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It's a bit overkill, but if you want to get rid of something, you can get rid of wp engine. I have a lot of websites running on cheap $5 hosts + cloudflare and once everything is cached, they are blazing fast.

Regarding the rankings, as Cyrus said, depending on the niche you'll see fluctuations, i have a website where i see movement in the serps every day or every other day.

Website looks nice, clean and professional.

Do a full 301 redirect and don't worry so much about DA/PA - they are not google metrics and the numbers themselves don't influence google rankings. But just as Monica said, you will see a drop in rankings but they should be back up in 2 weeks or so.

How much of the content is actually yours and how much is copied from other places. Did you use spun articles? If the website an autoblog? Either way, i would say the penalty is correct and your website is spam (if you can't prove otherwise).

Easiest thing to do is replace every instance of "1886 ten dollar bill" with "1886 ten dollar ($10) bill" - it contains all variations you need to rank for. Let me know if that helped.

Martine, nothing to worry if you have the same keywords 18 times on a page, that's not keyword stuffing. If you had it 18 times in the title only, that would be a problem. Just think about it on a regular page about sex dolls, the word "sex doll" will appear 3-10 times in the content. It would also appear in the menu, breadcrumbs, categories, product variations, titles, etc. So 18 times on the whole page is not a problem.

This could get you in trouble, even if the articles are not identical, but fairly identical. It's like those crappy spun articles people were (or still are) using for building contextual links. Most of the won't get indexed and if you have too many of them. The main problem is if those similar articles are also posted on your website. If yes, it could hurt you, if not, there's no risk but just as max pointed out, the backlinks will have no value.

You don't have to worry about a thing, Google is smarter than you think - a trailing slash more or less won't affect your SEO in any way.

use sucuri.net to do a full website scan and see if it's still infected (and where it's infected). the scan if totally free.

You just need to wait a bit (24-48 hrs), if you didn't do anything to that page, chances are it's gonna be back in the top 10.

The pagerank won't update. What you have now is what you'll have (probably forever). Good thing is that pagerank doesn't count. Your low DA/PA is due to the few links or low quality links you may have. If you want to increase it, you'll need more links (from high PA pages of course).

Just like you said: add https version (with and without www) to gwt, change the wp main url, use the ssl redirect plugin or manage the redirect via htaccess and finally wait a few days to see the changes.

No such thing as best tool for seo. Seo is huge, so there are different tools for different purposes.

You shouldn't worry about this, as far as i remember ezinearticles and most article directories are nofollow, so no harm done. To back this up, i know 3 websites with tons and tons of links from article directories (like 10k or more) and nothing happened to them (no penguin or manual penalty).

U got hacked - someone created a dummy page on your website and created links to it. You need to secure your wordpress (but first you need to clean it or do a fresh install).

Did your rankings drop? How old is your domain and what DA/PA do you have? How many links do you have (checked with all available tools)?

3000 links won't do much, that's not really negative seo, 300k links would be something to worry about. So unless your rankings dropped or your site is brand new, all should be ok.

Also, disavowing is not instant, not even fast, might take up to 2 (or more) months to see some effect.

This is proof that the link wheel still works. Like idimmu pointed out, all the huge media or news networks use it and if you look carefully, all the big bloggers out there use it. The link wheel is used constantly in one form or another, it's just that people using it don't call it by it's name. I mean, when you, as a big profile blogger / expert do 20 guest posts which all link to one of your websites and then link those guest posts to each other, how do you call that? Or when you own 10+ websites in the same niche (all with high authority and trust) and you link them all together via some blog posts promoting your latest product / service, how do you call that. You call that a link wheel.

And no matter how much people would tell you that link wheels don't work anymore, you have proof the they actually do. But all in moderation (just as with any other link building strategy). High quality stuff will always do good, no matter what changes google brings on. So if you're planning to build an seo link wheel, make sure you do it right - read this for more details on how to build a proper seo link wheel.