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Well if you want links to the content on an html page and not the PDF then make the content fully HTML compatible.  Place a small form at the bottom of the page allowing users to submit their email for the PDF version and you won't have people trying to link directly to your PDF.

I would continue with erring on the side of caution when it comes to link building.  That competitor is on a one way street to a penalty sooner or later.

I recommend targeting themes of keywords rather than one exact match keyword.  I typically choose the top 2-3 keywords per theme to target based on highest search volume and lowest competition.

It sounds like you have canonical and rel next/prev setup correctly so you shouldn't worry about duplicate meta descriptions.  You could add ?page= as a query string to "ignore" in WMT and then it will ignore those pages and you won't be getting any errors from duplicate meta's on those pages.

Hope this helps,

It depends on how you are coding it?  Can you paste some sample code?

Are you tracking rankings on all 3 engines?  I've noticed something like this before where it said I was increasing or decreasing in ranking and I didn't see any change until I looked at Yahoo or Bing ranking and that's where the change was happening.

If you keep the same URL structure and properly SEO optimize the WP site then you shouldn't have any problems with rankings.  I recommend using the Yoast SEO plugin for Wordpress and making sure you correctly implement your robots.txt file to block any archives or duplicate content that might get created by Wordpress when you bring the content over.  Wordpress has author archives, date based archives, etc and you need to make sure you don't get any duplicate content indexed.  The Yoast SEO plugin has a great post here with all the details:

http://yoast.com/articles/wordpress-seo/

Could you consider a version of option 4?

Main deal page could feature the top 3-5 deals of each of your most popular subcategories.  Then your category pages feature all the deals for that category so it doesn't seem like there would be a duplicate content issue with this approach.  This also seems to be a user-centric approach b/c it allows people to see a variety of deals on the main page and they are being curated by popularity of category and top 3-5 best sellers within the category.

Does that make sense?

This sounds like a cautious approach.  If you are only issuing 30-50 anchor text optimized badges and you vary the anchor text I think you're safe as long as relevancy remains intact.

In my opinion I believe the correct implementation is to use the JavaScript event.  I've seen it implemented this way on a few ecommerce sites that I know are doing well.

The only metadata that the search engines look at are image titles and alt tags.

of you are referring to all of the metadata stored in a RAW image then no the engines don't use this data today That we know of.  As seo morphs more into content and content becomes more and more visual this isn't to say that they might not use it in the future.

What do you mean the nofollow did not work?  I noticed on the example page that some of your external links in the papers section are nofollow while the videos are not nofollowed.

Yes it "could" be that your homepage has been penalized or has lost some back links.  If so it would have a direct impact on the link juice flowing through to your other pages.  The best thing to do is check out webmaster tools for any warnings.  If you don't have any warnings then I would start digging into my link profile to see if any links have fallen off your profile recently.

I think SimpleLivingWithGod.com will help you rank faster for simple living queries.  Titling with your brand name at the end is a best practice in my opinion but definitely not required.  I never recommend leading with the brand name unless you are Sears.com or WalMart.com.  Those brands are recognizable to the point it makes sense to lead your titles with the brand b/c the brand actually drives CTR.  If you're brand isn't known and you aren't investing heavily in the brand they I think your keyword targeted approach is the best option.  Just don't get carried away and spammy with it and make sure your page titles reflect the actual content on the page and you should be good to go.

Thumbs up if this helps!

Thanks,

301 redirecting shouldn't be hurting you much unless you are getting 3 or more 301 redirects on the same URL.  When you string together a bunch of 301's you stand the chance that Google will refuse to follow it after about 3 so in that case you would be in trouble.

Other than that you should be OK and once Google reads the 301's they will eventually deindex the old pages and your 301 ratio should go down.

I agree with the earlier response though that you should be mindful about changing product titles too many .

In my opinion CL is great for the traffic it can drive but not good for link equity.  I'm pretty sure they nofollow all of the links from Craigslist so the only real value is the traffic.  If the listings are expired and still cached by craigslist I would suggest seeing if you can't login to craiglist to manage the ads either by adding new ones or possibly deleting old ones.

Branded sitewide footer links should be ok as long as your domain isn't an EMD.  If you do have an EMD then I would not use site-wides and go with advice of Irving about making them homepage only.

It is usually a good thing to do some natural internal linking from your editorial content to your main site or product/service pages.  Be careful not to "over-optimize" the anchor text when you link internally or you stand a high risk of an over optimization penalty.

It may not be getting them a manual penalty but it's definitely not helping them in the long term either.  Creating unique and useful content is the only way to keep gaining organic search traffic in the long run.

Also don't forget you need to setup a change of address in google webmaster tools