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I agree that there's no longer any difference to the crawlers. However, one other thing worthy of consideration is the possibility of moving the site to a new URL. With relative URLs, you may be saved a lot of painstaking work, whereas with absolutes, every single page will have to be rewritten. There are tools to assist in the task, but it's still a lousy job to undertake.

The first thing that I would do on a revival project is a site survey, to identify your on-page situation. You'll also want to dive into your link profile, as you're bound to have a number of issues there, on an aged, unmaintained site.

I only glanced at the site, but it seems like you definitely have some meat on the bone there to work with. Looking at the meta data, I'd guess that it may have been optimized by someone that thought "if a little bit is good, then a lot is better."

There's definitely a lot that can be done with the on-page. Good luck on it! Should be a fun one.

If you're unable to get the webmasters to remove the links, I would definitely disavow them, by domain. They may be unwilling to remove the articles, but as long as you're not using them on your own site, the links are really your only concern. If they're showing your author profile on those sites, then I do think it would be a good idea to have that removed, as well, since Google still stumbles occasionally on attribution issues. That wouldn't have any effect on your link profile, but it could conceivably muddy the authorship waters.

Gina is correct, Eliran. rel="author" is intended only for personal G+ profiles. You would need to set up your company's G+ page as the publisher and embed the rel="publisher" tag on your site, then use rel="author" for each individual author. You can review the procedure here: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1708844

I'm of the opinion that an XML sitemap is unnecessary, IF your site navigation is in order. That said, though, we all know how easy it is for a five or ten thousand page ecommerce site's navigation to get out of whack.

The bottom line, I think, is that it costs nothing but a few minutes to build and submit, and it can't do you any harm. Cheap insurance, no?

Good catch, Anders!

The hierarchy of headers would require an H2 to be a subheading within the more general topic area of the H1. I can't imagine there would be any requirement for content between the H1 and the first H2, although, from the users' standpoint, it might help them to better understand what the page is about and how the H2's content applies.

That's correct, Gina. Eliran, you need to set rel="publisher" on your home page and tie it to the company page on G+. Using rel="author" set to a company page won't work (it may check out as okay on the rich snippet testing tool, but it won't appear in the SERPs, and it won't tie the G+ page and the site together in the Knowledge Graph)

As has been mentioned elsewhere, subdomains are, for SEO purposes, considered to be totally separate sites. I cannot see any logical reason for separating two sites unless they are totally unrelated.

For example, if you have a corporation that owns a mining concern and an electronic manufacturing concern, then it might make sense to have them both as subdomains of the holding company's main website.

But for a company that provides a product, and has a separate division to service related products, then I think that using folders would be greatly preferable, from an SEO standpoint.

Hi, Travis-

I wouldn't be concerned with "diluting" any pagerank that you already have, if that's your question. You may be setting up new pages in competition with existing pages, if they're going after the same terms, though. The longer the existing pages have been out there, unmodified, the easier a new page may outrank it, all other things being equal.

Unfortunately, without seeing the site, it's impossible to even render a guestimate. For instance, how's your crawl budget? if it's limited, QDF could possibly allow newer pages to push older pages into the shadows. You might check out this post: http://www.algohunters.com/building-solid-index-presence-optimizing-crawl-budget/

Jared-

I think it's quite possible that one of the factors that played into the lack of response is that a fair amount of research is required. With comprehensive research, a spreadsheet and lots of graphics, you're asking for a piece that is definitely a cut above what many typical freelancers find themselves asked to provide.

I have found some outstanding copywriters on textbroker, and I have no doubt that you can find several there that can and will meet your standards. I would suggest that you might get more response by simply soliciting a writer that is willing to do more than just basic research, and then "interview" two or three of the most promising candidates. Ask them for samples that required a similar level of workmanship. Sure, you'll get a few that can only claim to be fluent English-speakers with their fingers crossed or are simply not up to the task. But IMO, since you're looking for quality work, you'll need to invest some extra effort in your search to qualify the respondents.

Get 'em interested, then thin the herd.

Dave, you might want to check out UN.CO.VER, from Textbroker: http://www.textbroker.com/uncover/

I use it a lot, and it's customizable to the level of checking you desire. Nice, because it'll give you a live link to the location where it's detected duplicate content. Free, by the way.

As Loudogg says, with a 301 redirect you'll be fine, although you will experience a slight loss of link juice through the 301. Further losses can be avoided by ensuring (as much as is possible) that links are directed to your destination page, so they don't go through the redirect.

I'd definitely make sure to implement a rel="canonical" directive, and focus on being consistent.

I have not used Headway, but a good friend of mine, that is a coder, was a die-hard Thesis fan... until he tried Headway. While he has no problem tweaking the code in Thesis to accomplish what he needs, he has been quite vocal about Headway being more secure and more user-friendly to the novice coder. Coming from him, that's mighty high praise. FWIW.

Absolutely, Jonny. This week, Google introduced a change to this (http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=189077) which allows a default setting. But I've been doing this for a couple of years, with just one or two pages of a foreign language, placing idiom-specific hreflang attributes on those pages, and none at all on the rest of the pages, which are all in English. It works just fine, so I really don't know exactly what the x-default is supposed to accomplish, other than perhaps avoid having the rest of the site bracketed with a foreign language page.

I haven't seen a sitemap.php in a long time, Sha. Certainly Google could  read it if they want, but whether they will or not is the question. I would be inclined to doubt it.

If he says that it's generating a sitemap.xml, but none is present on WMT, then I would respond that one of two things is happening:

1. It isn't generating the sitemap in an xml format at all, but only in php, or

2. For some reason, the xml version is either not transmitted, or not received.

The only other possibility that comes to mind is that perhaps the conversion from php to xml is not tagged in a fashion to be recognized as an xml file, and WMT is detecting it as php and assigning it that status accordingly. I suppose that could happen, particularly if he is using an outdated plugin or if of his own coding, the conversion is faulty.

I'd be interested in hearing what you ultimately learn on this.

The only limit that I'm aware of is that you shouldn't use more than one H1

I'd agree that sitewides should be avoided whenever possible. It sounds as though you may be flirting with disaster. If it were me, I'd nofollow them, at the least.

I'm still using it, Egol. I've had no complaints from subscribers, but of course, that doesn't necessarily mean there are no issues. Since I've never monetized my feed, the Adsense issue didn't affect me. I imagine my complacency is temporary, though... it's likely to break sooner or later.

The main reason I haven't moved to a different feed is that of the few I've looked at, none appealed to me. So any suggestions that pop up here will be welcomed.

I agree with Tim... I'd even say that I seriously doubt that 302s had any impact at all in moving a site up, given that Google has stated many times that a 302 passes no link equity.