Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I doubt it has anything to do with the Yoast plugin unless your settings are not optimal. Given the timing, you may have been affected by the Penguin 3.0 update that hit around Thanksgiving. See http://searchengineland.com/holidays-google-breaks-updates-rules-gives-fresh-penguin-updates-210367 for details.  You'll need to do a backlink audit to be sure. Use the Panguin tool to compare your Analytics to Google algorithm updates.

Google does sometime change titles in the SERPs when they deem it appropriate, so the customer support response that you got was likely accurate.

It looks like you may be blocking CSS and Javascript from being crawled. Check your robots.txt file. Google recently stated that blocking these could affect your ranking.

Okay, I see. That's often referred to as the "Authoritative Onebox."  The searcher's location may be influencing results the most in this case, so you'll definitely need to build up the other local signals for the Michigan location. Unfortunately, I don't really have anything to add to what you've already mentioned.

You seem to be referring to local search results (with the local pack and map) rather than organic results. Local search results for Michigan will not show up for someone searching in New York unless they specifically add a geographic modifier. Otherwise, they'll get local pack results for their own location or they may not get local results at all.

Are you trying to get the Michigan G+ page to show up higher than others in organic results? If so, why would this be preferable to having your website show up first for branding searches?

Forgive me if I'm misunderstanding the question. If so, can  you clarify?

I would start with keyword research and come up with a large bank of alternatives for the "dog training" keyword. Look for synonyms, alternate word endings (train, trained, trainer), and co-occurrence terms. Then rewrite the content with these to be far more natural. It may require some heavy rewriting, depending on how bad it is.

Definitely get rid of the over-optimized footer links. If you do all of this, you shouldn't have to worry about the banner in the header. Header content is often the same across an entire site.

The hard part may be explaining to your client that on-page optimization isn't so much about exact-match keywords as it is about topical authority.

Are you tracking conversion goals or events in Analytics at all? If not, you might want to set some up on the old site so you can get some before and after stats. I would also keep an eye on some of the data available through Google Webmaster Tools, such as pages indexed, crawl errors (after re-launch), search queries, and crawl stats.

Search volume is only one factor that you should consider when analyzing keywords. At a minimum, we look at the following during keyword research.

• Search volume
• Keyword difficulty (Using Moz's Keyword Difficulty tool)
• Relevance (How relevant is the query to the client's business, website, products, or services? This is a subjective number that we score as a percentage.)
• Searcher intent - There are lots of different ways to classify user intent. See this, this, and this for more info.
• Google's perception of user intent - Analyze the SERPs to see what types of results appear for that query.

The last two are key for your issue. Take a look at the SERPs. Every result for "odor eliminator" is for a product rather than a service, and the top ranking sites are powerful brand sites like amazon.com, walmart.com, and homedepot.com. On the other hand, if someone searches "odor removal service," they are clearly not looking for a product. If my assumptions are correct, that query is 100% relevant to what your client is offering.

My advice is to focus on the more relevant, less competitive keyword in this particular case. .

Understood. Just post more details as you learn them, and I'll do my best to address any issues.

Yes, Google can index dynamic content. Whether or not this will affect search performance depends on multiple factors.

• What platform is being used?
• How are URLs affected?
• Are the blocks of content creating a duplicate content issue?
• Is it possible to optimize the title tags and other on-page factors with that kind of variable content?
• Is content hidden on the page and then revealed based on user activity?
• Will you be able to set up canonical tags?

With more information, I might be able to point you in the right direction.

The duplicates will likely affect affect organic rankings for the entire site. Local pack results are somewhat affected by organic signals, so that could be affected, too.

As for whether or not to 301 redirect the duplicate category pages, do you want users to see them? If not, why do you have them? The 301 redirect will prevent users from seeing those pages.

If you want users to see them, use a noindex tag at the page level, or use the robots.txt to exclude them from search engines.

Your friend has to give Google a reason to send searchers to his website instead of the many well-known authority sites that have the same verses.  Is he providing a lot of unique commentary, or are the pages mostly bible verses that can be found on thousands of other sites? If it's the former, then he should be okay. If it's the latter, he may want to focus on adding more unique content.

I'm not sure I fully understand your question, but I'll give it a shot based on what I think you mean.

Just swapping out the NAP will not create unique content for those category pages, so you'll want to add a canonical tag with a link to a single category page that is not location specific.

Panda is site-wide.

Is timing the only thing that makes you suspect Penguin is the cause of the drop in traffic? What does your backlink profile look like? Are there tons of spammy links to your site? If so, then you may be right about Penguin.

It's impossible to say what caused the drop based solely on the information you've provided. I highly doubt that a few hours of downtime had anything to do with your drop in traffic.

Other questions to consider:

• Have you made any significant changes to your website within the last three months? (What kind of maintenance was actually performed on the site?)
• Are there any new competitors pushing you out of the SERPs?

Google has indicated that they don't use Schema data for ranking purposes.  Adding the schema will not make it less likely for you to rank for "Autism Alternative Treatment Arizona" than you are now.

Do you provide any services to clients in California, or is your website more of a resource site with information about autism? If it's the latter, you really don't need to worry about queries with a local intent. Focus instead on making your site a topical authority with high-quality content.

Do you have a single physical location or multiple physical locations?

The "unique landing page" in your first quote refers to landing pages on your website. In most cases, the best practice is to have a local landing page for each physical location. When you claim and verify the Google My Business listing for each location, Google will automatically set up a Google+ page for that location. Link both the GMB listing and G+ page back to the associated landing page.

You can delete campaigns from http://analytics.moz.com/manage-campaigns.

It looks like you are set up with the Magento shopping cart. There have been several other threads addressing the same issue. You may find some useful information there.

http://moz.com/community/q/temporary-redirects-on-magento

http://moz.com/community/q/magento-302-error-needs-to-be-301-http-to-https

http://moz.com/community/q/magento-1675-302-redirects-how-to-fix

If that doesn't help, I would recommend contacting Magento support.

You can find the 35 temporary redirects that Moz reports using the Screaming Frog tool. You'll see the redirects for individual links under the "Response Codes" tab. Look for the "Redirect URI" column.

The fastest way to find all of the redirects is to go to "Reports" > "Redirect Chains." This will show all the redirects on the site. I think you have to purchase a license for this feature.

If you are trying to find redirects that have been set up for incoming links from external sites, you'll have to access the .htaccess file. I also do a site:domain.com search in Google just to see if there are old links still in the index. Then keep an eye on 404 errors in Google Webmaster Tools after the site launches.

Use a tool like Screaming Frog to crawl the site. You'll be able to see the response codes from each page and the redirected URL's. A temporary redirect will have a 302 status code.

I agree with Hutch42 and RangeMarketing. In most cases, the best practice for SEO is to create a self-hosted blog under the same domain as your main business website, if applicable. There's no reason to create more than one website (or blog) to achieve the same purpose. It dilutes your link equity (juice).

Creating a separate blog for the purpose of creating a bunch of links back to your website could be seen as spammy and cause more harm than good. There are much more effective ways to get links to your website with good quality content and digital PR.