I have found this article to work really well in getting these fixed as quickly as possible. Fixing duplicate listings. It walks you through multiple options and guidelines

If you effectively nail the SEO on the keyword scaffolding, and have your location you want to target mentioned properly the rest will fall into place. Your ideal is to have your site come up in the serp any time scaffolding is searched for. If you want to optimize around additional keyword phrases, create additional pages based precisely on that keyword phrase. (URL structure, meta data, page title, content, backlinks, etc)

Simply put, make sure you have no duplicate content, including:
Page titles
Meta Descriptions
On Page content
Multiple URL's with the same content (often a huge issue with CMS or cart systems)

Screaming Frog seo spider  is a good resource to use, and its free up to a number of URL's.

Don't forget to check your robots.txt rules, to filter out anything you dont want showing up. If you are using a CMS, check that the home page isnt being rendered with multiple URL's such as:
YOURDOMAIN.com and YOURDOMAIN.com/index.php. This can be corrected with a 301, unless you are using VirtueMart, which needs the index.php. (there is a custom fix we came up for this to not display)

One of the things I noticed, is that the linking sites, even tho they are not related, and blog comment spam, have a high domain authority. I wonder if that plays a part in this at all.

If you set the site to display using an ip address and the username, that will allow others to view the site

No problem! Glad I could help. Once you get an idea of how your campaigns work and how people search for your business, this can in turn help you figure out how (and what to focus on) organically.

Think of it like this: Google says "We could show them the search terms for free in analytics"

Intern says "But, we could make them pay for the data, possibly through adwords"

Google says "Brilliant! Promote this man."

I looked at SEO-browser, and saw the same result. We have done a lot of ecom sites over the years, and it's always wise to fill in any space you have in the cart system with product info that sets the pages apart from one another.

We put together a page a while back, that includes a similar page checker. This lets you see on a percentage scale how "similar" pages are to one another, and explains the definition of what "duplicate content" really is, and how it can hurt your site.

By combining the two, you can build up the site's authority and potentially outrank your competitor. I would not spread out your efforts on managing two sites, just focus on making one awesome site. In the new version, you could also create content that specifically targets the areas/keyword that your competitor is ranking for.

Go for the user. If you look at seo-browser's reports for pages that have large images or fullscreen sliders, it still renders out to a search engine bot about the same. People like pretty. People share pretty. We use a full screen slider for our home page, and still rank consistantly on page one.

Even better if your large images are conversion-focused. Might actually see an increase if done right, rather than a ranking loss.

I would NOT replicate this linking pattern for your client's websites. In the long run, it could do more damage than good. I will save you the long explanation, but it's just not a good long term strategy. Do the things you know are right, and not the things that could pose a risk in the future.

For small businesses, the easiest way to combat companies that use BS linking strategies is to look at the TOTAL health of one of your client's websites. This would include keyword density testing, a complete citation profile analysis (using Moz Local or Yext), domain choice, on-page health, page load speed, etc. Basically everything that Google says matters, and do it to a "T".

Beat them with quality quantity, not by replicating the same tactics.

301 redirects are processed through your htaccess file, and your server. Here is an example of what the code looks like. This particular example is used to force "www" on our site, so that a user cannot access multiple versions of the home page: (btw if you don't have this in place, you should)

force www

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.webdesignandcompany.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.webdesignandcompany.com/$1 [R=301,L]

The # symbol allows the description to be ignored, so that you can organize your htaccess rules easily, and have them labeled.

If you use cpanel for hosting, or have a host provider that uses it, here is how to process through the backend admin:
http://docs.cpanel.net/twiki/bin/view/AllDocumentation/CpanelDocs/ReDirects

"I know you can use a plug in for wordpress, have you had any experience yourself implementing the rel'canonical' or 301 redirect?"

Super simple, so don't sweat it. By using the Yoast SEO Plugin, you can set the canonical page directly from the page's editor. 
Here is the link explaining how to do just that:
https://yoast.com/wordpress/plugins/canonical/

Hope this helps! If you need any further assistance let me know.

