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I use CopyScape but it's more of a plagiarism tool then an actual duplicate content identifier tool.  I say that because just because a few lines of text are the same on a page, that doesn't mean Google will remove it from the SERPs.  Generally duplicate content has to be a substantial portion of a webpage to be considered duplicate content.

I would first dig into Moz Analytics and see WHY you are generating duplicate content before I would worry about what part of the page is duplicate.

• Have you set canonicals on your pages?
• Does your site produce session IDs?
• Do you have pagination?
• Are you copying and pasting text from page to page to fill up your site?

Google has said time and time again, duplicate content issues are rarely a penalty. It is more about Google knowing which page they should rank and which page they should not.  Take a look at why you are getting the duplicate content issue and then we can help you resolve it or give advice on what to do next.

The problem with making it transparent is that you would lose 25% or so of the image which means you would still have to add some design to it (ie. making your picture offset or something)  The way it is now you can just add a photo and you're done.  No editing or Photoshop skills required.  I just think it's too 'blocky' (thanks for the verification on that word) and think the 'info card' should be just a slightly bigger size or something to make it work better.  You should be able to customize your background color for the 'text card' too.  I think it would work better with branding.

https://plus.google.com/+LaBovick/ has their image fade at the bottom and the 'info card' to the left is a little longer and it looks nice that way.  If Google could make this sort of design default I think it would look a lot better.  Maybe even have the menu fit in that negative space below the image and to the right of the 'info card'.

Unfortunately I don't work at Google anymore so I'll just build a template to make it work.  Either way it's much better then the old style.

Nothing at Google is here to stay.  I can think of at least 5 cover photo changes already.  I didn't see any announcements but I now that the Google+ for Android rolled out yesterday.

Here are my thoughts

What I like about it:

• "that giant monstrosity of an image" that Mike Roberts mentioned is gone!  I hated having to scroll UP to see all of it.  That was just dumb.
• I like the 'info card' on the left side vs the bottom long drawn out text area we had before.
• I like that the 'info card' doesn't cover ANY of the image.  We spend a lot of money on photography and I don't want it covered.

What I don't like:

• It looks very blocky (<-- is that a word?).  I think a more artistic design would have been better.  www.google.com/+vzpro is very boring whereas www.google.com/+labovick, who designed their cover before to allow for the text area to be easily read, looks great.  I think making the 'info card' be a little longer and have a little shadowing behind it would make a world of difference as far as design.  I know we can design images to do that now but I think it is an easy adjustment for G+ to do.
• I don't like the fact that the background of the 'info card' is the same image as the one to the right and is extremely blurred.  I don't know if a solid color would be better but I just know I don't like it very much.

Ok,  I'm off my soapbox now.  Carry on...

I'm not a Google+ expert but I agree with Tom here that the URL should be easy to remember and brandable.  I would prefer something like /+casey&torres vs the other ones they suggested.  I know you can request a different URL.   But if you have to choose between the two the /+tallahasseedefense is definitely better.   I have google.com/+vzpro which doesn't help people know what I do but it is easy to remember.  I keep all of my marketing urls the same if I can.  fb.com/vzpro, twitter.com/vzpro etc and try to coordinate them as best as possible.  I would consider what their other social media outlets have as urls and maybe try to get something that all fits.

I've linked to a basic version of one I've built and use for my clients.  It's not ALL of them but the ones listed are free.  You'll still need to find directories in your local area that will help them but it's a good starting point.

http://bit.ly/1cjMc7R

You can also use a service like Yext.com for more but there is a fee to use them.

Also, here is some resources for citation building best practices.  These are from getlisted.org a company owned by Moz.com:

https://getlisted.org/static/resources/

"Manipulation" to me suggests that you are wondering if you'll receive some sort of penalty for the search engines only keeping good links and removing bad links.  A basic answer is "no" but I would recommend a strategy that would protect you in the event that you somehow got a penalty.

If you are e-mailing webmasters and the like, I would set up a separate gmail account and only use this account for your link removal process.  In the event you receive a manual penalty from Google, you can share the details of this account with them to let them know your process.  You'll have e-mails that prove your efforts and if you use Google spreadsheets to notate your efforts also, you'll do yourself a huge favor when trying to explain your reasoning for removing all the links.  In the spreadsheet, you could have all the links you are trying to remove in one column, the contact dates in successive columns and a column at the end that notate removal date of the link from the webmaster.  If you keep this all in the same Gmail account, you'll be able to share the account details with Google in the event of a manual penalty.

That being said, I don't think you'll have a manual penalty issue.  The issue I could see is a algorithmic penalty that would come about via the over optimization of the left over links.  For the links you are keeping and the links you build going forward, I would recommend using a good mix of anchor text and start to focus more on your brand name.  You can use opensiteexplorer.org to download your anchor text and use a pivot table to see the anchor text diversity.  I'm sure there are tools out there that will automatically give it to you but I pretty much only use OSE.

I hope this helps

I agree with you.  The contact form is the right first option and then let them guide you through the process.  Thanks!!

Thanks for this Miriam.  I originally had done what you recommended.  But the reply I got back from Google said that is for when a duplicate listing exists in DIFFERENT places accounts or for a listing I do not control.   They said that when it is in the same places account, that I should delete the duplicate one.

