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It's really unfortunate this has happened to you! One thing you might want to check for is compromised / hacked content as well, since here in the Moz community (and in-fact the wider SEO community) we are seeing increased instances of negative SEO combined with hack attacks Another thing, you have to be really careful when updating your disavow file. If you don't download the existing disavow file first and add your entries on to it, then all of your prior disavow work will be undone. When you upload the disavow txt file, that is your COMPLETE disavow, not simply some additions to it. So if you handled that wrong, you may have disavowed the new stuff and un-disavowed loads of legacy work (which could land you right back at square 1) In general, disavow work does not result in increased SEO performance. If a load of sites were giving you boosted SEO metrics, and then Google decides they are bad and nullifies them, doing a disavow doesn't magically make Google give back SEO authority that you should never have had in the first place. Those pipelines are severed Have you considered that in its early stages, a negative SEO attack often actually boosts rankings? Then, when the network is uncovered, that juice is all cut off. Maybe the past positive performance, wasn't all down to you. The negative SEO attack (before it reached critical velocity) may have been boosting your rankings. Now that it's flipped negative, most of that SEO authority will be cancelled out. That could be a bitter pill to swallow, but I have seen it a lot of times Maybe this drop in performance, is actually where the site should be ranking under your own efforts. If the negative SEO attack initially went undetected and boosted certain rankings, then was discovered and spun around - then actually you are where you should be. Could be complicated to explain to an enraged client though The reason you process a disavow file, is to list all the spammy links and disavow them, so that Google will not (in the future) give you a manual penalty which nullifies all (or most of) your rankings. Since you don't know which links Google currently does or does not consider to be spam, this inevitably results in a few non-spammy links (which were contributing SEO authority) getting nullified, which makes results go down NOT up. What a disavow does, is trade a very small amount of your current performance away, in return for mid-term insulation against manual actions (which believe me, are truly horrible) It never ceases to amaze me how people don't understand what disavows are truly for and how many people say "hey I did a disavow and I saw slight drops and no gains". It's only under very exceptional circumstances (like manual actions) where disavows can potentially (if they are accompanied with linked Google Word Docs, explaining in detail what has happened to Google, through a reconsideration request) result in raised rankings. 99% of the time they just insulate you form things getting worse and give you a very slight results dip One thing you may want to look at is if your disavow was too aggressive. Spam can mean different things to different people. Did you download all links from all tools (Majestic, Ahrefs, Moz, Google Search Console), re-crawl them in SF to see if they are all still live? Did you then fetch metrics (Ahrefs URL Rating, number of linking domains to each URL, PA and DA from Moz, CF and TF from Majestic, Sessions from domain from GA) for all URLs using service APIs and URL Profiler / Netpeak Checker? Did you put all the metrics against each URL in a massive spreadsheet? Did you normalise and boil the metrics down to a final score to see which links have good SEO authority, and which ones don't? If you just looked at them with your human eyes, if you only looked at links from one backlink source without doing a master de-dupe from all backlink data suppliers, then you probably didn't do something anywhere near extensive enough to clean up properly. Cleaning up a negative SEO attack properly with minimal risk, is a huge undertaking that could take an expert around 5 days to compile and update the disavow file Remember you're dealing with an algorithmic devaluation. Algorithms see in numbers, not with your actual eyes. If you didn't have a data-led approach to your work you are extremely likely to continue suffering in the mid to long term I would go over the work again much more forensically Finally: Remember that Google and Moz aren't connected data sources. DA (Domain Authority) is NOT used in Google's ranking algorithm (at all). It's  an estimate only (to replace Toolbar PageRank which Google took away, and stopped SEOs seeing). Even TBPR wasn't great, but it was at least aware of disavows, Google penalties and algorithmic devaluations. Moz's DA is 100% unaware of these things and doesn't factor them, so if you are looking to DA to save you - or for things to 'just get better' over time - think again!

