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Algorithm updates/changes &/or re-indexing. Tough to say  for sure but I have witness this type of rapid fluctuation before.

Difficult to say, but I would say much sooner than 6 month (I would say 30-60 days or sooner). Take a look at this link scheme  help article from Google and if it fits, let them know (link in last paragraph).  Good luck!

It may be working in the short-term--but won't in the long-term.

How could this possibly be working? The algo has around 200 factors and new website/pages are increasing at an incredible pace. The indexing of these pages and ranking by the algo isn't perfect and typically can be exploited (intentional or not) in the short-term much easier than in the long-term.

I try to structure the meta description to describe what is on the landing page in a way to encourage click-throughs under the max-constraint.  If you are shorter, no biggie! Good luck

For Google, typically between 920 and 923 pixels (or roughly 160 characters).  However, this does change periodically.

It is a factor.  In general, It is easier to rank for a keyword on an older domain name than a newer domain name if all things being equal.  However,  great content and the ability to generate inbound links and etc will win in the long run.  Remember, Google's focus is show the most relevant results to the user. A factor of this may take in account that if a website is brand new (a month or so) it may not be as "credible" as a site that has been for a few years. Take a look what Matt Cutts says from awhile ago (should still be applicable).

1. Is this related to AWS? Yes, most likely a customer on AWS scraping your site.
2. Is this something we should worry about or not?  If so what could be a solution to counter this? Monitor it. If the crawling get's ridiculous, you could have site performance issues. Could deny IP addresse(s) in .htacces or try via Robot.txt file.
3. Could this affect our Google Analytics organic traffic? If your site performance suffers, could affect organic position and decrease traffic.

Good luck!

If a sitemap existed, you could pull from cache or server. If not, you can recreate one via Google Analytics/Log data.

Is the url structure the same? If not, did they do 301's?

If the blog post is under 2000 words and have a singular focus, I would just have it on one page (better for search, printing & etc.). If it split, the objective may be for advertising to increase pageviews.

Piggy back on Colemckeon reply. If the purchased domain  backlinks are spammy, just disavow them.

If I understand you want to rank for/the middle initial. Just have it in page title, h1 heading and etc.  Would it benefit  to be in url fragment? Yes, but not a huge factor in this case & especially if the kw isn't common .

If you create  a landing page simply to do a 301 redirect to another page, it will eventually be deindexed.

No, Bing doesn't use it.  Source from Bing's Duane Forrester.

Also here:

"But as the engines get smarter with and about signals, and as new, trustworthy signals are grown and adopted, the SEO of yore becomes a bit less relevant. No one really cried when we all walked away from tags after they were inundated with spam. No one cried when keyword density became a passé topic, largely covered up in the then somewhat novel approach of “making quality content”."

I did a Google search and found the homepage listed. Strange as I checked if you were logged in and displaying something becuase of personalized results. So not sure

Nozzzle had a great answer. Also, run it through insights. You have several .png over 1 mb. I would optimize those to proper size and etc.  As you probably know, speed is a factor. Good luck!

Nope. Typically if a searcher queries a keyword and it's not in your meta description,  Google will show snippets of where it is used on your page.

Some questions to help you analyze:

• Was it an overall drop in traffic or for specific articles?

• Did you check your Google Search Console for any messages or did you analyze performance report or etc?

• Did you look to see any Google Algo Changes?

• Did you see any drop in Bing Organics?

• Any major site changes?

  Good luck!

As Alex & MrWhippy said, if structure urls --regex is best. If you can't use regex and have to redirect that many, will impact speed of the site. You can do it w/the include directive in httpd.conf.  Good luck.

Did you check out fiverr? Just filter by reviews and give someone a shot . I heard of some bad experiences on fiverr, but mine were typically always good.

Also, try a local community college. Some of those students are a wiz when it comes to do this and will provide great value.

Good luck!

It matters. I typically try to keep meta title around 60 characters so they are not truncated. If important keyword aren't prominant, there is a good chance they would be cutoff. Also, focus on each page having unique title and prioritize those keywords. MOZ has a great guide. Good luck!