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When I can I keep both, I try to keep the normal structure and mark it up with schema mark up. I am almost positive that technically you can include organizational data without it being visible on the site, but I generally think it is a good practice to keep it visible even if it is not for SEO. Think about how a meta description is, they basically hold no SEO value any more, but the value they hold is to get people to click through the SERP's to your site. Having the normal NAP structure holds the value of people trusting your business. Also, things can change, I do not want to be caught with my pants down if Google decides that organizational data needs to be displayed on the page and hidden data is no longer allowed.

I think Sauce Labs is pretty much the best out, check out their device / OS / browser support here, https://saucelabs.com/features

Spoon.net is also pretty great if you develop on a Windows platform. I usually run other Os's in a virtual machine for testing too.

This is the best advice I have found. http://moz.com/blog/what-separates-a-good-outreach-email-from-a-great-one-whiteboard-friday

Funny note, I used that advice to outreach to Rand one time and it worked.

Yes, most platforms already disallow anything from the search in the robots.txt file. You might check and see if this is done already, if not I would do it. You can also add that to the pages as well. Just be careful that it is only on the search pages.

For those links I would say that #1 and #3 are link exchanges, which are a no-no now. #2 is a paid advertisement, but it is not a no follow, which makes it a paid link. I think all of them can really be considered paid links, so I would either contact the people and have them removed or disavow them all.

From my understanding Mozscape is the API for Open Site Explorer. You can build widgets with the Mozscape API if you wanted to offer the information in the Mozscape index to your clients. One example I can think of off my head is nibbler.silktide.com I am pretty sure they use link data from Mozscape.

This is kind of in response to the other answers, but also an answer to the question too.

I do think 36 hours is excessive, but at the same time I don't think it is too excessive. I personally charge 4 ~ 6 times what that guy charged per hour. I feel a lot of the reason that I can justify that is that I know the little idiosyncrasies like this. That being said, I think the hours were excessive, but the cost I do not think was too excessive. Depending on the goals and content, it might be a little on the high side, but not like wow high to me.

Edit: After I posted this I realized I should have made a point that I didn't. Unless a client specifically asks for it, and it is "new cutting edge" stuff, I don't bill for time learning something. I look at it as a business expense and eat the loss. I see it as adding another tool to my toolbox and getting paid something to do it. Because in the end, learning things like that is how I raise my rates across the board.

I think everyone is going to disagree with me, but I see nothing wrong with paid links. Sure Google does not like them, that has been established, but it is one of the best ways to go really and cannot be avoided if you want to grow. You want a link on a popular blog, Huffington Post, CNN, Elle Magazine, Glamour? How do you get it? You pay for it. We as SEO people and Google also needs to get over the idea that Adwords is the only way people monetize web sites. Links are bought and sold for every site that has traffic and paid writers. The SEO value of the link could be negligible, but if the link performs and you profit from it, why not do it. Now I am not saying go to a link farm and buy as many links as you can afford, but I am say the places that you want links, as a general rule they can be purchased. I had a client that sold things to women and she always wanted to be in Vogue. After she paid them for an article in their magazine there was a website write up included too. It worked out, she made money off of it.

If you were not able to do any redirects on the old domain, there won't so much be a decline as it will be starting over from scratch. Were you able to put any 301 redirects on the old domain that the new owners will leave?

If it were me, this is what I would do. I would export all of your back links from google webmaster tools. You can do this by going to webmaster tools -> links to your site -> all domains and click to export table.

From there I would if possible go through the list and make a master list of "good" links. Take that list of good links and copy that column into a text file as and save it as a reference point of good quality links. Then every day I would go and download the latest links from webmaster tools, copy and put them in a text file as well. Then I would use beyond compare to see the new links to the site by comparing the "master good link file" to the daily generated files. If you have time, go through the different links and see if any of them are legitimate good quality links. If it is too many, I would just start disavowing them all until the attack is over.

