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So, just to get on the same page, you have a .fr ccTLD but you want to target US, UK, Middle East, etc. Is that right?

Remember that a ccTLD is a hint to Google that it is targeted towards that geographical region. But, at the end of the day, a TLD is a TLD. What makes a site rank for a given term is far beyond just the TLD. Do you have different pages in different languages? Is that copy well written in those languages or are you simply dumping them into a translation program? Do you have links from the regions you want to target?

There's no reason a .fr can't rank well for any term in any region. I see .co.uk results in the US SERPs all the time. But it does bring up another problem: user behavior. If a UK person sees a .fr they might skip your site, assuming it's French. Then again, they might just ignore the ccTLD and click it anyways. it might be best to get a gTLD instead if you want to go the single site route.

The best solution with geotargeting is always to segment by ccTLD. There's no duplicate content penalties, each domain sends its own hint, and it makes marketing it all easier. Plus users know that domain is for their country/region.

As for Google+... depends on your answer to the question above. If you're going to segment by ccTLD then build a localized page. if not, go with a company.

A time lapse video of them doing their work? Would take some effort but be fairly unique.

The answer here is not one that I often advocate but you're going to to need to grease the wheels a bit

Buy his website out. Make certain this includes his domain and control of the social media he's running. Have him sign a legal agreement as well. Once you own it, 301 redirect it to your main resort page.

If he balks, or tries to run the price up, my bet is he has a contract with the owners of the building and they might have some things they can do that will make his life uncomfortable (consult a lawyer first so you know what your legal options are). You might be able to use that as a stick to encourage him to take the carrot of a buyout. Try the carrot first, tho, and save the stick for any serious negotiations.

Next, you need to harden the contracts with your private owners. Make it clear that, for a small sum of money, they agree not to try to represent themselves as the resort. Again, consult a lawyer and get this written properly. Make any future private buyers sign this agreement as well.

At the end of the day, I would chalk this up as an expensive marketing lesson. If you can get him to sell, you don't have to jump through any hoops. Otherwise, you're competing with what Google sees as the legitimate business (which is a much more difficult path to walk).

It definitely sounds like your certificate is not installed correctly. I wouldn't worry about the htaccess until you have the SSL version working properly.

Something you might have missed is an intermediate certificate (sometimes called a CA certificate). That helps the end user browser validate the signature. I don't use Verisign so I don't know if they use one, but other SSL providers I use do.

It's not a penalty per se, it just means that Google is going to pick one copy and devalue the others. Does it affect your ability to rank? Not really. It just means one site is going to be the winner. Remember, a penalty is where Google devalues your whole site for bad behavior. Duplicate content is not bad behavior.

If you want to pick the rankings winner yourself you can add a canonical tag to the other pages pointing to the one you want to rank.

I dunno if it covers social yet, but there is a Linkscape API

Back up for just a second. You've got a standalone post that sounds like a response to something. A post? A blog? What?

I agree that for custom you get what you pay for. I'm in a very custom business and we have to work hard at the "sweet spot" where people want to pay for custom. In software this gets very fuzzy. Templates can be free, cheap, expensive or custom. Every user has to assign that value and make that determination themselves. What was probably being said was that a designer could make a template and sell it at $XXX a pop. You sell a few of those and you could make the money you want. Without the original post, tho, that's just a guess

I wouldn't install the certificate to get around this problem. In fact, that could make things harder to fix because your browser has now been fixed but everyone else get a scary SSL error that drives them off. Your end user will not know how to install a certificate, nor should they need to.

You either need to fix this in Apache or your control panel software (if you use one).

You stand to lose some rank in doing this, at least temporarily. Keywords in the domain help, but if you're not ranking well now I wouldn't count on that one change to carry you to #1. If I were you, I would focus your efforts on ranking the current site for that keyword.

What does your campaign for your site tell you about how well you're doing in SEO?

My current bet is linking domains, if we're only limited to those 2. Sitewide links seem to be harmful as of late, proving that total links is less valuable.

Depends what you're aiming for. The largest difference between mobile and any other browsing experience is real estate. You're extremely limited on a normal mobile browser vs any other venue. In this realm, the iPad is generally not considered mobile. You tend to get the same browsing experience you would get on a full computer.

