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It's ironic you're asking that today. Search Engine land has an excellent article on just that

First click free: We’ve worked with subscription-based news services to arrange that the very first article seen by a Google News user (identifiable by referrer) doesn’t require a subscription. Although this first article can be seen without subscribing, any further clicks on the article page will prompt the user to log-in or subscribe to the news site….

It is possible to limit the number of free articles that a Google News reader can access via First Click Free. A user coming from the domain [.google.] must be able to see a minimum of 5 articles per day. This practice is described as “metering” the user: when the user has clicked on too many of a publisher’s articles from Google News, the meter for freely accessible articles on that site is exhausted.

If your site meters access on a weekly or monthly basis, you are still responsible for showing a minimum of five articles per day to Google users. Otherwise, your site will be treated as a subscription site.

While Penguin changed a lot of things about links hurting you, nothing that I have seen anywhere has suggested that nofollowed links are harmful. Google gives these safe harbor, more or less. The only exception would be if you were spamming and get reported as such.

There's no difference, really. Multi-domain certificates have been around for years (UCC, which is what this basically is, isn't new at all) and I've never heard of any problems with them. If anything, a multi-domain EV like this better in the long run because EV is much harder to obtain (you have to be a corporation to get one). I wasn't aware that anyone was allowed to issue what is basically a EV UCC certificate but I guess it was inevitable (I am surprised they don't have EV wildcard yet)

For Google's purposes they want a valid, signed certificate. They don't care if it's a single domain or a multi-domain EV like this. All certificates are issued and validated the same way.

Generally speaking, no. You're using ccTLDs and it's generally understood by Google that each one is targeted to a specific region. Furthermore, each of the countries you're targeting are all English so localization is not as critical. You could try to differentiate the language (Canadian English is different from Australian English, etc) but it's not necessary (although you would probably want to do this on French Canadian pages, if applicable).

If it's really, really eating at you that much, host each site in the country it's targeting (not necessary but it helps a bit). Other than this, watch this video by Matt Cutts and be happy.

You're talking about the Knowledge Graph. It appears in the upper right corner of results and often contains images. Here's an example: Coke

Generally, it appears when you have a strong enough brand for Google to show it when people search for that brand. You can't control when or where it appears, and the data is gleaned from not only your website, but other potential sources (sometimes with undesired results).

Google is also not known for its customer service, especially with regards to organic search. Best of luck getting a response. Maybe try tweeting Matt Cutts?

What are you doing to market the site? Good content is a great foundation, but it sounds like nobody knows you exist. That's where marketing comes in. Have you reached out to people who might be interested in your content? Maybe get some Adwords just to start the ball rolling and get relevant traffic. Do you have social media you could use to reach your target audience with?

Any keyword that's in the URL will be highlighted in Google's search. And Google seems to consider a given URL as one logical unit.

Does it help? Yes. Is it something I would go out of my way to obtain? Probably not (especially since these vanity TLDs are often more expensive). I would say you'd be just as fine with a .com as you would .shoes. Remember, exact match domains (i.e. www.tennisshoes.com) were a huge SEO thing for a while and have not been so in quite some time. I would say your URL structure after the domain name is more important than the TLD itself.

Canonical isn't like a 301, where the page is eventually dropped. Canonical is a hint the page gives to what should win the duplicate content race. It doesn't mean you won't be crawled again, but it might take some time. The key factor here is page popularity. The more popular a page, the faster it gets crawled.

Have you considered a social campaign for the pages in question?

There really isn't any practical difference. Here's the raw HTML so you can see

[Your Link Here](some url) OR Your Link Here

vs

[Your Link Here](some url)

Google's bot will parse the URL and note it as a link.

Canonical hands down. This is what canonical was made for anyways: duplicate content you can't remove.

Canonical simply lets you tell Google which duplicate content should "win" the indexation race and Google will take it into consideration. I can think of many reasons why you'd have overlapping tags but would not want to remove them (which is what a 301 would do)

First off, chicago.yoursite.com is going to be seen differently from atlanta.yoursite.com, unless they are substantially similar (i.e. they are carbon copies). Remember that this means that each subdomain will have its own SEO. yoursite.com/chicago is going to be viewed as the same site as yoursite.com/atlanta because they share the same TLD.

Unless you're going to build a ton of content around each, I would suggest one site with a subdirectory. It's less work for you. Then make each localized page unique. Take pictures, discuss the features of each location, etc. Add the address and maybe a map widget.

Ok, you got me there. It doesn't matter what Rand's opinion of your site is. Or Roger. Or myself for that matter.

Organic SEO is a branch of marketing aimed specifically at Google (or Bing, but mostly Google). And Google is a fickle mistress who will coo at the latest things but turn her nose up at the strangest times. We kinda know what she likes but her handlers talk in riddles sometimes and seldom give you straightforward answers. So you can ace the Moz exam and still be #37 for "buffalo widgets". Or "beard growing cream". Or whatever it is that you want traffic for.

