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There's nothing wrong with hidden elements as long as they serve some purpose other than to game Google. A hidden div with tons of content that will never be seen by a end user is spam. A hidden div that requires you to click on something to see it is not spam.

Matt Cutts talked about the issue a couple of years ago

Not an unusual problem. YouTube is a naturally popular site and Google likes to showcase it in the SERPs when there's something relevant.

As Amie said, you need to link to your site in the video description. You're missing out on potential traffic.

As convenient as YouTube is, maybe consider hosting the videos yourself? Amazon S3/Cloudfront, for instance, is fairly cheap and speedy enough to serve videos to your visitors. It neatly avoids having the YouTube problem but it means a lot more work to get your videos ranked (writing content, transcribing, etc). You might want to check out how to do some video SEO if you go this route.

I really like how Stack Exchange handles their URLs

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/30526714/seo-and-user-friendly-urls-for-multi-language-website

So to break down the URL, they have a directory questions, then the question ID and THEN the SEO friendly tag. Since the URL can be edited by anyone, it preserves the reference the system needs to access it regardless of what URL you're using. This might help your programmers if they know they can keep the ID in the URL. Otherwise you have the overhead of looking up the URL and then loading the correct page. Does that keep it typeable? No, but let's be honest... when was the last time you actually typed a URL (more than just the domain name) into your browser?

First off, let me commend you for asking questions. Too many people hand their website (and thus their brand) to someone else and then walk away. Nobody will care about your website like you do.

Second, you've got far greater problems than cloaking. Head over to SEO browser and put your URL in and click the Simple View button. Not only is it cloaking, the page the robot sees is filled with keyword stuffing. This is an actual paragraph on the page being fed to bots (emphasis mine because it's both hilarious and sad)

log home construction cost Everything I do and Log Home Construction I do on the principle of Russian borscht and log home construction cost. You can throw everything into it-beets and Log Home Construction carrots and Log Home Construction cabbage and Log Home Construction onions and Log Home Construction everything you want and log home construction cost. What's important is the result and Log Home Construction the taste of the borscht and log home construction cost. log home builder reviews There are many fine ideals which are not realisable and Log Home Construction and yet we do not refrain from teaching them and log home construction cost. log home construction cost I want to know how God created this world and log home construction cost. I am not interested in this or that phenomenon and Log Home Construction in the spectrum of this or that element and log home construction cost. I want to know His thoughts the rest are details and log home construction cost. The surest way to get rid of a bore is to lend money to him and log home construction cost. log home construction cost calculator log home construction cost Your Rutherglen Log Home Construction and log home construction cost Source

Seriously, it's like someone found the worst SEO manual from 2005 and ran with it. I've not seen SEO this bad in YEARS. Your website, as it is running, is a walking and talking example of what NOT to do with SEO. Panda was built to find sites like this and penalize them. At this point, if I were you, I'd go get a Wordpress blog, write a few content pages and point your domain at it. You literally cannot do worse than your current site.

I think your answer is in the question

All our old pages were 301 redirected and content is relatively the same on the new redesigned website.

So if you recently remodeled and redid your URLs that's a much more likely suspect in your drop. 301s past most, but not necessarily all, page juice

It depends a bit. In order to host on a different site you'll have to have a different domain or subdomain. That will let it live under a different IP. The IP thing isn't an issue but the different domain might be. I would try to get it under a subdomain of your main domain (i.e. blog.domain.com) so bots can at least see there's a relationship there. The catch here is that your subdomain is not going to pass as much juice to your main site as if it lived under domain.com/blog (where it's part of the same domain).

You don't have to host your own blog incidentally. Check out wordpress.com where, for a fee, they will map a domain to your blog. It's the safest way to host Wordpress, since they update it and secure the servers.

I don't think that's a terribly good idea. First off, Google probably won't be able to tell you replaced the text so it will still say "Orlando" to them. Bots don't reliably run JS. Could it be cloaking? Possibly, but you're not doing it to trick anyone. Still, not a good idea to risk it.

What I would do is make a new page for Tampa. Make it unique, add your Tampa address (local search!) and start SEO efforts. Focus your efforts on Tampa and let Orlando just sit. There's no reason you can't rank well for both.

My $0.02 (apologies if I'm soapboxing)

I wasn't terribly impressed with them back when they were Hackersafe. The idea was that they would scan for known vulnerabilities and report them to you. You could then post their banner on your site and claim to be "safe". But I came to realize it was a banner for rubes who don't have any idea about what it represents. In fact, they had me turn OFF some security features so they could scan us properly. They found a few things we could do better but a lot of their security alerts were notifying us a lot about updated packages, not realizing we were running packages with the same security fixes backported (it's a server admin thing).It's not just McAfee tho. I'd say the same about any security banner (i.e. Authorize.net). Most people don't have any idea why it's supposed to be safer, they're just supposed to "feel" safer. They don't stop a site from being hacked, or having its data compromised and these services will tell you, the server admin, that up front.

ccTLDs are different from gTLDs (and .uk is also restricted to only UK businesses unlike .co.uk) in that they show a specific affinity for a country. Google recognizes this, as well as users.

The only SEO consideration is do you want to be seen as UK specific or more general? There's nothing from preventing you from doing either, but you do need to understand that signal is there with a ccTLD.

As far as buying yourdomain.uk and pointing it to yourdomain.co.uk there's no harm but no benefit either.

Is your brand name trademarked? If so, you can use that trademark to remove ads that contain your trademark in their ad copy (here's the Google form for Trademark complaints in ads).

