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I would stop worrying and keep optimizing. I can't say specifically, but my guess is that all other things being equal, a good Places listing could potentially draw more attention. But who cares, keep building, keep promoting, keep marketing. Get exposure any and every way you can.
1. Use the canonical tag. The assumption is that whatever rankings you may have garnered for the "small pack" version would now simply land on the other page. The duplicate content implications are far greater than the potential loss of some rankings.
2. Yes, use the canonical tag on the /index to point to just http://www.yoursite.com/
Different ranking trackers handle this differently - some show places as organic, some don't. However, it is very, very rare for Google to show both an Organic and a Places listing for the same site, so it is possible that you are legitimately ranking for that term but the Places is showing instead.
I would defer to the places experts on this, though.
ReverbNation has an incredible natural link profile that builds up a ton of authority. Spammers and hackers take advantage of this by setting up content on ReverbNation and then pointing tens of thousands of spam links directly at the pages. This allows them to rank temporarily.
I wouldn't worry about it. Your site is indexed in Google and is, likely, cached. Just because Google's cache: operator isn't working properly for you at the moment isn't a real cause of concern.
The biggest concern with these sites is that their distribution network can easily create anchor text over optimization penalties. If you promote an article on these sites and use manipulated anchor text, there is the possibility that by the end of the day you could have several hundred sites all with the exact same anchor text pointing to you. In a post-penguin SEO environment, this is not a good thing.
I can't see a strong argument against using these sites if you are creating good content and then using your brand or your actual name as the link, but I would be careful with targeted anchor text.
I am spidering your site right now to see what issues come up. The first thing I noticed was the large number of subdomains...
It appears you are opening up your site to other bloggers - just be careful with it.
Our spiders found over 25,000 pages in the first few minutes, which seems pretty high for a site your size (although I know you have around 9000 articles written)
One issue is that your article and a comment page tend to always get indexed, despite having very similar content, ie: /article/ and /article/comment-page-1/
There are many great SEO firms listed on the SEOMoz Recommended page
1. Just use your address and phone number in the byline of your blog posts, along with a link.
2. You can, but it kind of defeats the purpose. The 30 minutes it takes to write a decent piece of content is the least you can offer a blogger in return for space on their site.
3. Guest blogs. I would stay away from article directories - just my opinion, but they tend to be spammy, can lead to anchor text over optimization, and (if and when that happens) it is very difficult to remove the links.
Yes, this will remove them, but if you want to speed up the process you can use the google URL removal tool http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=164734
Actually, the problem is that Google.co.uk tends to default the user to the keyword "Global" as if Globak is just a mispelling. My guess is the majority of the people searching for Globak actually intended to search for Global, and Google automatically fixes it for them.
Google is probably getting better at removing any value from links like this:
http://www.englishdaily626.com/links.php?008
Most of your anchor-text specific keywords come from links pages like this. Am I correct that a good bit of your rankings losses were for keywords like "english to spanish translation"
Wordpress. Still, hands down, Wordpress.
Unless you can find a compelling reason to use Joomla like a extension that just isn't available anywhere else and is necessary for the functioning of your site, I would go with Wordpress.
I have never seen any evidence that commas are negative, however usability can often drive the social factors that may play more and more a role in the future. I wouldn't make it a priority to change those URLs now, but when the time comes (perhaps with a redesign of the website), it would be worth your while to go ahead and remove them.
No experience with it, and their "blog" links to a twitter account with 4 posts in the last 2 years.
The live keyword analysis tool has always been good, but you really shouldn't be worried about keyword density. Just make sure your keywords occur once in the document and spend the rest of your time writing good, relevant content...
Yep, it is definitely best practice to come up with unique titles and descriptions for the shopping sites. If you have a large number of products, you might want to use a service like TextBroker or ContentWriters.us to handle the work for you.
Absolutely. We have seen nothing but positives when using the hreflang tag. Of course, make sure you use it appropriately and don't accidentally tag a page that doesn't have a sibling on the other ccTLDs
Google would prefer in most cases not to index search results. What we find best is a method called Tag Seeding, where essentially you are linking to a set of known tag pages that help Google find the relevant categorical results. This helps prevent Google from finding an unending number of pages while, at the same time, allowing you to expose users to your content in an organized fashion.
I wouldn't worry about it. You would see a modest improvement at best. Focus on good content at the moment, this kind of minor manipulation won't be worth the effort.