Welcome to the Q&A Forum

You could try searching NerdyData for a search operator like below:

href="http://example.com

Make sure to leave the closing quotation mark out to account for any sub pages.

This may or may not  return some different results, it's worth a shot.

If you are seriously concerned about a penalty which could result in your business having to close it's doors, you should probably be seeking out help from an agency rather than looking for free advice here.  If the situation is that dire, then getting an audit and quote from an agency will probably be your safest bet at this point.

Migrating to a branded domain is probably the best step to avoid a penalty at this point.  Get away from the EMD and over-optimized anchor text ASAP.

If your domain is penalized, it won't be your branded domain - it will be your EMD domain.  It's hard to say if it could be penalized in the future, but it hasn't been yet, so you might be OK.

I assume that you'll 301 redirect all pages on the EMD to the new branded domain.  You should be prepared to put in a lot of effort to clean up the anchor text of the EMD link profile, or completely disassociate the old domain in the event of a penalty.

I would tell your client to not worry about it.  I didn't know that GoDaddy was in the SEO consulting business now?

I found this as an explaination of what a GoDaddy SEO Checklist Stop Word means:

Words that are common do not help search engines understand documents. Exceptionally common terms, such as the, are called stop words. While search engines index stop words, they are not typically used or weighted heavily to determine relevancy in search algorithms.

It sounds like more of a warning to me.  I wouldn't worry about it.

I would suggest Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARRP), but since your main concern is performance - be wary of large sites.  This plugin can be resource intensive on large WordPress sites, in which case it is to your advantage to use YARRP Experiments to control the cache and throttle.

To 301 redirect all files in the direct to the new directory in .htaccess, try this:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^old\ foldr/(.*) /newfolder/$1 [R=301,NC,L]

This should redirect all HTML pages, images, you name it.  It should also account for the space too.

You'll want to move all your files to the new folder location so when the redirect happens your end user doesn't receive a 404 error.

As Jeff mentioned, it could very well be Google running a test - they run small tests like this quite often.

I just tried a branded search for one of my clients when I was not logged in, and I see www in front of the domain.  This client required www as part of their domain, so we set up .htaccess redirects to force all URLs to begin with www.

Google is pretty good about figuring out redirects and will show www is it's required, and will ignore it and not display it in the SERPs if the site doesn't use www.

Does your site have the proper redirects set up to send non-www URLs to the www equivalent?

Like Federico stated, the link results in a 302 redirect, which does not pass any link equity as far as search engines are concerned.  It might as well be a nofollowed link.

So, does it have value?  If the link is driving your client traffic, then it does have value.  If the link is on an obscure website and isn't driving any traffic - than it has no value, because it will not help the client rank in search engines.

Monster and Indeed pretty much have the job-related searches locked up unfortunately.  It would be a waste of time trying to compete with them, unless you get luck and are able to outrank them on a long tail keyword - but even then you might not get the results your looking for (as far as traffic goes).

Some marketing association sites will charge you to post a job, others won't, it depends on the association.

You might be better served with referral traffic and social media traffic.  Post the job to Linkedin and see what happens?

It's possible that the Google Hummingbird update is assuming that when you search for "privateequityfirms" you are really trying to search for privateequityfirms.com because of a lack of other relevant results.

It's also possible that the fact that it's an EMD has something to do with it.

It looks like you used to have a domain 301 redirect to your domain (pedatabase.com) but that no longer is the case.  I'm showing a lot of links to this domain, even some .edu links.  If Google has disassociated this domain with your domain, you rankings could be dropping as a result.

Of the linking domains in your link profile, many of them link to the pedatabase.com domain: http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links.html?page=1&site=privateequityfirms.com&sort=page_authority&filter=equity&source=external&target=domain&group=1

You will have a hard time competing with Monster and Indeed for job-related broad match keywords, but you might have better luck with long tail keywords.

You could also look at posting to popular niche directories for the type of work you are looking to hire for.  If you are looking for a developer or designer, StackOverflow has a job board.  If you are looking to hire a marketing oriented job, Inbound.org also has a jobs board.  Where I live (in Minnesota, USA) we have a local marketing association that also has a job board that gets a lot of attention and traffic - so much so that showing up in the SERPs isn't even necessary.  Perhaps you have a similar place to put your postings?

Unfortunately, sometimes we're at Google's discretion as to whether or not they want to display structured data and authorship the way that we would like them to.

Even if you have authorship set up properly, Google has no obligation to show your author image next to your content.  When we set up Google authorship on our sites, we're merely suggesting to Google that we are the author of the content - it's up to them to display the image if they feel it's relevant.  I've seen many SERPs where my authorship doesn't show up, but changing the keywords a bit will display the author image for the same posts.

I would give it a few days.  Try using depersonalized search to see if it makes a difference.  If your authorship image doesn't come back, I would unlink your site from your Google+ account, and relink it - and see if that brings it back.

Does most of the traffic come from referrals or from organic search?

If you are targeting organic search, you would probably be better off using the acme2013.com domain as a redirect (for those that want to go directly to the site, easier to type in) and hosting the content as a subdomain of your main site.  You can piggyback off the domain authority you've built with your main domain to gain added exposure in search engines - as opposed to starting from scratch with a new domain.

If you aren't concerned with search traffic, it might be easier for people to remember a shorter domain than a longer domain, so creating a new domain each year would be the way to go.

I don't believe that this will affect your mobile search rankings.  It's a common practice in responsive design to hide some elements on smaller screens.  Google knows this, and they take this into account.

Lots of sites have large sitemaps in their footer, and this doesn't really translate nicely to mobile screens.  You could consider creating a jQuery dropdown menu that includes the sitemap - this way the content is still there, accessible, and usable, but it doesn't take up any screen space until you click on the "menu" button.  Just a thought.

The only thing to be careful of is to make sure that you are not hiding keyword intensive objects.  It's hard to say, but it's possible that Google could interpret this as abuse.  I wouldn't leave it up to Google to try to interpret what you are doing.

OpenSiteExplorer only returns the social sharing data for the specific URL you entered.  If you entered your root domain (http://example.com) it will only return the number of shares for that specific URL - not the entire domain and all sub-pages.

Likes on a Facebook page will not show up in OSE, because the number of Facebook likes returned is the number of times people on Facebook liked the specific URL you entered into OSE.

So in short - the social sharing data that OSE is returning is accurate, it's just not what you are expecting to see.  Hope that helps!

I personally don't think it would make a difference one way or the other, as long as the proper 301 redirects are put into place and all traffic to the old URLs is sent to the correct new URL.

I do, however, think the sub-directory approach looks cleaner.  Anything beyond the first sub-domain looks spammy to me (or just sloppy).  That's just me though.

I don't think it's Google that is causing the problem, perhaps it's the browser.

In Chrome, I searched for your keyword.  I noticed the '%20' (the HTML character for a space) in the URL of the first result.  When I moused over the result, the HREF that showed had a space in the URL in place of the '%20'.  When I clicked on the result, it correctly sent me to your page, and did not replace '%20' with a '+' symbol - which can also be used to replace a space.

Have you tried writing .htaccess redirects to send users to the correct page if they encounter a situation where they are attempting to hit the + URL when they should hit the '%20' URL?

I could be wrong, it's possible that feature was just added to the higher subscriptions.

For the record, I remember checking yesterday, and the Pricing page said "coming soon" I'm not sure why it doesn't today.