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Yes, that is a bit of a mess.  There are a few different ways this can be approached, depending on your answers to the questions below:

• First of all, is there a business case for marketing the umbrella company instead of the individual event venues? Was the umbrella business created for legal or tax purposes rather than as a brand to be promoted?
• You mention that the 3 locations have different business names. Do they offer the same services?
• I'm not clear on whether the 3 locations are all on the same website or not. Are they?

If your marketing goals are to promote the branded event locations rather than the umbrella business, especially for Google's local business results, leave the umbrella business out of your digital marketing and relegate it to the legal disclaimers or "About Us" page.

If the 3 locations are different brands and they provide different services, it might make sense to have 3 different websites. Just treat them as separate businesses for marketing purposes. On the other hand, if the 3 locations are under the same brand with the same or similar business name and services, it might be more appropriate to have one website promoting the brand that includes a location-based landing page for each venue. The best way to do this really depends on your specific business case.

Finally, you definitely need 3 separate phone numbers for each venue if you want to optimize for local search.

First of all, backlinks from Adwords campaigns do not help you with organic search rankings at all.

Secondly, this kind of duplicate content issue may not be as big a problem as you think.  If Google detects two pages have the same or very similar content, it will choose the best one to display in search results and filter the other one out.  So, you may not need to do anything.

On the other hand, if you are particular about which website should appear in search results for that content, you'll want to use the rel="canonical" tag to let Google know which page you prefer. You'll find more info about the canonical tag at the two links below.

• https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en
• https://moz.com/learn/seo/canonicalization

I hope that helps!

Having the same phone number and address on two websites is not a duplicate content issue. It's very common because of business directories all over the web. If that's the only duplicate content you're worried about, then you're fine.

Most likely not. The links may have been created by a 3rd-party bot, a Fiverr project, or something similar that can't be easily traced. The only thing left to do is ask yourself who benefits from the negative SEO attack. Even so, that's likely a large pool of search competitors.

Is the blog on a separate domain or subdomain? Can you share the URLs?

Most likely you'll want to add rel="nofollow" to the links rather than disavow them, but it's hard to say definitively without understanding the site architecture as a whole and what you hope to accomplish. Regardless, you might want to dig deeper to find out why those links are being flagged.

You'll want to do a risk assessment of the domain before set up 301-redirects to your site.  Set it up in Google Search Console if you haven't already. Check for any manual actions or malware warnings associated with the site.  Then you'll want to audit the backlinks to check for any problems there.

If you can share the link with the community, someone else might find issues that you don't see.

I suspect the spam score would be lower if the site was more than one page. Right now, it probably seems like a doorway page since it's just one page that links to another site.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of business directories that require your street address. If she wants her home address to remain private (understandably), it will be tougher to rank locally but not impossible. You'll need to work harder on other local ranking signals to be competitive.

Fortunately, there are quite a few sites that allow you to hide your street address even if your city is still shown. Here's a great guide for this - https://www.brightlocal.com/2014/07/10/citation-sites-allow-hide-address/.   Some of the information may be out of date, so you'll have to double check with each site.

If she serves clients at their location rather than hers, her business is considered a service-area business (SAB). Joy Hawkins had some good advice for SABs in her Moz post at https://moz.com/blog/intro-local-seo-service-area-businesses.

If the canonical page disappears when it's out of stock, the user will get a 404 error when they try to access that URL. You'll need to canonicalize duplicates to a generic product or category page that won't disappear when the product is out of stock.  Furthermore, if a product goes out of stock and you'll have more in stock later, it's best (for SEO purposes) to leave the page with an "out of stock" notice rather than remove it completely from the website.

It's possible that you are being sabotaged. I've only looked at backlinks in Open Site Explorer, but I noticed a trend. Most of the questionable links appear to be pingbacks on the other websites.

Someone else may have insight as to why this is happening. It looks like pingback spam on the other websites. The question is why your site is part of that spam. I don't know how you would find out who's doing it.

Fortunately, they appear to be nofollow links, so they won't have a negative effect on your site. You may simply have to remain vigilant with your backlink analyses.

