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There is no duplicate content penalty, as such. (Google "duplicate content penalty" for many articles about this.) When Google comes across duplicate content, it simply decides which version should appear in its index and drops the other one(s). This won't affect the high-quality content you have on other parts of your site.

He should be redirecting one to the other via a 301 redirect (usually people choose the www version as the canonical one). If he is not doing this he will have other problems, like massive amounts of duplicate content. A 301 redirect will pass along most of the authority from the links, >90%.

1. In Yoast, you use a wildcard that slightly switches up the description for each category, like this: "Archive of posts categorized %%term_title%% in my blog, "Wonderful Blog."

2. Yes

Here is a good explanation.

Why do you need 302 redirects? That is a temporary redirect--do you have some pages that have been temporarily moved?

Although many sites do put canonicals on every page (making them canonical to themselves) this is not necessary. You only really need them if you have duplicate content on your site. Do you have that? If not, you don't need canonicals either.

Internal linking is not counted as heavily as external linking, but yes, it is still very important. If all of your well-ranked pages link back to your business page, you are pointing a lot of authority at that page.

[I have personal experience with this. When I had some new pages (which didn't have any links yet) that I wanted to do well in the SERPs, I made them one level below the homepage (www.example.com/top-page) and pointed good internal links to them. Before long, they were among my highest-ranked pages, even before they got any external links.]

I noindex my tags and archives, but there is also a Yoast setting for those, same place but under "Other" rather than "Taxonomies".

Here is a thread about the DMOZ/Open Directory project that ViviCa1 mentioned. [A lot of people are trying to get into DMOZ but can't, you should be happy you have the link. ]

One thing you could look at though is why does Google think that the directory description is the best one to return?

Check and see whether you can improve the descriptive content on the actual site. [At one point I got two new sites to work on, both in DMOZ, the rich, active one returned site-appropriate information, the long-neglected one returned the directory description.]

When I go to your site and search on USB flash drives, I see 53 products, same as in the Google snippet. What number did you expect to see? http://imgur.com/ZKZGvyb

[I know you obscured the domain in your image, but the name of the company is in the title.]

Yes, dmoz is still accepting listings. It is a large, human-edited directory and submissions can take a very long time to process, depending on your area. They also don't accept all sites. As far as value, it is certainly not the golden ticket it once was and the general consensus probably is that it has little or no impact. That being said, it's not that difficult to submit a site and it wouldn't hurt to be accepted.

It could be that your home page will continue to rank for that keyword (since it is very low competition) if the keyword remains relatively prominent on the page and the meta data.

If this is not the case or not what you want, then yes I would create a new page with appropriate content and link to it from the home page.

And that is causing a reporting problem for you, yes? You can't tell whether traffic coming in from that URL is campaign or search traffic. I am assuming you have checked and your 301 is correctly implemented and doing what you expect.

Have you tried doubling up by using a canonical URL? It might not make a difference since Google is ignoring the 301, but it might reinforce the message.

As far as why this is happening, is there something about the vanity URL that might make Google like it so much better? Are there for example some good links to it? [I know it is part of an offline campaign, but someone may have put the URL online.]

Why do you have it set up that way to begin with? Could you put the content on the higher level page? Or is it meant to be an easy-to-remember "vanity" URL? In any case, yes, do not put a page with no content in your sitemap.

And to get it to stop showing up in search, you can add a canonical to the page, pointing to the deeper page with the actual content.

In the Moz Research Tools drop-down menu, you will find "keyword analysis". Choose that and you will see a box where you can enter your keywords of interest--they will then appear in the "keyword difficulty and analysis" table below. Choose one and click on "view". This will create a report for you, which will include the top ten ranked pages for your keyword. (You can run an advanced report from there to get even more information.)

As far as replicating links, for Moz tools there are the competitive link finder and the link acquisition assistant, which you can find in the left column on the research tools page, under more tools & resources. You might also be interested in the "Beginners Guide to Link Building", which you can find here.

Yes, no hyphens in the domain name. Thanks for clarifying, Donna.

Google Adwords does not directly affect your organic ranking in any way, Google makes a point of that.

You should easily be able to talk to your Adwords representative about any aspect of your paid campaigns (in fact I am surprised that they have not contacted you--I get regular calls from my rep). I am sure that person could also reassure you about the effect of Adwords on your organic rankings.

The phone number for free Adwords phone support is: 1-877-442-0135.

The posts and articles with good backlinks, does that content still make sense in your renewed site? If so, I'd bring them back. If you don't have the content, you can try the Wayback Machine. The same goes for any old posts you think would be useful to your new readers.

The problem with redirecting a bunch of 404s to the same page (like the homepage) is that you end up with soft 404s and not a very good user experience. Pick the ones that correspond to specific pages that you have on the updated site and redirect those to the equivalent page.

Anything else, I'd let 404. A bunch of old posts, with no good links, the content of which you no longer have a use for on the site don't represent value to searchers—those pages will just drop out of Googles index (and crawl attempts) over time.

[This isn't just theoretical. We changed domains back in November and we had lots of old content—going back 10+ years, which is ancient history for a financial publisher. I ended up with about 6,000 404s. We are now down to about 4,000 404s as pages drop off. Google crawls us quickly and regularly and our organic traffic is up 86.49% .]

On a given website, it is better to get links from the higher PA pages (all of the pages will have the same DA).

So a homepage link for example (which will usually have a higher PA than other pages on the site) will be better than a link from a deep, newly created page (which is likely have a low PA).

When I try that page in the on-page grader, I get "Sorry, but that URL is inaccessible. " If I put that URL into Screaming Frog, I see it is 403 (forbidden). I can see the page when I enter it into a browser, however.

It seems that something is blocking robot access to this page (although I do not see a robots exclusion)...

Google Search Console (aka Webmaster Tools) will give you some of that information. And Screaming Frog will give you that and lots, lots more.