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I had so many issues with it that I finally gave up. Now, one of my campaigns hasn't updated traffic data since July 21, despite having a valid connection.

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.

This doesn't even really make sense. Your client had you build a new site, then left his old site up to compete with it? Bizarre.

Content on old vs. new site - I'd think the new site's content should be a copy of the old site's content, given that it's the same site.

Why weren't all pages on the old site 301d to the new site?

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 cross-domain canonical tag would probably be a good idea.

It could be a lot longer than 2 months. You may need to wait for another update to the Penguin algorithm before you see any changes. We're overdue for an update, but given that we've waited 9 months already they may make us wait even longer.

sterlingbuild.co.uk has a poor quality backlink profile with anchor text heavily weighted towards [velux windows]. But links are still the most important factor for ranking well. Despite Penguin, crackdowns on link networks, etc., old school link building still works and this is just one of many examples of it. It's definitely not a good long-term idea, but if you need sales quick it works.

Told to write content for a CONTACT US page! Classic content-brainwashed SEO.

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.

Google's gone after multiple link networks across the world in the last few months. Search on seroundtable.com for all the details.

Google will never get rid of all these sites and they won't go away on their own. These old school methods still work very well to rank.

No reason other than finding all those 404 pages and doing individual URL removals for each isn't a very productive task. 404s generally have no impact on search rankings.

There is no white hat or black hat SEO - there are only varying levels of risk tolerance. Trying to earn links naturally will take a long time, particularly for a new company, and sometimes new companies need rankings and sales right away and can't afford to wait (which basically everyone here forgets).

The link building plans you're looking at will likely have you ranking well very quickly, but Google could penalize you destroy those rankings just as quickly. If you're willing to risk it, you can get some of those links initially to rank, work on building high quality links in the background, then attempt to clean up those initial ones later on. It all comes down to risk vs. reward.

Keep doing what you're doing. As long as you know how to properly identify if a site/link is good or bad, you shouldn't hurt your site. Better to do this work now and prevent another penalty in the future than to put it off.

RE: total backlinks - I recommend combining and deduping Open Site Explorer, Webmaster Tolls, Majestic, and AHREFs for the most thorough picture.

Don't count on Google dropping those 404ing pages from the index any time soon. We have pages that have 404d for over a year and they're still in the index.

Are you talking about a dev site? If so, the easiest solution is to add it in Webmaster Tools, verify ownership, then use the URL removal tool to take the whole site out of the index. Just enter / in the removal field.

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.

Yes, disavow them. Better to be proactive and disavow now than wait for a penalty and warning to do it.

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.

There are no absolutes with canonicals. Google treats them as suggestions, not rules.

Even with a tool like Link Detox (which I use and think is great), you'll still need to manually review every site as there will for sure be false positives. You'd probably be better off hiring someone to do this for you than trying it yourself.