I work for a company that rode the Google wave. We did well in the SEO game for a long time (it was stupid cheap marketing) and, like a lot of people here, lost big in the various updates that came afterward. Since then, we don't focus on organic SEO as much. We still make sure we have quality content, but we broadened our marketing to make sure we weren't so singularly focused. No more spreadsheets detailing how many links we built this week. No more wringing our hands over the fact that we have 10% KW saturation on that one page. No more guest writing articles. We pay attention to our SEO, but it's a small part of what we do and it's part of the other things we do naturally. Organic is nice but not the only show in town.

At the end of the day, only you can decide if it's worth the cost of a Pro subscription to keep pursuing organic rankings. I don't know your company/business/barber/accounting/income.

Moz isn't useful. We just hang around here to see what Rand's beard looks like this week.

Your website is like a house. It has problems and you want to fix them. So what do you do? Hire a home inspector. They come in, look at the house and give you their professional opinion of what's wrong. But it's up to you, the homeowner, to fix the problems.

Moz is a home inspector. It inspects your website and tells you what it thinks is wrong. But they can't market your website, build your SEO or grow your beard build your brand. And remember, no home inspection or SEO tool reveals all your problems. Moz tells you the obvious ones and some not-so-obvious ones but it can't tell the difference between quality content and spam. That's your job.

The only caveat I would offer is to make sure you don't run afoul of any trademarks. You can do organic SEO all day long (falls under fair use) but if you run PPC with their trademark inside, they can request Google remove that ad (I know because I watchdog our brand the same way).

I would include a disclaimer on your site that you are not affiliated with Brand Name company and that their name is trademarked. Beyond that, write some good content to explain that Brand Name doesn't sell the product anymore, but you do. Would be useful information for potential clients. I know I like finding pages that explain what happened to a market segment I pay attention to (i.e. they left the market, went bankrupt, etc).

I have two general rules of thumb on disavow

1. Disavow is for unnatural link patterns, not unnatural links
2. Don't disavow first and ask questions later. Disavow is a flame thrower and while they can help you set things on fire, they are a terrible way to weed a garden.

It sounds like your problem is not the link but the fear that the link is going to be seen as unnatural and might draw a penalty. If it's seen as unnatural it will likely be devalued. That's it. One link won't kill you. If anything, it might hurt the blog its on. Unless it's clear cut, leave it alone.

There's several different kids of SSL but it sounds like you're talking about a single domain. That narrows things down to the two most common kinds: domain validated and extended validation.

Domain validation is the most common kind of certificate. The certification authority will send an email to the administrative contact listed on the WHOIS of the domain. Typically it's a link and you click it and that's all that's involved. These are relatively inexpensive but only work for one domain or subdomain (i.e. the certiciate will be issued for www.domain.com but won't show as valid for domain.com). In this same vein, but more expensive, is the wildcard certificate, which works for all subdomains (*.domain.com).

Extended Validation is only available for corporations and you have to jump through a LOT of hoops to get one (birth certificate of one of your officers, letter of validity from your lawyer or accountant, etc.). They take some time to get but the advantage is that you get the coveted green bar (see PayPal's site for a good example).

It doesn't matter who issues the certificate. Verisign used to be a huge name in this area but not so much in recent years. You'll pay more for their name and "warranty", but I doubt anyone outside the industry itself could tell you who Verisign is, let alone what the difference is. I have two Godaddy certificates and it hasn't slowed us down one bit. Many people simply resell for another authority (i.e. GeoTrust, Comodo, etc)

The encryption itself doesn't differ between certificates. Your Private Key (the piece your server needs to decrypt the traffic) and Certificate Signing Request(CSR) will have to be at least 2048 bits in strength (industry-wide). The actual encryption between your server and your client's browser is something that is negotiated as part of the "handshake" when the connection is first made and is most likely 128 bits (although some browsers and servers can support 256 bits). One thing you will need to note is the difference between SHA1 and SHA2 (Godaddy directly asks you which you want and I'm sure the others do as well). When you look at a certificate's details in your browser you'll see who issued a certificate. If it says G2, they're using SHA2. SHA1 has some weaknesses and is being phased out. The only people who will notice the difference are people running Windows XP SP2 or earlier (running any browser, even Chrome or Firefox) and they'll get an invalid certificate warning.

Be sure that your host has plugged the Heartbleed bug or you'll expose your private keys (anyone with your private key can decrypt your traffic).

You do know that you can put raw HTML into Wordpress, right? It's a full CMS system so you can paste the raw info in and it will keep the same template.

Google itself really doesn't care about the extension or how it looks. If the page is isolated from the site (i.e. it doesn't interlink like a normal page) then Google might view it differently.

Matt Cutts talked about this on topic. I would pick only one and run with it (i.e. all SSL) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xeFo4ytOk8M

Also a small public service announcement, please make certain your host is all patched up from Heartbleed.