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It sounds like you have links in posts being followed, no follow all links in posts no matter who posts them. For footer signatures, make a threshold, say 25 posts before the user can have a footer signature. If you want to give people more incentive to post, have a do follow link in their profile after a certain threshold has been passed, like Moz does.

Fighting forum spam is a full time job almost, but it is easier to beat it in the beginning than just handle it as it comes in. Create a honey pot on your registration form and change it out weekly. Something like this could work, http://solutionfactor.net/blog/2014/02/01/honeypot-technique-fast-easy-spam-prevention/

As for the links on the other sites I would disavow them, but once you stop the spam, they should stop. What they are doing is called link laundering. They are placing a link in your forum, then they are using a service like fiverr or similar to build backlinks to the forum link. They do this in hopes to raise the authority of the forum post and in turn raise the authority of links pointing to their site. They are pretty insulated from penalties by doing this, but they risk you getting a penalty.

I would make the links no follow. I think you could find yourself at risk for a penalty if you do not, it really just depends on how widely it is spread. But I would include the links, because they would generally be deemed helpful Especially for someone wanting a table of their site. But I would make them nofollowed links as well just to protect yourself.

I did the same about a year ago for my blog without adding the https. I generally would have just changed it then waited about a month, then added the https. With just changing ours it took about a month and the traffic was back up to the level it was at before. About 45 days in the traffic was higher and leveled out. I am guessing you have all of the redirects in place?

You might get a little quicker removal if you send them with a 410 status code. That will let Google know that the page is gone for good. http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2340728/matt-cutts-on-how-google-handles-404-410-status-codes

One thing I would recommend off the bat is enabling rich snippets for recipes and maybe a rating system too. https://developers.google.com/structured-data/rich-snippets/recipes

Can you share a link to the page so we can see if anything is marked up incorrectly. That would more than likely be the cause.

I either missed the link or you added it. I looked at both your main page and a listing page. The main page is suing a H2 correctly. The listing I saw did not have one. Is the main page the page with the error on it?

This is just the application I have been looking for to push my site up through the ranks. I am totally joking. I think it appeals to people looking for an easy way to rank. There are always going to people that want the easy way out of things that is why the "1 trick doctors hate" type advertising is so popular.

I think software like this does start a good discussion though. What is your opinion of the death of the content writer? Do you think machines generating content will eventually take over the SERPS? From what I am understanding talking to different people in the journalism industry it is already happening. There are apparently programs that you can feed "lesser" news into in and from a paragraph or two it can spin a few paragraphs on the story using Google, internal algorithms and other sources. While now they are not helpful to the average SEO person, they look promising to a media outlet that pays $60k a year for someone to rewrite AP or Reuters news articles.

Also I saw you recommend Hemingway App a while back, I have been using it to rewrite some of my content, I absolutely love it. Thanks for pointing it out.

The load time is not an issue really since it is just text data and only about 20 products. We have a nifty setup actually, we use Algolia to display the products on the category page, we are just making a double call to Algolia before the page render and taking their json array and modifying it into what is needed.

If you run this page through the Structured data testing tool, https://www.ebay.com/b/Fine-Jewelry/4196/bn_2408477  this is what one of us is proposing. See how the tool does not break each into a product node.

At the other time this is a page that the other is proposing,  https://www.apple.com/shop/mac/mac-accessories  It breaks the products into nodes. (albeit there are errors that can be fixed with the pricing)

I think this better illustrates the issue.

I have been torn lately on the issue. I have a couple of clients that do absolutely nothing in regards to SEO. (they are e-commerce sites) By nothing I mean no SEO firm, most pages don't have meta descriptions, the title tags are just the auto generated tags, no content what so ever. If someone were to give them an on site audit they would be basically have a field day with them in terms of SEO. But social media powers their sales, it powers it hard too. They might have a pinterest post generate 1000-2000 orders in a day.

So that really has me torn to be honest. I have always seen the value in social, don't get me wrong, but I don't guess I have seen it drive a whole marketing strategy before.

I would leave them be. Use accurate meta tags initially, then just let them stay. One thing I would add if it is possible, is to use authorship rich snippets. If the news articles are reviewed, add that one too. Another suggestion I might give is to internally link them to newer articles. Like say you have one from 2007 that talks about Googles stock price, I would link it to the most current one that talks about Googles stock price and put a little message in about an updated article. Other than that, I think you will be fine.

From experience the absolute best is to use different domains that are targeted to the country. Like site.uk, site.com.au, ect. I have found that besides being expensive, it works really well, just have different content on each domain.

I have a client in this market, I can give you tips that they use. Let me ask one thing, is it e-commerce with prices listed on the site? Or is it show room only purchases?

They are not ignored by google, they would be seen as duplicate content if the same content is used on each page. Also one thing you should keep in mind too is that you will be diluting the keywords in the page name by adding more.

Remove the products.. it adds no value. What the article is describing is if you have collisions. Like say you have a "page" in wordpress call "ipod" and you also have a product called "ipod" When you remove the category, everything will be like yoursite.com/ipod so if you have a product named the exact name as a page you will have a collision. Just ensure that you do not have this. SEO ultimate plugin can do this, I use it on my blog for the very same thing with no problems. Or you can manually do the rewrites in the htaccess file.

You absolute best bet since you are not dealing with a lot of products, it sounds like it is a small site, is do it in the middle of the night and do a spider from MOZ and see if it picks up errors.

I gave a concrete answer, I said disavow them. The simple reason being is that YOU need to manipulate the link direction of your website, not someone else.

Interesting, it sounds like they had a long term plan. Good thing you found about it in time.

I think the plan sounds good. I would definitely get off front page, it has been out of development for a while so there are vulnerabilities that have not been patched in years.

You might look into a cms like Wordpress or concrete5 to make things easier for you with transitioning the site. Then you would have to only learn minimal html / css, and could focus more on the content.

Good luck to ya.

Depending on how they are using the brand name, it might be a legal matter. It could be something easy enough as filing a DMCA notice with their hosting company or sending them a cease and desist notice. They aren't immediate solutions, but they will solve the problem.

I know the end of the rope feeling, this is what I would do if I were in your situation.

I would use every link finding tool I could to find all of the links to their site, majestic, seo moz,ahrefs, everything. Then I would disavow anything that even remotely looks spammy. Next I would set up an adwords account and start advertising, maybe a few hundred dollars. I would let that go on for about a month or so, then I would contact the sales person that Google puts in charge of the account and see if they can do anything before you submit another reconsideration.

Honestly in my opinion you are going to have a hard time making the category rank higher than the product. Especially since things like rich data only supports one offer per page. I have no proof, but I would off the hip say that search engine want to put people on a product page, not a category page.

One thing to take into account to is conversion rate, just about every study says you convert more with a product as a landing page vs any other page in a site.

You can either use /cats/ or /cats/* that should just block the cats folder and not the other folder. Note the first use is the preferred one.