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I'm not sure I understand. What is wrong with the ASP -> PHP redirect?

While it's possible that advertising is skewing this, it's also important to note that Social advertising doesn't work the same way as regular ads. Social ads simply place you in front of people who would not otherwise see your posts. So you're basically paying CPM but any Likes/Shares are incumbent on the people who see the ads to respond in that way. Granted you can still go viral without that, but it's much rarer nowadays. Most people boost social with ads but I wouldn't necessarily classify those differently. A like from an ad still means they're following/engaged with you.

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

The correct answer is... as many as you can afford the time to build correctly

From the Moz link building guide

There are lots and lots of ways to get links. The right tactics for you depend on the resources you have at your disposal as well as the industry that you're in. Industries that are more established and competitive often require you to be quite aggressive with link building, and you might find earning those links more difficult. Other industries, often the newer industries that are quickly growing, are full of opportunities to engage with bloggers and build a community.

But the key here is to BUILD VALUE. From Rand's recent Whiteboard Friday

I would urge you to go the opposite direction. Narrow your funnel. Worry less about the number of people you're targeting and more about the success rate, because once you get the success rate high, you can turn up the volume really fast. But if your success rate is low and there's a limited market of influencers in your field, you can quickly burn all of them with your outreach before you ever have a chance to get good at it.

The simple fact is that your question is, more or less, "How many low quality links can I safely build?" and the answer there is none. I could easily go get 80 links... and then those links would get devalued or draw a Penguin penalty. Instead, you need to build quality links, and that means you have to take time to build some value with what you're offering to them. To sum up that Whiteboard Friday "There are no shortcuts to build quality links". You have to do it low and slow. If someone is willing to give you a link for little or nothing then that link isn't work building.

Just an educated guess on my part but I'd say that it's probably due to the indexing problems of late.

First, this index still contains data crawled up to 100 days ago.We try to make sure that what we've crawled recently is stuff that we believe has been updated/changed, but there may be sites and pages that have changed significantly in that period that we didn't update (due to issues I've described here previously with our crawlers & schedulers).

It's clear that Avvo is being crawled and indexed. You have a link on this page that shows up in OSE already

http://www.avvo.com/attorneys/34655-fl-daniel-dean-1267113.html

Not really. People are obsessed with calling duplicate content a penalty. It's not really a penalty as much as engines trying to sort the noise out. If pages A, B and C all have the same content, there's only room for a single #1 rank, so that means the other pages will have to lose out. They're not penalized, just not ranked as highly.

The place where duplicate content is harmful is if someone scrapes your site and outranks you. That's a different problem entirely. In your case, the concern is that you will harm your site. That's not the case. The engines will simply pick one review page in your case and devalue the rest. In my book that's not necessarily bad because people are still going to come to your site and read a review page.

Canonicals can help by letting you pick which page wins the duplicate race. You simply tell Google that B and C are duplicates of A and, thus, A wins #1.

Link audits are always helpful (hence why Moz specializes in them) but you want to identify bad or poor links. Relevancy is something that Google will determine for itself. I mean if a tire shop is linking to a florist Google might not give that link much weight but what if the tire shop has a blog and they want to thank said florist for sending flowers after a coworker dies? Google might not give it a lot of relevance to it, but it's also not necessarily spam.

Unless you can clearly identify that a given link is actively hurting you, I wouldn't remove/disavow it. Remember that link disavow is a flamethrower in that it can kill weeds and burn your house down. Which it does depends a lot on how you use it.

So, first off, you don't NEED to go full HTTPS. The SEO benefit (if there is one) is minor at best. If it were a large benefit then people would be driving hard towards full HTTPS. Google doesn't require any data be submitted over HTTPS, but PCI compliance does. You don't take credit cards so that doesn't apply.

If you want to try SSL for free, my suggestion is to switch to CloudFlare DNS and use their Universal SSL product. This way you can stick HTTPS on your site without changing anything. You can use an unsigned certificate on your site if you want to go full SSL. Cloudflare only encrypts between their servers and your clients, not between you and CloudFlare. Full SSL doesn't require a valid SSL, just any SSL certificate (Cloudflare doesn't validate between you and them). Once that's done, be sure to enable HSTS to force all traffic through HTTPS

Someone needs to make a Blackboard Thursdays...

I think you're right. it doesn't sound like there's a solid case here for subdomains. Consolidation would make for easier marketing as well.

Subdomains are a bank shot at best. Google can determine their relationship to the root domain, but you're relying on Google to make that connection. A subfolder, however, has an implicit connection to the root domain (because it's under said domain). Just understand that a subdomain (for the purposes of SEO) should be treated like it is its own site. That means each one gets its own marketing campaign.