Will she have an actual office at this new location in Chicago with staff, or are you talking about a virtual address rented for the purpose of making Google think you have an office at that location?

If your answer is the second one, then let me stop you there. This type of virtual address goes against Google's policies and can have negative consequences. See https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038177?hl=en for Google's guidelines. They've been going after these types of virtual offices for a while now. See also http://www.localsearchforum.com/help-support-google-local/978-virtual-offices-home-address-google-plus-local.html.

Leave the real address and focus on building organic traffic for Chicago. If she really wants to grow to a national level, you'll have to work on growing the brand to a national level through social media and content marketing.  Unfortunately, there are no SEO quick fixes in this situation.

Yes, please share the URL.

John Mueller addressed a similar question in a recent Google Webmaster Central office-hours hangout, and he was pretty definitive. The question was about text that's hidden behind tabs. He states that they see the hidden content but won't give it as much weight.

Here's the link - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZAY-BwL6rU.  The question starts at 6:45.

Google does read JavaScript and CSS, and that's why they send warnings to webmasters if such files are blocked from googlebot.

When you say "there seems to be more and more spam links that are popping up on my site," do you mean the links are actually on your site? Like blog comments?

You can scan your site at https://sitecheck.sucuri.net/.  There are others as well, but it's a good idea to have a web developer actually look at the files on your server as well. Scanners don't always see everything. If your site is a WordPress site, you can install and scan for malware using the Wordfence plugin. (Note: Some hosts, like WP Engine, don't allow the Wordfence plugin.)

If you don't want to share your domain name publicly, you can send it to me in a private message and I'll take a look.

Are the backlinks pointing to actual pages on your website? I have seen cases where there was malware on a site that created new pages the site owner couldn't see. Then hundreds of backlinks were created that point to the malware pages. You may want to scan your site for malware.

Google will probably index it, but it won't be given the same weight as content that's immediately visible.

The problem is that these two pages have almost identical content on them, and the content on these product pages is thin anyway. This is a common problem with ecommerce websites, and some ecommerce platforms automatically create a lot of duplication headaches  You also seem to have a related issue with crawl inefficiencies.

Yes, this may very well be affecting your performance in SERPs.

There are a number of ways to address duplicate content issues on ecommerce websites. The precise strategy to use will depend on the specific issue, and you have multiple issues that need to be addressed on your site that relate to duplicate content. Below are some resources that you might find helpful.

• https://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2300528/ecommerce-product-pages-how-to-fix-duplicate-thin-too-much-content#
• http://www.goinflow.com/duplicate-content-ecommerce-seo/
• http://www.goinflow.com/are-duplicate-url-paths-killing-your-ecommerce-seo/

Domain authority is not a metric that can tell you whether or not you've been penalized. Moz recently updated their index, which caused a significant change in DA for a lot of sites. See https://moz.com/learn/seo/domain-authority for more information on what domain authority can tell you.

Moz Local isn't the type of spammy directory submission service that will get you in trouble with Google. The kind you need to watch out for are those that submit to hundreds of low-quality directories that really only exist for SEO link building. You don't see that kind of submission service as much now, but they were everywhere in the pre-Penguin days.

It really depends on your rationale for having two different pages with mostly the same content. Ideally, you could remove the old page or merge the old with the new and 301-redirect the old URL to the new one.

On the other hand, I recognize that there may be a legitimate business case for keeping both pages. In that case, you would add the new URL within the rel=canonical tag to the old page. That tells the search engines that the new page is the one that should be indexed by search engines and come up in search results.

I can't speak to the validity of the Moz report in your case, but you might want to try a different crawler like Screaming Frog and compare what you are seeing from Moz.

To my knowledge, the behavior of the googlebot is not influenced by whether or not the product is out of stock. Is the page still accessible when the product is out of stock, or does it not display at all?

If the product page remains with an "out of stock" message, that's what users from search will see. If the product page becomes inaccessible when it goes out of stock temporarily, users from search will likely see a 404 page.

You may want to canonicalize to a higher level category page rather than one of the product variation pages.  That way, it won't be an issue if one product variation goes out of stock.

May I ask which ecommerce software you are using?