I have a few questions, to help me better understand your question.

First, are you only wanting to have a business page, and not a personal linked to it?
You should be able to edit the exiting profile, rather than set up a whole new one. I would edit what you already have exisiting, revise it to be your personal profile, and then set up an additional business profile under that authorship.

In response to the question:
"Should I then delete the old one or is it helpful to keep double posting?"
I would not double post, or at least not do it in the same places or communities. If you make another profile, you should be able to edit or delete any under that account.

I wouldn't worry about that as much as making it easy and simple for your customers to navigate the site. Think of how you would describe the page to someone who hasn't seen it. You would probably mention the additional colors and styles. Optimize the site naturally and complete all the required items (page titles, meta, on page), and make sure that Google knows about all the pages in webmaster tools.

Sounds like you have a good awareness of where to start looking. Without seeing what you have it will be difficult to diagnose. Can you PM me the URL? Could be another external factor besides the links that is causing the ranking issues.

Just wanted to add that he may want to process the 301's, even after setting the plugin correctly, as Google may have already indexed a lot of the non-SEF and author pages. On the new canoncial pages, it's probably a good idea to also check "no-archive" so the search engine only shows the most recent result.

David, for you to reference:

• NOINDEX tag tells Google not to index a specific page
• NOFOLLOW tag tells Google not to follow the links on a specific page
• NOARCHIVE tag tells Google not to store a cached copy of your page
• NOSNIPPET tag tells Google not to show a snippet (description) under your Google listing, it will also not show a cached link in the search results

Best of luck with your edits!

I would specify all your main services on the listing that allow you that ability. Most will only have select categories you can fit under, so on those use your main service you want to rank for / provide.

On the citation listings that allow descriptions, this is where you can get a bit more creative. Since I'm sure you spent a lot of time on it ;), use some of your page meta descriptions, and content from the site to make your descriptions. This will keep all your content and listings closely related to your subject matter, and keywords.

I would not set up different listings for different keywords, as this somewhat dillutes the purpose of the listing, which is to verify what you do, who you are, and where you are. Having a separate listing for each service will not only be harder to keep track of and take longer to set up, it can get looked at as spammy, and further dillute the "what you do" portion of info since each one will say something different.

You should be able to fit under digital marketing and web design under most listing categories. Google might even see them as similar services after Hummingbird, who knows?

So we have a client that has a ton of great links, solid social profiles, content with good keyword-to-content ratio (7.5-9%), etc. This site has been around for a while and performed well.

Recently a new competitor showed up with a very long keyword driven domain and has been outranking our client (and everyone else) for a large quantity of keywords. We own a keyword driven domain that could be used, but should we switch? I am always for branded domains vs keyword, but in this case it appears to be working and undefeatable. We have waited for 6 months to see if it's a fluke, but it has only gained additional ranking.

The site in question has bad backlinks, many spam items, and stuffed content on the homepage. We will not copy that format obviously, but should we take one more step and beat him at his own game?

Our client has Yext Premium, MOZ local, AdWords, social paid campaigns, location targeting pages, fast load time, etc. Overall a good presence. He seems stuck around the 3-5 position on page one, and is looking to push into the top 3 consistently.

I agree. Get rid of all the links that do not offer any benefit. Remove external links that don't point to good, relevant info. Disavow inbound links from any banned or questionable sources. Even if the links pointing at you are no follow, the links can still get visited. Remember, it's up to Google to respect the no follow rule. In some cases they may ignore it, if they think it's a relevant link.

Looks like you have a few pages that may be the same. If you use a CMS (content management system) like Joomla or Wordpress, chances are that users and search engines may be accessing multiple versions of the same page. What is the URL in question? I'll take a look.

Also, this might help. Google

Create descriptive page titles

Titles are critical to giving users a quick insight into the content of a result and why it’s relevant to their query. It's often the primary piece of information used to decide which result to click on, so it's important to use high-quality titles on your web pages.

