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It sounds like this initiative is primarily about branding and strengthening relationships with existing customers. I'm not sure that a bunch of re-tweets is going to accomplish that. How about something that encourages them to meaningfully engage with you? For example, they could submit their own animal-loving stories or vote on which animal you sponsor. Are your clients/followers from one particular industry or field? Is there a way you can offer them a chance to use their expertise? If you work with a lot of graphic designers and artists, you could invite them to submit designs for a commemorative patch about the animal.

I wouldn't bank on that in the future. Google has been tweaking the "domain diversity" settings a lot lately. Their goal seems to be to increase domain diversity on any given SERP, so I would still assume you'll only get one result on page 1. Anything extra is gravy.

Absolutely. If he was logged into a Google account, that can have a big impact. Even if he was logged out, though, a cookie on his computer stores information about his search history, and that can have a big impact, too. Then there's location -- not necessarily where you are, but where you've told Google you are. I've told Google that I'm in the U.S., so unsurprisingly, I see your .co.uk site toward the bottom of the 2nd page.

PR is one of many, many ranking factors, so low PR doesn't necessarily mean the page isn't ranking well.

But you didn't mention where that traffic is coming from. Referrals, direct, ads, or search? If it's search, what KWs are getting them there? Maybe it's ranking for a ton of great long-tail KWs, or one low-competition high-volume KW.

Useful content, amusing copy, appealing design, intuitive navigation, easily crawled HTML ...

To elaborate on this, the most basic "reputation management" technique is to make sure you have an active, popular presence on every social network. If someone searches your business name, your social media sites are likely to rank well, possibly pushing down bad reviews.

I don't think it's a killer to have bad reviews out there, though. Consumers understand that reviews are subjective and people have different experiences. I'm an enthusiastic Yelp user, and honestly, I get suspicious when a restaurant or business has no bad reviews.

Now, if a company has a nasty write-up on Rip-Off Report or the like, that's a bigger problem. There's a good write-up on ways to handle that here: http://searchengineland.com/how-to-remove-ripoff-reports-from-google-not-just-bury-them-65173 Ultimately, the best strategy is to simply be a better business.

Everything you mentioned is about links. What about relevancy? How's your on-page optimization? Your anchor text?

Thanks! Would we be losing any value by discarding a URL that has been live for multiple years? I've heard that the age of a URL (not a domain) can help a page rank, but I'm not sure I believe that.

Our site has a number of, shall we say, unoptimized URLs. I would like to change the URLs to be more relevant; if a page is about red widgets, the URL should be www.domain.com/red-widgets.html, right? I'm getting resistance on this, however, based on the belief that you lose something significant when you 301 an old URL to a new one.

Now, I know that if you have a long chain of redirects, the spiders will stop following at some point, and that is a huge problem. That wouldn't apply if there's only one step in the chain, however. I've also heard that you lose some link juice in a 301, but I'm unsure how serious that problem actually is. Is it small enough that we'd win out in the long run with better-optimized URLs?

I think it's possible that the company would "lose out," but that's not necessarily the case.

If I have successfully convinced the algorithm that I am an expert on widget maintenance, my articles about widget maintenance will get a rankings boost. Then I leave the widget-maintenance industry. The algorithm still believes that I'm an expert in that niche ... for a while, at least. It's quite likely that the algorithm's confidence in my expertise will decay over time if I no longer engage with that niche. My AuthorRank may drop, and the content I authored may no longer get the AR rankings boost. How far the content would fall in the SERPs depends on how much it was relying on that one ranking factor.

I don't see why an account tied to a particular e-mail address would have an advantage in establishing AuthorRank. But keep in mind, we're all still guessing here.

G+ does have a one-account-per-person rule. I have no idea how much they enforce it. Considering how aggressively they enforce the no-pseudonym rule, I would guess that they take all of their rules pretty seriously.

Your copywriter's first priority should be writing content that converts. That means it needs to be informative, appealing, full of benefits, all that good stuff. That's the hard part. Including a few keyword variations is the easy part.

A change to the way Google displays the title doesn't necessarily mean Google has changed the way it reads title tags and uses them to establish relevancy.

I think the terminology here may be a bit muddled.

AuthorRank is not something you "set up on your blog." It's a ranking factor that Google has patented and may be implementing some time soon. The thing you set up on your blog is the rel=author markup.

I'm not correcting you to be pedantic, but because it's important that you understand what AuthorRank actually is so you can make the best decision. AuthorRank is basically the answer to the question "How much should I trust what this author has to say about this subject?" Google will determine that based on your social profile on Google+. If you want Google to think you're a trustworthy expert on widgets, you need to engage with other widget enthusiasts and widget experts on Google+, and they need to engage with you.

You can use rel=author to connect your content to an inactive Google+ profile, and that will give you a pretty picture on the SERP and maybe help with CTR, but it will not help with AuthorRank. AuthorRank will only come from an active Google+ profile.

I'm not sure if it's a good idea or a bad idea to keep a personal G+ account and a professional G+ account. On the one hand, if all you use your professional G+ account for is engaging in your niche, that could be a strong sign that you're really into that subject. On the other hand, if your professional G+ account never has any off-topic, personal activity, that could ping Google as inauthentic.

I'm not sure the title-rewriting is a bad thing. The title is being rewritten to highlight the KW used in the search -- isn't that good?

This is definitely not 'great linkbuilding." It's spammy linkbuilding. Now, as the other commenters noted, spammy linkbuilding still works to some extent. The question is, how much is it working? Will it work at all by the end of the year? Given its limited benefit and the high likelihood that it will soon have no benefit whatsoever, is this the best use of your client's resources?

I'm a new in-house SEO at a company that has been doing something similar for years. It's still working, so we haven't stopped it yet. But I'm working on transitioning to the content-marketing model, so we'll survive the inevitable Penguin update that tanks it all. So educate your client about how outdated and spammy that kind of linkbuilding is, and make sure they understand that it's just a matter of time before it stops working. If they want to keep doing it for now, that's their choice. But they cannot afford to only do it. They also need to start a solid content-marketing plan ... and if they don't think they can execute a solid content-marketing plan, they need to think about shifting resources to other inbound marketing tactics like PPC.

We use SEMrush to get a general idea. They project search engine traffic based on KW volume and position. The numbers are wrong, but the proportions are usually close; e.g., they think we had 20k visitors in March and 10k visitors in April, and we actually had 40k visitors in March and 20k visitors in April. It will get you in the right order of magnitude, at least.

Every website created after, I dunno, let's say 2000 uses divs. View source on any page on the internet and ctrl+f for it. Divs are how you separate blocks of content so they can be arranged and styled. The spiders would be pretty bored if they skipped over all the pages with divs.

Can you say more about this? Our web guy also wants the blogs on subdomains for security reasons.

I assume rel=publisher doesn't give you the pretty headshot on the SERP?