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Link Detox is good for finding toxic links, but you still need to manually review them all. It will give you false positives - no tool is 100% on that stuff.

Rmoov and Pitchbox are good for outreach, though I favor Rmoov since it was specifically built for link removal. Pitchbox is more for prospecting, finding new opportunities, etc.

I'm not surprised, OSE routinely misses many of our links. But none of the backlink checkers will be 100% accurate. Your best bet is to use a variety of sources - OSE, Majestic, AHREFs, etc. - and compile and remove duplicates to get a true picture of your backlinks.

It's Penguin 2.0, which was put out on May 22, 2013.

OSE doesn't have the resources to crawl as deeply as AHREFs, Majestic, etc., so the index is smaller. Get your backlinks from multiple sources for the best picture.

Site B likely had a manual action or ran afoul of an algorithm and now that's impacting Site A. Your first step should be to figure out why site B had been going down over time, if it's a Panda issue like you suspect or something else. But don't take action until you know what the problem is.

Moz claims to report the average position that most people will see, but there are tons of factors that go into how SERPs appear for you.

Personally, I find Moz's ranking reports to be reasonably accurate most of the time. Then there are occasions where they report all my keywords dropping out of the top 50 when none of them moved more than 2-3 positions up or down. So take what it says with a grain of salt.

For rank tracking purposes, I use a Chrome incognito window with no history, not logged in, and location set to United States. As long as you're tracking with the same method over time, your results should be pretty reliable.

What steps have you taken to reach out to people and actively obtain links?

If you're going through with link removal and building a disavow list, you might as well log all the outreach efforts and results - it really doesn't take that long. Just note when you sent emails, when they replied, what they said, and if the link was removed.

I'd upload that to Google Docs and include the link in the disavow file so on the off chance a real person looks into your site, they'll know you did the work.

Using your company name in the title tag isn't (generally) done with the intention of ranking for it. If you can't rank for your brand name, you've got bigger issues to deal with.

Adding the company name to a title tag is more for brand awareness. If people know your brand, it reinforces that they're in the right place. If you're not as well known, it gets that awareness going in the consumer's mind.

C-blocks basically refer to where an IP address is located. C-blocks are like the neighborhood and sites that share it are basically your neighbors. More linking c-blocks is better.

DA can fluctuate with OSE updates depending on the size of the index. If the size goes down, DA may go down. If it goes up, DA may go up.

Your client can go the easy way with what some would call black hat tactics, rank very well very quickly, get a lot of sales, but then there's always the chance it'll disappear overnight. If you're in to churn and burn and don't care about starting over every few months then go for it.

Or your client can go with what some would call white hat tactics - focus on content, earning links, etc. Results will take a long time to come, but you're better protected from future Google updates. Depending on their resources this may or may not be viable.

It's totally fine. Optimize for the term and have the landing page be a page on your site explaining the difference between and benefits of your league vs. Pop Warner.

Zappos does a similar thing with coupons - http://www.zappos.com/truth-about-zappos-coupons

The description should be long enough to convey the features of the products, the benefits of it to the customer, and any other important info. If it's 50 words, it's 50. If it's 500, it's 500. Writing to hit a number means you're going to include a lot of fluff.

Since you asked this question, it sounds like you're not a copywriter. Pay one to write your product descriptions. It will totally be worth it.

There are multiple ways to do everything in SEO. Multiple ways to rank highly, multiple ways to lose all rankings. I'd say it's pretty much 0% science, because if any part of it was then it wouldn't be nearly as hard. Even the things that one might say we have down to a science (proper title tag structure, well written meta description, etc.) aren't really because Google can display them how they want to display them - not how you wrote them.

The most important thing I can stress is don't rely solely on SEO. Don't rely solely on any one strategy. That's a guaranteed way to fail. Use SEO, PPC, email marketing, etc. Diversify your strategy and you won't freak when Google changes the algorithm and everything goes upside down.

It really needs to be a rule that you're not allowed to ask questions specific to your site unless you post the URL.

A lot of people have been having this problem. I emailed Moz and was told to completely disconnect then reconnect to fix it, though I explained originally that I had been doing that and it didn't fix it. Still getting this error message.

Every backlinks tool - Webmaster Tools, Majestic, AHREFs, OSE, etc. - will give you different results because they all have their own index. You can't rely on one to get a complete picture. The best method is to get backlinks from as many sources as you can, compile them in one list, remove duplicates, and then start reviewing.

The Moz ranking reports aren't always accurate. They're a good guide, but if you see something suspicious like that (and there hasn't been an algorithm update or manual penalty to you), then it's probably wrong. I've seen it say a keyword has dropped out of the top 50 when it's still on the first page. A manual check is the best way to see where a keyword is.

Virtually all our big keywords/category names took hits in rankings on the day of and day after this recent Penguin update so that makes it seem like it's Penguin. On average they lost about 5 positions, but some lost as few as 1 and some lost 15+. But it clearly affected our whole site. Our idea was to test out removing the links on one subcategory and if it worked to do it for the rest of the site.

The guy they had building links for years did all the typical stuff - directories, spam sites, reciprocal linking, links with non-relevant sites, etc. We sell outdoor products and I've found backlinks on penis enlargement sites, anchor text for products we've never sold, etc. The backlink profile is very, very bad. Even if Penguin wasn't the culprit, these backlinks have to be hurting our rankings.