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Mike, it's a tough situation. It's so important that you are informed about your site and holding an agency (or any partner) accountable is critical. It's tougher once the relationship is over and it is a big deal if you find out you got hosed. It's unfortunate that this wasn't caught earlier.

At the very least, they should be able to give you some sort of overview. I spent most of my career on the agency side and you paid for their services and asking for information on your account isn't out of line, IMHO.

If you can get the data, great, however you know enough to not let it stop you. I mean, if you can hold them accountable, OK, but that won't change your predicament, right?

It sounds like there's plenty of black hat stuff you need to clean up and are smart enough to know to make it a priority before it really hits your site negatively.

And you know for next time -if there is a next time - who not to go to or what to make sure no outside partner does

Good luck!

Glad it was helpful - good luck and I look forward to more Q&As with you!

Welcome! My two cents (and the great thing about this site is that you'll get plenty of opinions) is that I like one campaign per domain. For me,  it's really about seeing what's happening within mysite - and, using your example, www.kibin.com/essay-editing is a page within your kibin.com domain.

Focusing on just a subfolder, like your essay-editing section, just limits your overall visibility into what's going on within your site. Personally, I look at the big picture then whittle down into the subfolders and whatnot.

Why do I have that preference? The pages have to live within the overall domain - I look at the relation between them, how they each rank, where I may cannibalize one vs the other, what page ranks well, what doesn't. This is what Moz campaigns are great for.

Moz will tell you which pages rank for which terms. You could learn that, again using your example,  a different page is ranking for "'essay editing" than the one you seem to want, www.kibin.com/essay-editing.

(Although, having just looked at your main domain and your essay-editing page, they look exactly alike so there's duplicate content and possible cannibalization going on - or something isn't functioning properly and the page won't load; I didn't dig into it.)

Now, since you can set up multiple campaigns, there's nothing to stop you for doing both, either. You can always try it that way and see what data you see and then tweak as you'd like.

Have you done some troubleshooting? If there's that much of a % change, did you check your robots, tags, redirects, etc. to see if any of the technical side may be hindering indexing?

I'm not sure what you mean by ranking delay for highly competitive keywords, so I'll address the second part of your question: there's a lot of tools you can access to determine how competitive a keyword is.

SEOMoz has one you can use, it's keyword analysis tool (located in the "research tools" section of this site) is a good one.

Also, you can use Google's Adwords keyword tool to get a reading on how competitive some words are.

Luke - quite the project you get! I admit, I usually stay away from books since they can get out of date pretty fast for this subject matter, so here's some websites to check out:

We've recently invested in Eloqua for our marketing automation, which is probably too big of a tool for many companies, however they have great email campaign resources. http://www.eloqua.com/resources/

And, Marketo is sorta similar to Eloqua: http://www.marketo.com/b2b-marketing-resources/

This site has some great examples people post for A/B testing, so there's usually good learnings you can gleen: http://www.abtests.com/ and implement.

I also like content Hubspot creates: http://www.hubspot.com/products/marketing-automation/ & http://www.hubspot.com/marketing-automation-information/

Hope that's a decent start!

The crawlers have so many billions of webpages to get to. We have more than 50,000 on our site; there's about 8,000 that they check more regularly than the others - some are just really deep on the site and hard to get to.

If you block with robots.txt link juice can't get passed along. If your canonicals are good, then ideally you wouldn't need the robots. Also, it really removes value of the social media postings.

So, to your question, if you have the tracking parameter blocked via robots, then no, I don't think you are getting the link juice.

http://www.rickrduncan.com/robots-txt-file-explained

When I want link juice passed on but want to avoid duplicate content, I'm more a fan of the no index, follow tags and using canonicals where it makes sense, too. But since you say your URLs with the parameters aren't being indexed then you must be using tags anyway to make that happen and not just relying on robots.

To your point of "are you sure":

http://www.evergreensearch.com/minimum-viable-seo-8-ways-to-get-startup-seo-right/

(I do like to cite sources - there's so many great articles out there!)

The goal should be the fewer clicks to get to the RIGHT item. (Which is subjective, for sure.) People will do more clicks to get to better data, however we shouldn't put them through any more clicks than needed - so, if you can do it in two, great, but if you need 3-4, then do 3-4.

The one thing I have noticed is that (depending on how big your site is) more clicks to get to deeper content can make it harder for search engines to get in and crawl those pages, which can reduce ranking opportunity.

I don't think either of those are really the best examples - Amazon ranks well for several factors that don't have to do with keywords and Ebay is too "owned" by people posting content vs. the site manager managing it.

Retail sites like Kohl's do this (ex: womens>womens dresses>womens maxi dresses) and same with bestbuy.com, and REI.

http://www.searchenginepartner.com/Latest-SEO-News/seo-trends-utilysing-lsi-and-the-long-tail.html

I'd target both; short tail words can be harder to rank higher for, and the long tail can help sooner since they are often less competitive.

I get 500 errors when either my site is slow to load or if my site goes down. So SEOMoz could have crawled you and experienced any one of those two situations.

I can see #4 being a good option, too.

Well, you really are the only person who can answer what you think it best for your customer and then your site. You can see where revenue comes from, what products your customers want, etc. I know that, for example, I can get better conversions on better pages than others, so I want the ones that have the best conversion opportunity to rank better than the other ones.

If there's a difference between what pages you want to rank for several big keywords vs what Google has ranking, then that's usually caused by the site not being SEO'd properly to give Google the indicators for what pages you'd like to rank for which terms.

As the SEO director, it may be best worth your while to do a site audit and figure out how to address the bigger issues vs individual key pages?

Pagination can be a great thing for SEO because it helps Google identify the best page for certain results and it can offer a better user experience. I'm not sure what you mean by duplicate pagination results or where you are getting that data from, however, the goal of true pagination isn't having four pages, it's telling Google that THIS one of the four is the main page and the other three have similar content.

While I'm not sure if I am explaining it well, I think this is a great article to cover pagination: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/pagination-best-practices-for-seo-user-experience as is this one: http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/mitigating-mixed-signals-effectively-consolidating-paginated-urls

Google likes the page it thinks is best to match the search query. Kind of an annoying answer, but that's how Google fancies its algo. That said, both of your pages have the same page title and the same H1. What I mean by that is you aren't necessarily telling that you want that second URL to rank for that specific term because you are also telling it you want your first URL to.

So, create some difference between the two pages to help indicate which page you want to rank for which content. When you don't differentiate, Google will make the choice for you and they rarely pick the page you'd prefer.

It can be hard for small (or even larger) businesses to accomplish some of these things.

However, to be successful, it's what needs to be done - so the question becomes, if you want to do C work, is it fair to expect an A grade?

Based on my conversations with Google, relevance is absolutely something to think about - if your site is all about oranges and you get links from sites/even blogs that are all about cars, it's  flag because it can look spammy.

Unless it's an outlier and is just one (or two) random links from sites that aren't related in content to yours, you risk harming yourself by connecting your site with unrelated content.

Honestly, then you aren't really giving yourself any options - or the portals you use/systems, etc. aren't.

Since you can't caonical or do 301s or any of the other indicators Google looks for to figure out duplicate content, you can't really tell Google you are the originator. Even if you can't do a regular hyperlink, can you do a non-hyperlink/URL in the posting?

Great point. Not something that could give the client confidence.