Another difference is that no iOS devices support Flash (that includes the iPad). Adobe has also announced that they are dropping Flash support for mobile devices which leaves support for Android tablets in the future in doubt.

The same principle applies to all rewrites. You can rewrite one page, an entire directory or even your whole site. htaccess is one of Apache's best features and that's why every web server out there offers some version of it.

If I'm still not answering your question then please supply some more details and I can go more in depth.

301 is definitely the way to go, especially if you have inbound links to the unwanted pages. That will preserve most of your rank and transfer it to the actual page.

As far as blocking goes, you can use a robots.txt or a robots meta tag on your page with a NOFOLLOW,NOINDEX

First and foremost, you need to understand (or perhaps your CEO as well) that SEO is really a subset of marketing. Seriously, go watch some Whiteboard Fridays and you'll find them talking about marketing in pretty much every one.

Now that we're all on the same page about marketing... what your boss is asking for isn't impossible but very difficult and very much underpaid and overworked. 50 sites and 30 brands... really? For one person? That means each brand is getting, at most, one day of your time. It's a recipe for disaster. But to answer the question...

First, organize the sites and brands. Group them together (spreadsheets can help with this). Try to group by categories and then associate brands with websites. Next, come up with a way to address these. In other words, you can only practically work on one site at any given time. So I would pick 5 sites and set up a Moz campaign for each. Let each run 2 weeks and then Archive them. Moz only allows you 5 active campaigns at a time. I don't know what, if any, limits there are on archived campaigns. Now, assess the 5 reports while you set 5 new ones up and let them run. Rinse and repeat.

Now, for actions, you need to have a list for each website. Again, spreadsheets help here. Document what you do, when you did it and why. Then use Moz to keep tabs on what happens as a result. This will be painfully slow but if they don't want to give you the tools necessary it's the best you can do. If you do get an assistant you can use these reports and lists to delegate things for them to do.

Last but not least, sit down with the CEO and hammer out expectations. What does this CEO want? Does he want you to just make suggestions or is he expecting you to implement them as well? What kind of authority do you have to make these changes? An SEO without authority to make changes is impotent and your job will eventually be called into question (corporations are notorious for mandating things without conveying the associated authority to accomplish them). Try to work with this person to ensure that you know what they want and what you intend to do to get that result.

When I consider a new URL, I always consider how easy it is to remember and type. whitbyjetjewelry.co.uk fails both tests. Some people can't spell jewelry and, unless you're going to be selling jewelry on your jets (talk about a niche market!) I don't see how it's relevant to your business. Ryan's suggestion is top notch and they're not charging an arm and a leg for it. Snap it up!

Just canonical your urls to the root page and that should fix the problem.

Google is a registrar and it is known that they use some information to assist in crawling the internet (i.e. if you create domain.com as a site with no links or any external information, Google will still find and crawl it). I haven't heard of them using registrar information against owners, however. I have several domains in private registration and none of them are negatively affected by that either.

If you were dropped from their index that means something really bad went down. The reinclusion notice is automatic. When an actual human reviews your site is anyone's guess.

Here's an article listing the most common reasons for a complete deindex ban. I would review your site and make sure you're not doing any of them. Without any other data I can't venture a guess as to what was done to trigger it.

http://www.bigoakinc.com/seo-articles/banned-by-google.php

Depends how you have your lightbox set up. Is it an element within the page? If so, then spiders should pick it up. if it's AJAX or something else (like Flash) you might have some issues.

Be sure your translations have a defined URL stricture (i.e. domain.com/en, domain.com/fr, etc) so bots can spider them.

Major question:

Obviously they're running a 64 bit OS but what about the browser? For instance, Mat said he tested in Chrome, Firefox and IE. Of those, only IE has an official 64 bit version (and Windows defaults to the 32 bit version by default).

Using Waterfox (unofficial 64 bit build of Firefox) and IE9 64 bit the ads page loads fine. However, there was a 64 bit build of IE 8. Is it possible that could be the issue? My bet is that it's an IE issue and not a 64 bit one.

We've been re-evaluating our titles and I think the real standard here is the same one content has always had: does it sound natural? In other words, would you ever say what you just wrote in a real conversation? Since you're repeating the words "Google Engage" and it's a bit runny on the grammar, I'd say it doesn't look good.

Why not say Google Engage Basic Training for Agencies?