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You have the right idea with internal linking just don't over optimize the anchor text from your blog to your site.

As for content ideas your moving tips is a good start.  I would also focus on getting customer reviews to help your local seo.  Get either google places, trustpilot, or yelp reviews.

Other ideas could be moving nightmares to avoid, average cost of a move, moving scams, how to pack for a move, etc.  The more creative you get the better results you will have.  I highly recommend doing at least one info graphic per month.

Are you using the date based archives?  I would stop using those if I were you and assign articles to the appropriate category so your URL's are optimized for SEO.

The reason I'm suggesting this is because the easiest way to solve the problem is to disable indexing on date based archives which will also eliminate the duplicate content on the photo's b/c they are basically date based photo archives.

Let me know,

You won't automatically get the rankings from site A but I have done this in practice 3 times in the past year with whole site redirects and each time we have seen a significant boost in domain authority for the site we redirected to.  This boosted our rankings and traffic.

If you do this just make sure you redirect at the page level tans also do outreach to see if you can get your best external followed links changed to your new url.

I prefer to disallow photo archive pages via robots.txt.

I also recommend removing the default link WP inserts to the media image page.

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.

Focus on external followed links gained over time.  If you can show links are being built that are quality then that should outweigh the lack I'm the other metrics bc you could be losing ground bc of old link strategies that are still weighing you down.

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.

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.

I agree with this response.

1.  It's not diluting your page authority.

2.  The links only hurt you if your blog is employing some spam tactics.

You need to create URL's for each service you offer and then link to those services in the navigation using the keyword you want the page to rank for.  You need to use discretion here so as not to over optimize but your example above "Manage DNS" as part of the navigation linking to a /managed-dns page would be perfect.

Hope this helps,

Good question, I think it varies based on the product.  For feature rich products it makes sense to develop the product pages completely so the user has all the information they need to make a purchase decision.  There's no point in ranking a category page if your product pages aren't ready to drive a sale.

On the other hand for other products like fashion I think product content is much less important. In this space I think people tend to "browse" more and enjoy more of an editorial experience.  In this case I think incorporating editorial content at the category level is likely to differentiate your category page and if done right can actually drive incoming links.

Another big factor is the Return on Effort, it can be substantially quicker to add meaningful content to a category page versus a ton of product pages.

Just my $.02

In my opinion the best option for your organic traffic is to try and keep the service pages.  The caveat is that you need to substantially differentiate the content.  You should brainstorm options with your team but some ideas that come to mind are obviously changing title tags ,adding some service specific descriptions to the top of those pages, incorporating some unique service specific video, add links to service specific DIY/Guide/Warnings/Other related educational pre-sales material.

If that becomes too much work for this phase of the project my next suggestion would be rel=canonical back to the profession page.  Ensure your profession page is designed in a way that makes filtering to the service level the obvious call to action and you should be fine.  This will hinder your ability to target all of those service level keywords with service level URL's but you could still create content around those niches and drive links back to the profession page.

Hope this helps

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?

You should setup rel=canonical tags to be automatically added to each of the affiliate pages that are duplicates of your main page.  This basically tells Google that your original URL without affiliate parameters is the authoritative version of the content and that all other pages should not be indexed above the canonical version.

You should also probably add a query string to tell Google Webmaster Tools to ignore URL's that contain your affiliate query parameter.  This will make sure that Webmaster Tools is setup correctly so you aren't getting hit for duplicate content.

Hope this helps!

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,

If they were hit for sure then I would definitely have the links removed just to be safe.  You don't want to continue partnering with sites that are penalized until you know they have cleaned up their act.

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.

As for damage control I would just focus all efforts on Site A unless there is a clear differentiation in content.  If you have useful content to publish do so on the blog of Site A and focus on social promotion and outreach.  It's a much better use of time if you can get a few links from outreach than another one from a microsite.

The url for your sitemap is 404.

Your sitemap URL should be:  http://www.thebookshop.ie/system/feeds/sitemap.xml

Try updating to that and see if WMT accepts it.

It won't change the indexing but it does change server requests.  To reduce server load its best to use relative not absolute urls.