Here are a few tips for managing your titles:

• As explained above, make sure every page on your site has a title specified in the <title></code> tag</strong>. If you’ve got a large site and are concerned you may have forgotten a title somewhere, the <a href="https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/answer.py?answer=80407">HTML suggestions</a> page in Webmaster Tools lists missing or potentially problematic <code><title></code> tags on your site.</li> </ul> </ul> <ul> <ul> <li>Page titles should be <strong>descriptive and concise</strong>. Avoid vague descriptors like <code>"Home"</code> for your home page, or <code>"Profile"</code>for a specific person's profile. Also avoid unnecessarily long or verbose titles, which are likely to get truncated when they show up in the search results.</li> </ul> </ul> <ul> <ul> <li>Avoid <strong>keyword stuffing</strong>. It's sometimes helpful to have a few descriptive terms in the title, but there’s no reason to have the same words or phrases appear multiple times. A title like <code>"Foobar, foo bar, foobars, foo bars"</code> doesn't help the user, and this kind of <a href="https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/answer.py?answer=66358">keyword stuffing</a> can make your results look spammy to Google and to users.</li> </ul> </ul> <p> </p> <ul> <ul> <li>Avoid <strong>repeated or boilerplate titles</strong>. It’s important to have distinct, descriptive titles for each page on your site. Titling every page on a commerce site "Cheap products for sale", for example, makes it impossible for users to distinguish one page differs another. Long titles that vary by only a single piece of information ("boilerplate" titles) are also bad; for example, a standardized title like <code>"<band name> - See videos, lyrics, posters, albums, reviews and concerts"</code> contains a lot of uninformative text. One solution is to dynamically update the title to better reflect the actual content of the page: for example, include the words "video", "lyrics", etc., only if that particular page contains video or lyrics. Another option is to just use <code>"<band name>"</code> as a concise title and use the meta description (see below) to describe your site's content. The <a href="https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/answer.py?answer=80407">HTML suggestions</a> page in Webmaster Tools lists any duplicate titles Google detected on your pages.</li> </ul> </ul> <ul> <ul> <li><strong>Brand your titles</strong>, but concisely. The title of your site’s home page is a reasonable place to include some additional information about your site—for instance, <code>"ExampleSocialSite, a place for people to meet and mingle."</code> But displaying that text in the title of every single page on your site hurts readability and will look particularly repetitive if several pages from your site are returned for the same query. In this case, consider including just your site name at the beginning or end of each page title, separated from the rest of the title with a delimiter such as a hyphen, colon, or pipe, like this: <pre><title>ExampleSocialSite: Sign up for a new account.</title>

*` Be careful about disallowing search engines from crawling your pages. Using the robots.txt protocol on your site can stop Google from crawling your pages, but it may not always prevent them from being indexed. For example, Google may index your page if we discover it by following a link from someone else's site. To display it in search results, Google will need to display a title of some kind and because we won't have access to any of your page content, we will rely on off-page content such as anchor text from other sites. (To truly block a URL from being indexed, you can use meta tags.)

If we’ve detected that a particular result has one of the above issues with its title, we may try to generate an improved title from anchors, on-page text, or other sources. However, sometimes even pages with well-formulated, concise, descriptive titles will end up with different titles in our search results to better indicate their relevance to the query. There’s a simple reason for this: the title tag as specified by a webmaster is limited to being static, fixed regardless of the query. Once we know the user’s query, we can often find alternative text from a page that better explains why that result is relevant. Using this alternative text as a title helps the user, and it also can help your site. Users are scanning for their query terms or other signs of relevance in the results, and a title that is tailored for the query can increase the chances that they will click through.`**

I have seen a few different results where they did show a local result, such as when searching for something like "web design in city"

It seems like the word "in" makes a difference of when local listings pop up, as compared to doing a search like "web design city". Did MOZ ever do a study on this? I'd like to see results if so.