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We were seeing that before Hummingbird. Even in SERPS with no mapbox or the returns under it, slots 7&8 seemed to be very local centric. We did screenshots of the same result in an incognito in our various locations and got very local specific returns in those slots.

Yes,

Resubmit the total file with the "good links" omitted. It takes a little time but Google will start giving you link credit again for them.

Nope, as far as I know. Matt Cutt's commented on it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsSwqo16C8s

The only time I could see it was useful if you were doing some black hatish stuff and didn't want multiple domains on the same C Block that were related, but I'm pretty sure Penguin/ Panda is catching that sort of thing now.

Matt Cutts commented on this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7Yv6DzHBvE#t=2217 go to 36.24. He was addressing the idea of the new TLDs. It doesn't seem that it will.

One we were watching, the Official site for Jehovah's Witnesses went from watchtower.org to jw.org with a major site redesign. What makes it an interesting case study is that it was a multi language site as well.

I think you have a solid plan, my only thought is not to use the 302. It won't pass link juice over from that home page (Probably their most important) onward to the official site. I would either just 301 right away to the new site, or do a placeholder on the homepage explaining the merger with links to important pages on site A.

We went through a similar issue when Google migrated their local services to G+. Several of our clients had correct categories and when the platform switched they arbitrarily set new categories. Some were way off. If the personal injury is the most important category, I would delete the others temporarily and try reintroducing the other categories later. It could also be a situation where you have citations outside of Google in Bankruptcy related directories or with data related to it. Doing a citation building campaign focused on the personal injury category may also help.

It's always a good practice. It also depends if you are using a CMS that has an automatic 301 for the WWW vs the non for the site. For simple sites that's the only real reason that you would need it. I still like to have the tag, the major search engines have been recommending it and I usually do whatever makes Google happy if I can.

You can see if you have duplicate content if you subscribe to Moz in their campaign tools. If not there are a few free tools that will allow you to as well.

Here is my thoughts based on experience.

First the links don't disappear from Webmaster tools. You will still see them there. A reconsideration request only helps if you got hit by a manual penalty not algorithmic ones. If your traffic dropped after the disavow list was supplied it could be that you told Google to kill some valuable links and now you are missing that link juice. Though with that the  flip side from mantra of causality and correlation that Rand preaches. Google has been rolling out some changes so your traffic drop could be unrelated.

I would go back to the disvow list though and see if they put some links in it that shouldn't have been flagged as spam and resubmit the list.

To start I would make sure you have your current site structure well mapped out and that they are working with the designer to make sure pages aren't being dropped. A great tool to use is Screaming Frog for this. We find with larger sites and ones with extensive blog content that is the biggest issue that any potential 301's are in place when the new site rolls out so as not to lose rankings from broken inbound or internal links. I'd also make sure the site maps are updated and ready.

You may also want to make sure the architecture of the site hasn't changed dramatically for major pages. I would look to see what are your top pages for landing pages in Organic search and make sure they aren't being buried deeper in the site for no reason. So a page may have been mysite.com/awesomelandingpage and with a redesign it gets moved to mysite.com/genericfolder/subfolder/awesomelandingpage and it could lose some of it's link authority.

Just a few thoughts....

Ok the question doesn't fully explain the issue. I just want some opinions on this. Here is the backstory. I have a client with a domain that has been around for a while and was doing well but with no backlinks. (Fairly low competition). For some reason they created mirrors of their site on different urls. Then their web designer built them a test site that was a copy of their site on the web designer's url and didn't bother to noindex it. Client's site dived, the web designer's site started ranking for their keywords.

So we helped clean that up, and they hired a brand new web designer and redesigned the site. For some reason the dotted quad version of the site started showing up as a referer in GA. So one image on the site comes from that and not the site's url. So I ran a copyscape and site search and discovered the dotted quad version like 69.64.153.116 (not the actual address) was also being indexed by the search engine. To us this seems like a cut and dry duplicate content issue, but I'm having trouble finding much written on the subject. I raised the issue with the dev, and he reluctantly 301 the site to the official url.

The second part of this is the web designer still has that one image on the site coming from the numerical version of the site and not the written url. Any thoughts if that has any negative SEO impact? My thought it isn't ideal, but it just looks like an external referral for pulling that one image.

I'd love any thoughts or experience on a situation like this.

Thanks, I just wanted to make sure I wasn't crazy and was missing something obvious.

I'm thinking this is a silly question, but I've never had to deal with it I thought I'd ask. Ok is there a tool out there that will show all the redirects to a domain. I'm working on a project that I keep stumbling on urls that redirect to the site I'm studying. They don't show up in Open Site or ahrefs as linking domains, but they keep popping up on me. Any thoughts?

Gregory summed it well, my only add on to it in setting when adjusting the geographical settings also adjust the intent. So if you have a German in Berlin searching for "my service in Newcastle" they won't be served the ad if they out of the actual area, if you don't want any non UK PPC visitors.

My suggestion is to ask the owner to make them a non-follow. Technically for a Banner Ad that is the Google's recommendation.

My thought on seeing if you were penalized. Use webmaster tools to see if you have any manual penalties. If not I would go back to Google Analytics and filter Organic Search and look at the traffic for the last three years if you have the data. If there was an algorithmic penalty you should see a drop off in traffic. If there is I would also look to see if there were other changes made to the site during the period to rule out on page issues.

I wanted to throw this out where we have been seeing so much emphasis on Google cracking down on bad linking, have they let up enforcement on manipulative on-page tactics that have faded in current years? I've been seeing hidden text popping up again and ranking. Here is an example. Google "landscaping Portsmouth NH" and find the #1 result. Now find "Portsmouth" on the page. So what I find interesting, the site has a clean backilnk profile, but that's a pretty blatant manipulation hiding those keywords.

What I find interesting is I filled out a report on it a year ago. (I'm not a big "fill out spam report" guy, I was curious if Google would take action). A year later it is still #1 for the competitive keyword. So I'm curious if others have seemed similar trends like font-size:0px, or text color as the background popping back up and ranking.

I would love other's thoughts on it.

Have there been any new developments in this issue? I have tried the suggested solutions above and still haven't had any success.

Ok I have a client with a branded hashtag that is only working part of the time on Instagram. Client posts don't show up when the hashtag is searched and only partial people in their community have  their posts saved. We would like to find more fans of the brand who are already using Hashtags. I looked through all their help info but couldn't find a place to report it. Any thoughts?

Having the rich snippet is not a guarantee Google will use the information. We see that all the time especially with author tags. Providing the information to Google is just telling them it's available, as they tweak their results it tends to move around a lot. It sound like you checked webmaster tools to see how your mark up is perceived with Google.

I don't think you are correct. Google isn't the most truthful at times, but straight from the horse's mouth:

How does Google handle nofollowed links?

In general, we don't follow them. This means that Google does not transfer PageRank or anchor text across these links. Essentially, using nofollow causes us to drop the target links from our overall graph of the web. However, the target pages may still appear in our index if other sites link to them without using nofollow, or if the URLs are submitted to Google in a Sitemap. Also, it's important to note that other search engines may handle nofollow in slightly different ways.

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/96569?hl=en&ref_topic=2371375