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Google doesn't really look at the meta description anymore so I wouldn't stress about it.

Although personally I'd not include the domain name in the meta description as you're probably mentioning the brand name in the title tag and it's going to appear directly above the description in tiny green writing anyway. So why not fill your title tag with things designed to encourage a high click through? Things like "Free shipping on orders over $50. Widgets available in 30 colours including popular colour 1, popular colour 2 and popular colur 3."

I don't foresee this being a problem.

At all.

And I know what you mean about being scared of your own shadow

I'm with Mr Weiss on this one. It's dodgy.

I'd tell them they could either give me 301s or change providers. You never know they might give you a free upgrade.

Failing that move providers.

And on an unrelated note why do you refresh from .com to .com/index.aspx? That feels the wrong way around to me. Surely most people are going to link to you on the .com?

Do you want to rank in the main results or were you more interested in the local results?

My answer is concerning the main organics results as I've no experience with local.

I'd avoid subdomains and keep your landing pages on your root domain.

You will need to link to them from your main site and probably need to link to them them quite extensively.

Beyond that if it's good old fashioned on page optimization and link building. I have a sneaking suspicion that having a local phone number, postal address, etc. will help.

For linkbuilding my first priority would be to make sure you were listed in all of the relevant local web design directories and yellow pages style places (if any).

If you want Google to recognize items in your portfolio as separate pages then you should really create HTML snapshots.

You can find pretty much every thing you need to know about the process here  https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling/

Last time I checked (last month) no body knew. There is a definite case for them being allowed as part of the functionality of a website but it looks like this is going to be decide the first time the ICO takes someone ot court over it.

Sorry I couldn't give you a straight answer but I don't think there is one yet.

I use BuzzStream to track link building in the way you mention but there are other services out there. Even a simple Excel spreadsheet can do the trick.

Depends on your site. In isolation it's probably nothing to be worried about.

If all of your links are coming from sitewide's then I'd be concerned.

But if it's a none spammy site with a legitimate reason for linking to you then I wouldn't lose any sleep over it at all.

In fact I'd say it's a big win.

Unless the branding is drastically different on them I would personally consider amalgamating them into one super site.

Linking to yourself in this way probably won't have a negative affect on your rankings (not in isolation anyway) but why manage three medium sized sites when you could have one awesomeamazingkickass site instead?

Just for the sake of clarity I think you mean the Penguin update.

And I would definitely recommend changing the anchor text to either your brand name/domain name.

You could only embed links when the site reaches a certain PR threshold and while this might help you against any algorithmic penalities/devaluations it must be pretty easy to spot on manual inspection.

You'd be hard pressed to find any automated directory submission that's white hat. In fact auto directory submissions are pretty much the definition of crap hat SEO.

This soon after Panda you'd have to be particularly brave to try en-masse directory submission. I'm not saying that it won't work or that it will have a negative impact on your site but I certainly wouldn't try it.

If it's a testimonial of an company I believe you use the Reviews fields with Organization as the Thing.

So if you take the example page on Schema.org (below) and swap out the Product for an organisation you should have it.

http://schema.org/Review

If there's a valid reason to have the article on Nipca (as in it adds a benefit to users) then you could use a rel=canonical.

If it's not adding any value for users and is generally a dead page then why bother no-indexing when you could just remove it all together and not have it wasting crawl allowance.

I'd host them on your site and include an embed code as well (for easy sharing). Unless you think having them on slideshare will make them easier to discover in which case I'd probably do both.

I can't say what would work best with regards to getting the images in the image vertical search but if you're looking at usability/sharability I'd definitely organise the images into monthly galleries that are easy to flick through.

Just out of curiosity are you anticipating this content to drive high value traffic or is it more of an exercise in linkbuilding?

Have you checked that there weren't any well documented algo changes going on at the time? Maybe you were a winner from Penguin or something.

Alternatively have you looked to see how the new traffic broke down? Was it all on head terms or was it in the long tail?

Did anything else change on the site at the time? Maybe the page load speed went down?

I agree it does seem a bit odd but it could just be coincidence.

And congratulations on getting all that extra traffic.

I don't think so. If you could it would seriously ramp up their processing fees

It's not going to have as much affect as if it were hosted on company.com/blog.

At the moment the bulk of the domain level link equity is being passed to the info. subdomain. If you really want to benefit from it you should move it to a folder on company.com i.e. company.com/blog.

If it's been migrated correctly then you don't have too much to worry about with regards to search engines sending traffic to the blog but if your primary concern is link equity then it's a bit of a silly place for them to move it to.

If your blog title is fed into the H1 then it will make a difference.

I'd recommend having a look at the SEOMox 2011 Ranking Factors Survey which looks at on page ranking factors.

http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors#metrics-6

That being said I think there is an art to writing blog titles/headlines. I'd personally sacrifice having a perfect SEO title for having one that's punchy and attention grabbing.

If your getting Tumblr blog to try and engage more with the community there you might want to consider creating different content than for Wordpress. From what I've seen of Tumblr the content that spreads well is different from the stuff you find on normal blogs.

In answer to your question it's definitely not best practice and although there is no  active penalty but you will find that your Tumblr blog starts cannibalizing the Wordpress traffic.

ps. Tumblr loves GIFs