But it wouldn't hurt to try what you are saying first.  My issue happened at the end of 2012 beginning of 2013 so you may be right that my way is a little outdated.

Thanks again.

Keyword is generally one word like "shoes" where a keyword phrase is generally a set of keywords that are combined to make a phrase like "buy red shoes".

I don't believe there is a set number of words that have to be in a phrase for it to be considered a phrase.  It's a general term we use to identify keywords.  Many people use the words "keyword" and "keyword phrase" interchangably as most SEOs will not target a single keyword.  They might say, "The keyword I am targeting is 'AC Repair'."  Even though this is a keyword phrase it is okay to use it either way.

Can you send a screenshot and/or additional information.  I checked your site on Google's Rich Snippets tool and couldn't duplicate the error.

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets?q=www.mexpro.com

Google's guidelines state

1. Choose the listing that you'd prefer to keep in your account.
   1. Make sure that you have all your enhanced content (photos, business hours, description) attached to this listing.
   2. Make sure that its status is "active".

and that all the rest should be deleted.

This happened to an AC repair company client but it took almost 5 weeks for the listing to disappear and once it did we shot up in the 7 pack.

https://support.google.com/places/answer/183009?hl=en

Google won't consider that black hat if you do it right.  I am not really a fan of microsites but they do have their advantages.  The reason most microsites don't work is because people just duplicate the content from their main blog to their microsite which will be considered duplicate content and it won't rank.

The reason I am against them is because Google has made a transition to ranking brands more and more.  If you build a microsite you'll need to SEO that too and ranking them can take some time.  Getting high quality, high authority relevant links is hard enough and at what point do you start to dilute your efforts.

I prefer the strategy of categories in my blogs.  For instance you could have a category called breast augmentation and one called tummy tuck (www.example.com/breast-augmentation/blog-post-goes-here)  This will help keep all of your links on your main domain which will help you build your domain authority and also, people can just follow the categories they care about.  Any link to your subpage will help your domain metrics and that is always a good thing.  Also, you'll be able to get your main keyword in every URL that way too.

The other side of that is that a microsite could potentially take up another SERP position and therefore help you get more clients.  You'll have to double your efforts (if not more) and if you get that authority high enough, any link to your site will help your main site rank better.

But, like I said, I'm not a fan of microsites.  I want people to go to my business and help my mains sites metrics.  Just my two cents

Darin.

Glad I could help.. sort of.  And thank you for following up and replying back with the solution.

Personal Opinion --> Unless you've been it by Google's algorithms, your time is much much much much better served trying to gain quality, authority, relevant links then "cleaning up" old ones.

Unless your links are all exact match anchor text, I wouldn't worry about them.  If they are, you could help yourself by asking the sites to link to you differently with a diverse range of anchor text.

All in all, cleaning up takes just as much time as getting new, high quality, highly relevant links.  It's all about time management.

My original thought was that maybe you were using a PNG file vs a JPEG but I uploaded a png file to www.google.com/+vzpro and it showed up as a white background.  I would recommend trying to upload a new jpeg with a white background to test it out.

update

I just pulled your image,  You do have a JPG.  It looks like the background of the image is set to gray.  Please upload new image with white background and let us know if that works.

I wouldn't change a thing.  You have 8 sitelinks which most companies would kill for.  You domain authority is a 30 and your page authority is a 38.  You get really good traffic too (>5,000/mo).

Your domain name is less important then people make it out to be.  Having a keyword in your URL can help but it doesn't have to be at the domain level.  Something like www.enchantingquotes.com/wall-quotes would do just fine.

I personally feel that "Enchanting Quotes" is much more 'brandable' then "Enchanting wall quotes".  Google is going more and more towards brands and you have all the signals of good branding.

Can you send a link to one of your images and the page you placed it on.  I'll check out it's metadata and tags to see how Google sees it.  Images in a regular sitemap can take time.  I don't have an exact answer for you.  If the pages that the images are on are indexed, in general, the images should be indexed too.  I prefer to use the image sitemap strategy though.  I then like to add links on Pinterest or other sharing sites to the images to let Google discover them.  Sorry I can't be more exact for you, there are so many factors.

Is your site utilizing Google+,  I've seen some correlation between activity on Google+ and higher percentages of items indexed via WMT.  Not saying its causation but there is a correlation for most of my clients  They will have a >90% index rate for each of their sitemaps (index, images, categories, videos, etc).

Did you submit a separate sitemap just for images (aka Image Sitemap)?

If the images are in your regular sitemap and you don't have a separate image sitemap, make sure that the links in the sitemap are links to the actual image source and not the page that the image is on.

Image Sitemaps Help from Google Webmaster Tools

Not 100% sure but those "rogue" pages look like pagination pages and no-indexing them could cause some issues.  They don't have any content on there so I am not sure.  Also, this is just correlation and I'm not saying its causation but Google+ links have indexed my sites extremely fast and the sites that utilize Google+ tend to have higher percentage of indexed pages.  Again, correlation not necessarily causation.

Search Engine Land had a good article on SEO problems with pagination here.

Each location you have should have it's own landing page/url.  I'm not sure how the search engines would handle more then one of the same type of schema on one page but I know for SEO purposes two separate pages is much much better.  You'll be able to add citation links to each of the pages that way too.

Matt Cutts mentioned it's better to have one url per store too.