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Your welcome Alec, glad I could help.

Yes it's most definitely a factor in rankings but as you say, to achieve visual perfection on a budget (using a theme and not coding from scratch) you do end up with a lot of code.

I always ensure my sites score as high as possible in speed tests, and the Html, Css, and Java are all properly minified (when possible), and that's about all you can do.

If the site scores at least a 90/100 in the page speed test then Google are not going to hold back a site that looks good and has great content because it has a lot of code in the site.

Most of all that code is for the browsers to render the site correctly but good Seo is mainly dependant on the content contained within certain tags. I just checked one of my sites, and it has 600 lines of code before my H1 tag, thanks to the revolution slider. But the site still ranks top 3 for many keywords and still achieves a 93/100 on page speed test.

All things equal, custom built flat html sites will always rank better than themes php template sites, but it's quite rare that all things are equal. Those 400 lines of code may be holding you back by 1 spot or 5 spots, but it's nothing that some good links or great content can't fix. I understand your point though, as it's a painfully slow process to fix that code.

You need to be mindful of the anchor text they use. You don't want five new links coming in all saying 'Your Main Keyword' You also need to be aware of their site's overall quality. Check all of their site stats such as Domain Authority - Page Authority - Trust Flow - Citation Flow, etc.

Also, check their outbound and inbound links. You don't want your link on their site if they also link out to other sites that are completely irrelevant. And you wouldn't want your link on their site either if they have lots of low-quality inbound links pointing to their site.

Perhaps the main thing to watch our for in your scenario is that they don't just give you a site-wide footer link. You may think you're getting a good link in the footer of their homepage, but if it's a site-wide footer link they've just sent your website anywhere from 25 to 300 inbound links. That's something you don't want either. Hope this help a little.

Sounds like a big job Firstly, I would go with the sub-folder approach (and by sub-folder, I mean inner page) as inner pages can bleed more authority from the root domain than sub-domains can. You'll be able to rank an inner page easier than a sub domain. I also think that the sub-domain approach is confusing for referring offline clients. Telling someone to go to newsite.mysite.com is more confusing than saying, go to mysite.com forward slash newsite.

As far as all of your local Seo is concerned just be sure that the relevant addresses are on the relevant pages. Don't let the address of the primary site pollute the other business pages where that address doesn't belong on.

Yes, the rankings have crashed but getting rid of those 302 redirects and changing them to 301's will have a significant impact. All you have to do is ensure that any old page redirects to the most relevant new page. Don't bother redirecting the old about us page to the new homepage, just redirect it to the new about-us page where it should redirect to.

The folder structure that you suggested for your new pages is fine, and I would go with that too. It's crucial that your new inner pages have the right address and phone number details on the front end. Ensure your Schema markup is also properly optimized. You want to make sure that when you run an inner page through the structured data testing tool that it's showing all of the correct Schema address and business details. As long as you pay close attention to this I think you should see minimal disruption to your Google local rankings.

I would also go to your Google local pages and put the right URL in the about us section (XYZ.com/auto-detailing). Make sure you re-upload the verification file again to the correct page (XYZ.com/auto-detailing).

It doesn't really matter which pages of your site have links going to them, including category pages. There's a few things to watch out for regarding unnatural inbound links and they're listed below in order of priority, however any of the below points will cause you issues if you abuse them.

• The main one to watch out for is an over optimized anchor text profile.
• The second thing to watch is the type of inbound links you have. Are they all the same type of links such as directory links or blog comments etc.
• The third thing to watch out for is your inbound link velocity. Is that category page getting new inbound links at 5 x the velocity of everyone else's sites in your niche.

If all your links are from diverse and (reasonably) reputable sources, and your inbound anchor text profile isn't over optimized, then you could have hundreds of links pointing to your category pages without an issue. If a big brand suddenly released a whole new range of merchandise then their category page/s would acquire 1000's of links without an issue.

Feel free to build links to any page you want to rank, just make sure they're good links. I also hope that your category page has it's onsite Seo is up to scratch. Having all of your meta data, heading tags, and content up to scratch will go a long way and it'll help you to get the most power out of your inbound links too. Hope this helps a little.