Google. If everything is resolved there, start improving your content and get back to link building. Since a good number of your old links are gone, they'll need to be replaced with better quality links.

As mentioned above just setting the title to the most popular keyword won't guarantee you rank for that keyword. You're better off creating a page that uses and supports both keywords, or target a good keyword for your brand. Follow up by creating sub pages or sub content that support the 2 keywords you've mentioned. The goal isn't to just use the keyword in a few places, it's to create a whole map of content that supports a single keyword.

Yup like Highland mentioned, using your robots.txt for this isn't a good idea. The robots.txt file isn't guaranteed to work anyway. The only sure fire way to get it working is to move all the URLs from the old structure to the new one, then 301 all the old URLs into the new URLs. The 301 minimizes loss to your SEO.

It's best to choose either www or non-www and stick with that single URL. When people link to you, you don't want some links going to www and others to non-www. Just use one and 301 redirect the other URL into the one you're going to use.

Also make the use of canonical tags. Ryan there sent over some links for that. It's best to set that up on all your pages as well.

Short answer: No

These will affect SEO:

New servers are slow and affect site speed
IPs flagged as spam/bad IPs
The new IPs are in another country

There's no penalty for running a website on the subdomain. That's perfectly fine but all the redirecting might be confusing for regular users. The most important part for any website is to make it simple for the end-user. If it's simple for the user, Google won't have a problem with what you're doing. You'll also want to take a look at any backlinks. In terms of SEO, Google will pass a tiny bit of juice but for the most part, they treat a subdomain as a completely different site from the root domain. www.xyz.com is not the same site as subdomain.xyz.com, and both domains will need to be individually handled. They can work together but your backlinks will be split between the 2.

There shouldn't be any 301 links in a sitemap. A sitemap should only contain links to active pages. So in your case, you should remove all the 301 links and replace them with the new links.

Couple notes - Having 301 links in your sitemap won't hurt your site or SEO unless the sitemap is so huge that you need to split it up into multiple files. But you should really only have the final links in the sitemap, neither people nor bots want to be redirected around. If you properly 301'd the crawlers will automatically update their links.

Changing links around in the sitemap generally won't hurt your site. Especially if the links no longer exist and you're improving the list. There are very few cases where making changes will hurt the site.