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Sorry, these questions are impossible to answer correctly. In my opinion though, Google will pass value through the link especially if it is a strong news site.

Usually I just ask myself:

Would I feel comfortable telling Google about this link at a later date?

If the answer is yes I go for it.

We've gotten new business from our signature links. Just use a nofollow tag and you'll be within guidelines. The link is there to get new customers. Not increase search rankings. It doesn't make sense to remove the link. Doing so would be a bad user experience.

In terms of rankings - no can give you that answer but Google.

In my opinion, I'd go with 'and' though. It looks more legitimate in the search results - thus hopefully increasing CTR.

If it's B2C Facebook would probably be a good bet. Though, something tells me people will want to keep their medical lives private. Are you sure you want to be on social media at all. What's your goal? Direct leads / sales? Brand awareness?

Hey Ron,

Check out this case study:

http://www.micrositemasters.com/blog/penguin-analysis-seo-isnt-dead-but-you-need-to-act-smarter-and-5-easy-ways-to-do-so/

In short, be careful with keyword rich anchor texts. They should only be about 10% of your link profile post-penguin.

Matt Cutts of Google said links from press releases don't pass PageRank. Not sure what that means in terms of penalties, but something to consider. I do press releases in hopes of other journalists picking up my story.

I wouldn't 'cut them out' per say, but put them lower on the priority list. Make sure to use the most searched keyword furthest to the left in the title tag.

As far as everything else goes - try setting up some goals in Google Analytics to see which keywords are converting into sales. If you find one converts better than the other - swap it out for the furthest to the left in the title tag. Doesn't matter how much traffic it brings you if it doesn't convert.

As with most people, I can see that you're pretty concerned with your on-site optimization. On-site is a very small percentage of the reason why your website will rank. Links from external websites do most of the work.

I'd create a page on the site for each city if the business has its own physical address in each city (its own building). Then create a title tag specifically for that city.

If that's not possible, I think you're Title tag works. I'd move the brand to the end though (unless it's a REALLY well know brand).

It won't help. In fact, the search results are so finicky right now that you could probably redirect your domain to a competitor and get them penalized. Basically, if your rankings dropped on April 23rd - 24th you're probably not coming back any time soon.

It's not all bad though. Look at it as an opportunity to try out new marketing strategies. You could try going through your site and reducing bounce rates, increasing time on page, improving site speed etc, but honestly I'd work on other marketing techniques. Get a video or data visualization campaign going. Try to get some media mentions. Conduct some interviews and give some yourself.

Did you get an unnatural links warning in webmaster tools?

Goodluck

I have a hard time selling the "pay me to make friends in your industry" bit, so I hardly do it for clients anymore either. Making content for clients is a tangible asset that is

A. Easier to sell

B. A great long-term strategy on its own

Technically, you're loosing a very very small amount of link juice by hosting it on a subdomain. The optimal configuration is www.domain.com/blog.

Source - SEO Secrets (great book by the way)

There is nothing wrong with linking to the same item more than once on a page. Though, it isn't usually necessary and is usually the result of a poor website design.

Spam in terms of an algorithmic penalty or manual penalty?

In terms of a manual penalty, yes. Why? Because of the first sentence of your post here:

"See these pages that we've created to rank."

It's considered spam to create pages to rank. You're supposed to create pages to be useful to users. The pages you linked have nearly identical content.

Yes, give it some time. About a week. When you submit a reconsideration request to Google make sure to provide PROOF that you are doing everything possible to remove the unnatural links. If it was truly the SEO firm's fault make sure to mention the name of the firm in reconsideration request.

Was the SEO Firm providing you with a report of the links they built each month? I'd go through that report and try to remove each link 1 by 1.

This is very difficult to answer as others have said. I hate to do this, but shameless plug for my post here:

How To Recover From Google Penalties & Filters

It will help you figure out if you're looking at a penalty or not.

Thanks,

Dave

From my experience it's much easier to go back to the well with larger clients. Smaller clients don't tend to appreciate the "margin of error" bit so I'll try to over-estimate the quote when dealing with them. Smaller clients tend to ask 2x as many questions as well.

10-20% sounds about right for project management, but I won't put that in the proposal. I'll mark project management and reporting as "free" and just include them in the package (with the markup in other areas). I don't put the hours estimated for each task either... though i know some agencies do.

That doesn't 100% answer your question, but I hope it can help.

I apologize, semi-identical would have been a better description. To answer your question about the links at the bottom I agree with Crhis I do not think they're spammy.

Tell Google it was the SEO co's fault. Did you give up the name of the company in the reconsideration?

There are many legitimate EMDs. They're harder to brand, but it's possible. For example, FreeCreditReport.com. They're only toxic if they're idiotic like best-pay-day-loans.info.

The phrase of "widget" should pull your ad for "buy widget," so it really isn't necessary. However, if you create a new ad group for "buy widget" you can control the budget for these specific keywords.

Remember, 30 KWs per ad group is best practice.

You'd probably get more in-house than at an agency. Most agencies want you to focus on one thing and do it over and over. Your wide variety of skills could really get put to work an in-house position. You can save the company money on hiring out to agencies.

Just my .02