There is no golden rule but generally yes, the page higher in a structure would be considered slightly more important, especially if your sitemap indicates page importance automatically, but a proper structure has far more benefits. As long as you don' overcomplicate your structure it wouldn't make much difference whether your roses are at: domain.com/roses or domain.com/anniversary-flowers/roses as for no 4 - could it be that roses would fit many of the categories and therefore have been taken out of the structure to avoid duplicate content issues? I often see pages deeper in the category tree ranking just as high if not higher than top categories for their respective keywords. At the end of the day Pete, it's the content that will rank your page not the url. Using common sense, do you think Google would promote a model of websites where all pages and categories are always in the root? Would you use a library where all books are stuffed into 1 section? I don't think so.

Hi CKerr, The only reason I would keep a blog off the website is if you do not want the blog to associate with the company directly but instead be an outside perspective. Or if you want to sell the blog one day. Beside that the blog should be on the site in my opinion. You can also refer to the forum below that talks about the same issue. http://moz.com/community/q/should-a-business-blog-be-on-a-separate-site-or-on-the-ecommerce-site-itself 301 re-directs are great for this occasion. Remember that the blogs ranking and trustworthiness will follow it with the 301 re-direct. All the best!

Thank you for the reply, Trouble is I'm not sure that I can convince the web designers to implement a change like that. Really appreciate the help. Thanks.

I found the same as Matt Screaming Frog website shows a way more then a lot of parameters. http://www.wallybuysell.com/signup.php?type=guest PS get off AWS use Linode or DigitalOcean they will be faster and less $ http://www.cosninix.com/wp/2013/06/amazon-aws-ec2-linode-digitalocean-cloudserver-showdown/ http://matthewphiong.com/linode-vs-digital-ocean

I'm reading Christopher's explanation a little differently. Christopher, are you saying you have a single business (a flower shop) that you originally listed at something like your home office address, but that the flower shop is now moving and you want it to be listed at its new location? If so, this is the procedure: Edit the existent Google listing to show the new address. This may require re-verification and may result in ranking loss, at least temporarily. You may also lose your reviews. However, if you have the new Google Places for Business Dashboard, the good news is that it is possible to request that Google moves your old reviews to the new location. Read Googler Jade's explanation of this here: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!category-topic/business/3IyA72bx3o4 If you have the old dashboard, you cannot do this and will likely lose any reviews associated with the old address. Launch a citation cleanup campaign in which you discover and edit all mentions of the business across the web and update them to reflect the new address. This includes mentions on your website of the old address. If you are saying that you are also changing domain names (not sure if this is what you meant) you need to change this everywhere, too. You may experience some fluctuations in rankings, but hopefully you can keep working towards building authority over time.

Hi Christopher, Google stated in February of this year that they plan to make duplicate listing management easier in future, showing all versions of a listing in the dashboard and asking if they are all of the same business, but this has yet to materialize unfortunately. It can't happen soon enough, in my opinion! Right now, one way to deal with this is to go to the duplicate Google+ Local pages in question and click the 'report a problem' link on the right hand side and go through the troubleshooter. You will find a radio button for 'Place is a duplicate of another place'. That would be the one to choose. I would try that first and give it a few weeks to see if your request for removal works. If not, the second thing I would do is go to the My Listing Has Incorrect Information Troubleshooter: http://support.google.com/places/bin/static.py?hl=en&ts=1386120&page=ts.cs Again, select the radio button that refers to duplicates and walk through the wizard. It will ask you if you already tried reporting through the 'Report A Problem' link. This troubleshooter may actually lead you to a phone call, if you are lucky. Be prepared for this process to take time, Christopher, and keep crossing your fingers that Google will eventually implement easier dashboard management for this incredibly common issue.

I agree with Federico, the styling should be fixed through CSS and probably before you start doing any other work. Making these changes really shouldn't take that long. Since the site owner is wanting SEO done for his site, he/she would probably listen to your advice on getting the site cleaned up as soon as possible. Just state the issue and let them know that this problem is potentially costing them money.

Thank you so much,  I really appreciate all your help on this.  Great advice and knowledge!

You are very welcome, Christopher! I will PM you.