Should you consolidate? Possibly. How related are the franchisees? I mean, if we're talking restaurants that's a no-brainer to consolidate, but if we're talking about, say, carpet cleaning you could make a case for subdomains focusing the local aspects better. Additionally, a subdomain would afford them their own site so they could do distinct advertising/promos.

Wayfair is a similar comparison. Wayfair represents a single consolidated site compared to their 200+ domains previously (under the CSN brand). I'm familiar with them since we did similar things back in the day. I'm not sure how applicable it is because we used to do the same mega-spam footers they did. The bulk of their problem (long before Penguin) was that they were what is best termed as incestuous linking schemes. What crib bedding has to do with pool covers is anybody's guess. What likely tripped them up was, back in the day, we all linked keyword rich links to the sites without any regard to relevance. Once Google catches that you have to get rid of it. A single domain is far easier to SEO for, but they probably ultimately consolidated for the sake of advertising (their ads are everywhere). But (on point with the OP) Hayneedle did 301 their old domains to their new consolidated domain, and obviously for SEO benefit. Example

I don't think it's as big a deal now because link wheels like that are long gone. I have also seen other smaller networks arise (i.e. Soap) that link between properties (in the header no less) and do not nofollow anything. It's worth noting that these networks are poorly related (camping vs diapers vs clothing) so I don't think there's any real focus on SEO there (or they just don't care). At best these links carry some minor boost but at worst they carry no weight at all. Either way, if there was a penalty it doesn't show up.

There's an SEO I know who does nothing but buy expired domains and 301 them to his site. He claims excellent return on his investments in these older domains in terms of boosting his domains that he redirects to. So 301-ing a domain is worthwhile.

Not really. Google is looking for unnatural links and patterns. A single sitewide footer link isn't going to impact SEO that much. If the sites all share the same server/IP Google will likely just devalue them (not penalize) and move on. If you're still uncertain you can always nofollow them.

The only exception would be if you're trying to link targeted words in the anchor (which does look spammy). Just link the site names.

It doesn't look like that site is even indexed by Google. Even if it were, disavowing an entire site is pretty easy so a one domain spam attack wouldn't be very effective.

I wouldn't worry about it unless you experience a massive rankings drop.

I always remind people that Black Hat techniques like this can succeed in the short term but seldom produce the desired result in the long term. Google has a small army of highly paid smart people who want to catch things like this (see Panda, Penguin, etc). When Google does catch this (assuming they haven't already) they will almost certainly face some sort of penalty.

My bet is they're spending the newness of their sites on this technique (a new site has no rank but no penalties either). It probably gives some initial boost until Google catches on with their slower systems (Panda and Penguin are both slow in refreshing). A spam report to Google might draw a manual penalty to the main site but, as Egol said, this is a lot of wasted time and effort on their part.

Depends on the blog. Not all guest blogging is the same. If the blogs in question were just for guest blogging and have no real topics they focus on you could have hurt yourself. But if the blogs were high quality and related to your site then they could have helped.

Do you have social media that you promote and actively work on alongside your blog? What else do you do to encourage readership beyond just posting a blog? You might be wondering "I just want to know about links" but this is the new link building. Readership tends to link things so building readership is critical. Then you need to (as Rand put it) amplify your content.

Nobody ever said spam doesn't pay (in fact, short term spammers get lots of money potentially). But spam doesn't have long term success either. Remember, even if Google doesn't catch it now, Google is still actively trying to catch them. For a long time people said Google couldn't filter links and then came Penguin, which could filter links.

My suggestion is you report both sites for spam. Google is far more likely to take manual action against these sites in the short term. And they clearly are spam.

Why do you NEED a blog? More importantly, why do you need a blog for what is a highly technical (and probably arcane) topic?

Blogging is not for everyone and everything. Blogging is for where there is some form of dialog or constant change where you can generate fresh content people want to read on a regular basis. I have one website where a blog makes a lot of sense. It lends itself to lots of artsy-deco blogs and we have some talented young ladies who have found a niche in writing that. Their readership isn't stellar, but combined with social media efforts it works decently well. I have many other websites where we have no blog and never will, because attempting to blog about those topics would be pointless because nobody would ever read them. Instead, we put the information out and then market the sites as best as we can.

It sounds like you're a bit too niche here. If all you do is SEO, and don't offer, say, online marketing, you're really missing out because SEO as a job by itself is really hard to sustain. Offer to set up an Adwords campaign or offer to do some work on their social media. Maybe they need more local efforts. Do they show up on your phone if you search for what it is that they do? I find myself using Google Now a TON for local because Google makes it stupid easy to find. Websites, maps and phones numbers (with one click to open up my dialer and call).

Offering more services should help keep your clients happy. Especially if they don't have the time (or drive) to work with you on SEO.

And they would have gotten away with it too if weren't for those meddling kids and their pesky subdomains