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Sounds like it should be a 301. 302s should be used when the redirect is temporary. I'm assuming the way you're using it is permanent, hence it should be a 301.

Don't know their policy on this, but did you get a rel canonical from them?

The keyword thing is a common problem that's never been fixed. Some weeks it's accurate, some weeks it's not.

Possible? Yes. Likely? No. And I'm assuming that by good SEO you mean ranking well in Google.

Links are still the biggest factor for ranking. Matt Cutts repeated this again recently and studies back it up. Don't let the anti-link builders, pro-relationship builders, or whatever they're calling themselves at the moment brainwash you.

Disavowing links wouldn't have any effect on how Moz sees them. Some index updates get more data than others and that's going to impact the number of links and your DA. But that's just an estimate of your potential to rank. Keep an eye on WMT and GA non-branded search - much more important measures of organic success.

Google only responds to reconsideration requests, and you can only file one of those if you've had a manual action taken against your site. You don't get a response on disavows. You'll never get links removed from the vast majority of these directories because nobody maintains them anymore. Make a few attempts, add to the disavow list, and move on.

With that type of budget, you'd be better off learning SEO on your own through conferences, books, etc. Plus you'll save a ton of money in the long-run by not outsourcing it. You don't need an agency, SEO isn't that hard.

People will come in here and overwhelm you with links and information, but I'll tell you what you really need to hear - if you don't know the answers to these questions, you shouldn't have launched your site yet.

You don't get penalized for duplicate meta descriptions. You could have every one on your site the exact same, it won't matter. It doesn't impact rankings. It impacts how likely a searcher is to click through to your website.

The time it takes to reach the first page will depend on your link building strategy. Everything else is pretty much irrelevant and those who suggest otherwise are being dishonest.

Moz on-page grader results mean nothing, they're a joke.

Further proof that black hat tactics work and work well. And they always will work. Google still can't really determine the quality of a link, whether it's natural, negative SEO, spam, etc.

OP, your case is an extreme one in that every page on the site but the homepage 404s. That means you moved but didn't do any 301 redirects, so that's an issue.

But generally, 404s have no impact on your site's ranking and that's been stated on record multiple times.

HubSpot and AHREFs likely have more resources dedicated to crawling the web for links. The more resources you have, the more of the web you crawl and the more links you find.

You guys couldn't just give him the direct answer he's looking for?

OP, recovery from Penguin is possible, but you need to wait until the Penguin algorithm is run again. In 2012 and 2013 it was run multiple times, but it has not been run in 2014. It was last run in October 2013. So keep your fingers crossed for a refresh and hope it improves your rankings. If you've done as much as you could to remove links and done a proper disavow file, you should come out looking better.

I see some people who must study SEO but not practice it in here.

Think of SEO like investing in the markets. You have to consider how much risk you're willing to take. There is no white/gray/black hat - there are only different levels of risk tolerance.

Links are the most important factor for ranking in Google. If you can get some new inbound links from sites that aren't horrible or deindexed, they've got a chance at boosting your rankings. Obviously a backlink profile built mostly off directories isn't going to work for long, but dedicating a small percentage of your backlinks to directory submissions won't hurt you and is a quick way to get easy links.

You're getting too bogged down in things that will make no difference to your customer.

Sounds like management will end up sabotaging your SEO efforts with their ineptitude.

Google probably doesn't know. There are probably some incredibly convoluted methods they could use to determine it, but in general they don't know. This is why Penguin causes collateral damage and they haven't updated it again - they can't really differentiate between a spammy link / naturally placed link / negative SEO / etc.

We have tabbed content that's the same across PDPs on one of our sites. I highly doubt it will hurt you. Cutts has stated that duplicate content isn't a big deal for ecommerce sites.