Generally speaking, it's a good idea to bid on your own name. Case in point: we started TV ads this year and while we rank #1 for our brand, when the TV spots started we saw an enormous surge in people searching our brand name. Also, remember that some searches (especially on mobile) do not show any organic results above the fold. Bidding on your own brand name should be an integral part of your marketing strategy. Don't worry about making it more expensive for your competitors.

Couple of notes for you

1. There isn't any SEO impact on WHERE the data is loaded from. Look at any major website (especially one that ranks well) and they're openly using content delivery (like Akamai, Amazon S3/Cloudfront, etc) for static content. This is good business practice because it takes that load off your web server and often places the content closer to where the client is. Faster content delivery can help SEO if you have a slow server.
2. If they're using the raw S3 buckets I would HIGHLY suggest signing up for Cloudfront. There's two benefits to doing this. First, you put the content into Amazon's cloud, where it is more readily available. Second, you can use domain aliasing to help obscure the source. For instance, let's say you have an images bucket. You could add a CNAME DNS record for images.yourdomain.com and then put that into your source code. You can still see where the DNS takes you, but it's not obvious to the general public. The cost difference between raw S3 delivery and Cloudfront is negligible.

Oh, and I use Amazon Cloudfront for my delivery. Never had any SEO issues with doing so.

App Store? You mean like Google Play and iTunes? And why would it be the new SEO?

Most of the people here don't have an app. They have a website. It's a different thing. Perhaps if you elaborate some we can help you.

I see you're in the UK. While I'm not a fan of the court decision, there's always Right to be Forgotten. While it doesn't affect other Google indexes (i.e. google.com) or the article itself, it would let you at least have the article de-indexed in your local European market. It might buy you breathing room and maybe get the attention of the publisher so you can have the record corrected (I don't think any press organization likes having bad info out there).

I would focus more on marketing to make up the shortfall. There just isn't any other guaranteed solution. Buy ads, Pay-Per-Click and media time if necessary. Be louder than this article is.

It doesn't matter to Google. I don't think anyone issues on less than 2048 bits (your actual encryption will be 128 or 256 bits, depending on what your server and the client supports). As long as it's valid and signed properly it should be fine.

Public Service Announcement: Please opt for SHA2 (if asked) and make sure you don't have any heartbleed problems.

It's not over, it's just changing. Whenever a business model changes (i.e. selling newspapers) you'll have people who try to hold onto the old ways. In the US (where the government won't step into that fight) the news publishers have either gone to a paywall/loginwall or they try to track how many visits you've made (i.e. You've read X of X free articles, please pay to read more). Google requires some content to be free so it's becoming a crap shoot as to whether or not you can read an article for free. The place that's suffered the most is social linking, where I'll see a link on a blog or in social media and click it, only to hit a pay/loginwall.

The EU is going a different route with government regulation. I remember when Germany tried to make Google pay for linking to news content and Google opted to drop them from the SERPs if they didn't opt in. The publishers couldn't opt in fast enough. Google shut down their news feed in Spain rather than pay for linking to content. There are rumblings of trying to make Google expand "right to be forgotten" takedowns to all Google sites (which has pushed Google to force users to use only localized search). How far they get remains to be seen. If they declare Google a public utility there will be legal wrangling and if Google loses they may pull out of those markets.

So where does that leave you as an EU SEO? It depends on what you're trying to do. News outlets don't need a lot of SEO because they are high quality content generators, which is what Google feeds on naturally. I wouldn't worry about Google dropping markets anytime soon (legal stuff will take years and we're not to that point yet). If you could elaborate on what you do I could comment better on that last part of your question.

The only solution I can think of is to use an htaccess file to determine if you're using SSL or not and then feed up a special robots.txt to disallow crawling for the SSL site.

There's no direct punishment for buying a used domain. The problem comes in that you're probably not going to keep the same site structure. At this point you need to realize that you need an exhaustive 301 remap so you keep as much rank from the existing pages as possible.

The bad things about a domain buy? Well, you're getting whatever reputation the old site had (links, reviews, social commentary, etc) and if that was negative that now becomes your responsibility.

Here's what I would do for starters

1. Set up a campaign for your site. It will take a few days to run so start it running now
2. Link your campaign to your Google Analytics
3. Go to Open Site Explorer and do a backlink analysis on your site. With penguin looking for unnatural links, it's a good idea to make full use of this tool

I don't know that it much matters. The localization signal from just the ccTLD is not terribly strong but it should be the same for both the older .com.xx as well as the newer .xx

For purely aesthetic reasons I would choose .xx

I dunno about 10 steps (I hate lists that try to make some round number) but my steps would be

1. Who do you want to visit your site? Clearly women in this case, but what kind of women?
2. What do you want your visitors to do on your site? Buy? Read? Participate?
3. Identify your keywords that your audience is using. Look at similar sites and do several searches. Use keyword research tools like the Adwords traffic estimator to help narrow down words.
4. Build your content, focusing on your keywords. You need content that people want, not some formulaic mess that sounds like it was written by a content farm. Read your own content. Would you want to read your site? You need to be on topic and relevant.
5. Spread the news. Without spamming, suggest your site in places where it makes sense. Don't worry about SEO, you just want traffic. Don't just suggest your main page, but suggest deeper content (i.e. "Here's an article I wrote you might find helpful in doing this"). Blogs and forums can be good places to start, but be careful ,lest you start sounding like spam.
6. Consider advertising. Initially, your site needs to be found and advertising can bring people in. If you've done steps 1-5 well enough, your site should start drawing in links naturally as people begin to suggest you socially (blog links, social links, Google +1, etc).