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FYI, Deb is an American clothing retailer, and they sell dresses. So even if it's not a brand in Australia, it is still a brand that sells the thing that you're trying to rank for. I can see where Google might find it semantically confusing.

Okay, so that depends on why Joe was ranking well for widgets in the first place. If it was links, then a 301 will pass the link equity on to Janet. If it was the content, then you can move the content from Joe's page to Janet's and it should hold up since Joe's page won't exist anymore to be duplicate. If it was the business address, then that may pose a problem since location can be tricky as I understand it. I'm not a local SEO expert, so someone else should weigh in on that piece of it.

Honestly, I like your example competitor's tag, and here's why:

• Canon BJ10V
• Canon BJ-10V
• Cheap Inkjet Cartridges
• Canon BJ-10V Ink
• Canon BJ-10V Ink Printers
• Cheap Inkjet Cartridges for Canon BJ-10V Ink Printers

Just look at all those beautiful keywords that look just like something someone would actually type into a search engine to find your product. It's descriptive and gets the job done pretty well. You could probably lose one of the printer names and add your brand, but I don't think it's so spammy as you think.

Indeed. I certainly didn't mean to exclude all of the languages of the world there.

Just because Google is choosing not to display your titles and descriptions doesn't mean it hasn't indexed them. It's content and in the source code. It's indexed. It's being taken under consideration for ranking purposes. Google ultimately controls what is displayed, however. Titles and meta descriptions are merely a polite suggestion.

There is no way to opt out of those rewrites 100% of the time. NOODP is only good for opting out of Dmoz descriptions, if you even have one there at all. (Most newer sites probably won't since inclusion hasn't been relevant for at least 5 years, probably longer.) It's not the only alternative snippet source. It's much more likely that Google will just find relevant text from the page itself to populate a description snippet, and NOODP will not block that. If Google is choosing its own snippet over mine, I don't always worry about it unless it's choosing something that's just flat out bizarre.

I also like to look at Google's rewrites as instructive. The algorithm is serving up something that it thinks is more relevant to your query, and these days, with RankBrain and the entire menagerie in play, it's getting pretty smart. So if Google is rewriting my description, which means that Google has decided that particular text is relevant, then I'm going to take notes on what text it's grabbing and seriously consider adjusting my own description to be a closer match to whatever Google is inclined to serve up. If Google is literally pointing out the most relevant text for that query, maybe we should listen, right?

I have so many questions about this arrangement.

First of all, the third party ownership of the Search Console (and GA too, maybe?) is a massive red flag. Account ownership should always ALWAYS be handled in house. You need to insist on that, and insist loudly and furiously. It's extremely shady for a third-party SEO to own the accounts since it lets them hold the site and its data hostage if the relationship sours. How easy would it be for people who aren't even part of your company to use Search Console to start removing important URLs from the index? What happens to your data if you end the contract? Do they also own your analytics? Could they cut off your access to your own data on a whim? Replace your site with a page telling the world what awful clients you are? Depending on the size and type of company you are, letting an outsider own that access could be a very real threat to your business with the potential to do significant damage.

Also, what exactly is the local SEO company's role here? Why aren't THEY worrying about referral spam and questionable backlinks? If they're not, then what are they being paid to do?

If you don't have FTP access, who does? Does your company actually own the site? Is there a contract that spells it out?

For the staging site, all you should need is to make sure it's excluded from indexing via robots.txt. We have had multiple staging sites that, if indexed, would put some crazy dupe content into the world, but that's what the robots.txt is for. Set and forget. Well, check on it periodically, since you don't seem to have any actual control over what these guys are doing and the account ownership thing makes me very wary of trusting them to get it right and keep it that way.

As for the ghost spam, there's been a ton of discussion about it in the community over the last year. On Moz alone, there's this piece from March, and this one from August, plus a bunch of forum discussions. Bottom line is that there isn't much you can do to stop it, but that doesn't mean you're stuck with seeing it muck up your data.

I have a bunch of questions here that affect how I would answer this.

1. Is there an ecommerce component to the site where you're also actually renting cars?
2. Is the goal to get people to rent your cars? Is it ad impressions? Is it generating external links to a third party? Is it revenue through affiliate partnerships with one or multiple car rental agencies?
3. If a conversion is a rental, does that happen on your site or on another site?

I agree with Umar that BIGSCHOOL's overall authority is probably getting in the way. Is there any way to get a dofollow link from their course page to yours to help reinforce the linkage? Funneling a little extra juice your way certainly wouldn't hurt and it makes sense contextually.

Oh, nice idea, running Screaming Frog on a server.. I passed your notes along to our Dev team, we'll see what happens.

Different search engines, different algorithms.

But forget about rankings. How is your traffic? That's what's actually important.

Okay, so my first reaction is that the articles you're describing are probably better suited to the car rental pages themselves. That's where the conversion is going to happen, so that's where you want that long-tail, long-term content to live. Plus, since it's pretty formulaic, it's a good fit for an ecommerce page where that kind of info duplication is going to be expected.

For the blog itself, I would shoot for unique, aspirational articles. Getting a rental car isn't about the car - it's about the destination. Lists of great road-trip destinations stuffed with gorgeous stock photos. Infographics about where and when to buy gas. Tips for finding the best gas prices away from home. Go for shareability, not for SEO. Then promote the hell out of it on social.

Given that not all websites use an "m." mobile setup, I'm thinking that app deep linking to the desktop version of a page would be A-OK.

So, digging deeper into this issue, it turns out that we can't rely on status code as a reliable indicator of page validity for affiliate network URLs. Most of them turn up with a 200. Looking at possible custom solutions from affiliate compliance monitoring services now. No one seems to be doing this thing that I need to do, but it sounds like a great business idea for someone with coding experience and more entrepreneurial spirit than I've got. Just gonna throw that out there.

My first thoughts go to setting up and optimizing a Google+ profile for her, so that it starts nudging the Knowledge Graph in that direction.

I agree with Andy, your description of the setup sounds pretty excessive. Plus, just because content is unique and professionally written doesn't mean that it's high quality. If the sites all say the same thing but in different ways, then none of them are contributing anything meaningful. And your branding is diffused across a zillion different sites to boot.

Will ratting them to Google have any impact?

Yes, but probably not in the way you're hoping. It's pretty rare for Google to take manual action against a specific site just because someone reports it. They've stated in the past that they prefer to solve the issue algorithmically than on a one-off basis, so it can take awhile for the algo to catch up to what bad actors are doing.

If not, any suggestions on how to compete?

Make your site the best resource using white hat tactics and be patient.

Mike Blumenthal is reporting all sorts of weirdness is afoot at G+ today, it may be a temporary thing related to whatever issues they're having right now.

http://blumenthals.com/blog/2015/10/28/current-google-plus-page-url-cluster-fk-alert/

Is that site really so phenomenal if no one sees it because SEO best practices weren't baked into the design?

I don't think that too many 301's is actually a thing. Seriously, why would you want to put a cap on getting visitors to the right pages? It doesn't make much sense.

However, not all 301s are necessary. If Google has indexed the new URL and the old one doesn't have any valuable backlinks, you can let those 404 with very little risk. But I would only do it if for some weird technical reason you just could not keep the 301.

Honestly, I would avoid using the same titles as a competitor. You want to stand out in the SERPs, not look like everyone else. It is possible to optimize your titles and still make them different enough to catch a searcher's eye.