I would also think about signing up to other services as well, like ahrefs and the others that have crawlers, because one crawler will not find all of the links more than likely and from experience GWT will not show you every link either.

I think with everything there are mitigating factors. I bid 90% of the development work that I do as a flat rate. I think it is fair to the client to do it that way. Some times I do very well on it, other times I do not so well. One of the main mitigating factors in how well I do is how much I have to contact the client and hold their hands. I have some clients that I only talk to twice. They tell me what they need, then they tell me how happy they are when I finish things, that is it. I have other ones that try to creep the scope, use me as a help desk, they want to chat about everything, maybe send a long email with only a couple of sentences that are pertinent to the whole project.

That being said, I think part of the problem is that you are using elance as well. Not that I am saying elance is bad, per se, I have had a client or two insist on using it. I think part of the issue with elance is that it is a wild west crap shoot. You look at people's reviews and they have a five star review for designing a Wordpress website for $35. Heck, I would give someone 5 stars if they could install Wordpress on my server for $35. In my mind I have always considered elance and places like that a good place to find low skilled developers. Sure there are some great developers out there, but I think that represents a very small number of the total. Good developers don't usually have to go find work I have found, it just finds them.

One take away I would give you is to find a local to your area developer. Someone who is in a similar time zone, you are not working on anything highly specialized, so it should not be a problem. Build a relationship with your developer, I have relationships with most of my clients and I am generally around for them to talk to and ask questions. Plus it helps speed things up too. When I can call someone and ask a quick question, or send an email and get a quick response, I don't have to close the project and wait.

Bottom line is I would pay the guys, I wouldn't be happy about it, but mistakes were made on both sides and it is not fair to make the other side carry all of the liability.

I would think there would be no SEO value in it. Google frowns upon paid links so I am sure they treat that directory accordingly. As far as click through value I do not know.

I personally would follow them There is no issue in having a page with thin content followed, it will not hurt anything.

Is there a chance that you could have found their dev site? Look at the source and robots.txt, is it set to noindex and to disallow?

edit: Actually in looking it up, it is something that sales force is doing. I think it would be considered bad, its duplicated content. Another one that is hosted on the same server is

http://ricohau.force.com/

which is also

http://www.ricoh.com.au/

It looks like salesforce is copying the websites for some reason.

You are actually in luck. It looks like the site is hosted at AWS. You can send a DMCA notice to AWS and let them know someone has copied your whole site and is hosting it with them. They should take it down immediately. The link you need is here, https://aws.amazon.com/forms/report-abuse

I totally agree with EGOL on this. I would like to add my 2cents since I think I am one of the only SEO people that is a developer too.

This is what I would do (in pseudo code) put a <rel="canonical"  href="$url=strtok($_SERVER[" request_uri"],'?');"=""> </rel="canonical">

This is in php, I don't know what platform you are on, but what it will do in php is return the current url as the canonical and delete the ? and everything after. So basically it will return the url minus the query string. I use this technique a lot with my clients for doing canonical urls on CMS's that use query strings and it works great.

If you do not block googlebot ip addresses in the process, you will not get penalized. But remember google does not post a list of their bot ip addresses, so be careful and monitor your GWT for error messages.

On a side note, what kind of attacks are you getting, there might be better ways to block them.

**The following is bad advice, I am just leaving the text so people can see what it is, so no one follows it. **

If it were me, I would do make a totally different site, on a totally different server (hosting company) with totally different registration information. From there I would basically maintain two sites, maybe get a second phone number, maybe even split the address so you can use local citations.

But, I would not move the main site over to the new domain. The hit you would take would take a long time to recover from like EGOL said.

I am guessing the machine has a type of management on it. If you are on a static ip address I would have the sysadmin set the port to only accept connects from you, them, and the local connection from the sysadmin in the data center.

I have actually seen it happen in a matter of minutes from using fetch as Google. I had a client that left debugging on, on the site and it was printing an error message as the meta tag. It took about 10 minutes to get it cleared out using fetch as Google.