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The true method of "Negative SEO".  Shady.

Just following on from what David Liu said about Ahrefs, you might find this a very interesting read:

http://www.matthewwoodward.co.uk/experiments/ahrefs-majestic-seo-1-million-domain-showdown/

That being said, I believe Majestic found more backlinks here, although as you will see in that article there is a difference between links reported, and live links.

Are you able to link the site \ pm the site so I can take a look?

OK, I have had a quick look and I do see some potential problems:

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links.html?anchor_id=25321246274&anchor_text=holtorf+medical+group&anchor_type=phrase&group=0&page=1&return_page=1&return_source=phrase&return_target=page&site=www.holtorfmed.com&sort=page_authority&target=page

Check that page.  You will see this particular term (Holtorf Medical Group) seems overly used, thanks to a few sitewide sidebar links for example realitynibs.com

You should either get those sitewide links nofollowed, or removed,... or failing that dissavowed.  There may be other examples in that link, but I believe that is a potential cause of your problems.  I am seeing sitewide links be the cause of alot of problems lately.

Also if you go down the dissavow route, this might be worth reading: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2271695/Disavowing-Links-Google-Says-Use-a-Machete-Not-a-Scalpel

Obviously, be careful not to remove any decent high quality links.

I like your idea for comparison, however, be warned that once you open the box be prepared for counter campaigns by your competitor.

But I think a blog post like that sounds a natural and potentially a good source of conversions.  Just be sure to be ready to back up any claims you make.

But yes, I like your idea, and thanks for the idea of using adwords advertising to do this.  I like that too.

I use Inspyders rank tracker, and back link monitor to keep track of all that stuff.  Pretty good.

Looking at your sitemap, you do not appear to have a page .com/site or page.com/site/

Are you expecting a page named one of those to exist, or would you like the logo linked to your homepage.  If it is the latter, there may be an easy fix with this plugin: http://wordpress.org/plugins/eps-301-redirects/

Simple put in the .com/site and .com/site/ urls and point it where you want it.

You say .com/site is the "WordPress Address (URL)" in WP).  Shouldn't this just be .com, unless you have 2 wordpress installs for some reason?  I am not sure I fully understand this.

I wonder if you have your wordpress installed in a subdirectory, with the url pointing at the root i.e. http://codex.wordpress.org/Giving_WordPress_Its_Own_Directory

Essentially, you will need to just clarify these points a little more please.

I would stay well clear of any company that resorts to those kind of tactics.  Sounds more likely to be one of those scams than an SEO company.

I have read elsewhere that it impacts what search engines see, so will insert backlinks to other sites which only show to the crawlers.  You, or anyone else visiting the site would not notice anything different.  Its a very sneaky hack.

This would potentially affect your site rankings.  Apart from PR leakage, if they are linking to bad domains etc Google might not look kindly on it.

Just remove the offending code \ hack, and things should slowly get back to normal though as your site is recrawled.  Have you noticed a change in your rankings?  If you sort it quickly, I doubt you will need to do anything, but remove the hack.

Has Google identified your site as being hacked?  If they have follow these steps including request they review the site at the end: http://www.google.com/webmasters/hacked/

Yeh, they do specifically say its not available on the Mac.

Yoast uses a slightly different sitemap structure compared to some of the other plugins that generate a "sitemap.xml" file, so that maybe the reason.  I wouldn't worry though, as long as the sitemap is in webmaster tools you are good to go.

I think your brand name could be mistaken as it is quite long, but I don't think that would make much difference with your link profile.  It just isn't natural.

I guess branding is built from a number of signals, such as social media, domain names etc.  Those anchors differ from your domain and your facebook.

I suspect Google is more likely to see your brand as "Westlake Dermatology".

Unfortunately, to successfully do decent SEO on a one-page site you will need to make alternate landing pages for the keywords you are targeting as you will only be able to really target a couple of keywords on that page.

This has a number of benefits, as you can usually put more information on the site that you cannot fit onto the "one-page" homepage.  I have successfully done this on a "one page" parrallax site, and even linked back from the front page content to the keyword pages.

On a negative side, the whole point of the "one-page" is to wow the user and maximise conversion.  If 90% of your search traffic bypasses that page... well it may well defeat the purpose of it to an extent, and you may want to consider an alternative.

That sucks.  I suspect the site is not configured properly, but that it would require cpanel\ftp access to fix properly.

At least you have a solution, which is half the battle with Wordpress.  There are always bugs that need to be worked around (mainly from theme problems in my experience).

Anyway, glad you got a solution.

I too would like to know what people's opinions are with press release sites like prweb.  I have a competitor that has a high authority dofollow link via prweb, and it seems to have worked for them.

I guess the risk is whilst a prweb link may be good, you don't know which spammy sites will pick up that press release and republish it on their site.

But, yeh, would also love to hear what people have to say on this.

I checked the site, and saw something a bit odd.  This link kinda explains the problem, as you have the same code they have identified as a problem.

http://www.oxwall.org/forum/topic/11304

I would recommend in the first instance your client speak to their host.  I am not overly sure how good Godaddy is, but I haven't heard good things.  The common fix for this is reverting for a backup prior to this event happening.

In addition, once fixed install http://wordpress.org/plugins/better-wp-security/

If you do not have a backup, then try reinstalling wordpress files (keep the database).  Delete all plugins, and reinstall from fresh.  But for the love of god... take a backup first.

If you need a recommendation for a host try Siteground for specialist Wordpress hosting, or Hostnine for something cheaper, but very good.  We use both, but mainly Hostnine for client sites.

I would go for www.  There are some technical reasons why you would want www's.

I don't know the full reason, but the way some hosts configure their caching, and cpanel cloudflare integration you may be forced to use www's if you want to take advantage of that.  Take a popular host like Siteground for instance, if you wanted to use their supercacher and cloudflare you must use www's.

Sorry I cannot provide clear technical reasons, as I don't fully understand it, but I have had to deal with this in the past.  Prior to running into these issues, I used to think it didn't matter and had all my sites with the non-www's.  Its not a problem on the whole, but you should be aware in a very small number of cases it might be (of course you can just avoid any problems by avoiding that particular configuration, it just might be annoying thats all).

It sounds like you just need to wait for Google to recrawl your robots.txt file.  I saw this error in the serps:

www.thewilddeckcompany.co.uk/products/timber-water...

A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more.So it is clear that the robots.txt file has not updated with the changes, after the mistake was made.  Try fetching as Googlebot within webmaster tools, but it may take a little time to update.  But at least it would seem that the robots.txt error is still a cause of the problem, just need to wait a little longer.

The site looks quite old and dated.

What do your competitors sites look like?  Chances are they would be looking at various sites, and may instantly compare you to some of the new sites, and click the back button.  There are some amazing wordpress themes now with Woocommerce integration, which even if you DIY the website would look alot better, so if you have a little knowledge you can get a site relatively easily.

If you budget or skills do not permit a new site, work on some of the little things.  Get a smarter \ crispier logo, add more features \ articles etc. Try to get more engagement, more help pages, blog etc.  Adjust the padding on the product descriptions so they don't line up against the borders etc.

The way I often approach these things is to "brand out" the homepage, and do two inner pages, one for each location.