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I just checked your robots file, and I see this:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /cars/index

Disallow: /cars/details

Check in webmaster tools what Google is seeing for your robots.txt - this will confirm what you see is what Google is seeing

Can you paste the full text here?

You may also try to build some links into the page, as well as sharing it on social networks, particularly Google+, to get the big G to recrawl and revisit the page and update the meta info it is displaying.

Good luck,

Mark

If the search engines are using it, it's as a spam signal - I'd recommend staying away from it, and usually tell my clients to leave it blank and have them remove keywords tags that are stuffed and could seem to be a spam indicator - see this article on Search Engine Land

I don't think there's no reason to nofollow this branded link - you built their site, they chose you and have kept that link on there - that's a pretty good signal that they are endorsing your work. If they want it removed, by all means they'll remove it, or ask you to remove it, or replace you with someone else and remove it. So I'd leave it as followed - but definitely go with branded.

You may also want to consider creating a page of clients you've worked with in the past/portfolio type page, and then link to that page instead of the homepage. If you get hit, you can always kill that page and start another internal portfolio page. With the homepage, that's much harder to do.

I'd be very hesitant to add target anchor text in these links - I've seen sites that had built links like Web Design and SEO services by Company X - web design points to the webdev page, seo points to the seo page on the company website. These sites got rocked by Penguin - footer site wide links with keyword rick anchor text pointing to target pages leads to heavily overoptimized backlink profiles that are awesome penguin food. Don't do it! Just use a branded link or a naked anchor link (www.companyx.com) as the link back, otherwise you're just asking for trouble.

You can check out raven tools - they have a lot of these features, and also deal with lots of other channels - they're a very good multipurpose tool - http://raventools.com/ - I've used them in the past - granted they offer fewer services now since they no longer provide rank tracking, but they're very good for link building management, social, reporting, analytics, kw research, and lots of other features.

Google has recently cracked down on tools that provide data scraped from the search engines. They've removed API access because they believe these sites are violating their terms of service by scraping Google data. Since the keyword tool, and other moz tools like the campaign tracker with rank tracking, scrape Google data, Google Adwords has removed API access and so SEOMoz no longer has access to this keyword data.

You can see this thread here for more info about it. I hope they get it back soon, but it's not looking very promising at the moment.

Mark

I think the name should be reflective of the nature of the blog - is this a blog published from the site, which in my mind makes sense to call it blog, or is this something going to be created by and for the community of your audience, in which case it makes sense to call it community.

If you're publishing articles, behind the scenes info, general information, etc., I would call it a blog. If you're encouraging users to publish and it's more geared towards community participation, I would call it community.

Those are my two cents - good luck!

Mark

Why not write the content normally and use css to style the text to force lowercase - this way it shows up in the engines and to other crawlers as readable and normal text, while it displays in the browser to humans as lowercase? that's what I would do

Mark

If the site got hit in the search engines (I see a major drop in visibility for the site in Search Metrics June 21 and 28 2012), and the client has now moved to a new domain, why would you 301 the old pages to the new ones - don't you want to start with a clean slate, which is why you started a new site?

If the 301 passes the penalty or not, why take the risk? Why not build your link profile the proper way this time?

I also see a lot of over optimized anchor text in OSE and very little branded or generic - diversify your anchor text and focus on branded, unoptimized, and naked anchor text (www.claims...) in your link building efforts.

If you're worried about visitors to the current domain, why not redirect using a 302 and then eventually let the domain die?

Instead of switching domains, you can also do a link disavow after a thorough review of your links and then do a reconsideration request, and then start the link building again on the current domain, instead of switching to a new hyphenated domain that just looks like a spammier version of the original URL. I would do a thorough back link review and then disavow and reinclusion request instead of the new domain route. You can refer to this article for how to review your links from Search Engine Journal.

That's my two cents - hope it helps

Mark

It's more of a site security issue - not updating your wordpress and plugins leaves you vulnerable to security flaws exploited in old wordpress installs - Google is trying to help you and encourage you to update your wordpress to maintain security and prevent the site from being hacked.

I don't believe it's a rankings issue, but more quality of website and health of the web in general issue that Google is sending out these messages.

You can refer to this blog post on State of Search for more info.

I agree with Moosa, but it may make sense to also look at mozrank for the subdomain - OSE calls it subdomain mozrank, which would look at the strength of the whole subdomain. you can also look at the number of linking root domains and followed linking root domains, compare that to the total numbers for the domain, and determine how much of the overall strength of the domain authority is resultant from the particular subdomain you're looking at. Those are just my theories, but to me it makes sense

One tool you can use for this is scrapebox - it's got lots of uses, but you can definitely check external links with it - see here - http://www.scrapebox.com/internal-and-external-link-extractor

You can also use the screaming frog spider to crawl a site and then see all of the external links on the site

Scrapebox is a paid tool and screaming frog has both a free (limited) and paid version

Mark

I usually look at subdomain metrics as reported by OSE to gauge the strength of a particular wordpress or blogspot domain - if it is has legitimate external links, it's definitely something I'll consider.

do you mean semantic markup?

Hiring people to talk about your brand is fine - paying someone to talk about your brand and link to your site with the express purpose of influencing the search engine's algorithms is the problem. If you pay someone to talk about your brand and they nofollow the link that is perfectly fine in the engines' eyes - the link is not meant to influence your ranking - however, paying someone for a link is the problem.

That being said, bloggers are getting smarter and realize they can make money off of this, and are going to try and make money off of guest blogging just like they can make money off of inserting contextual links.

If you want to avoid these issues, try creating a relationship with the blogger first, connecting with them on twitter and other social media networks, actually reading their blog and interacting with them. As a representative of the brand, they'll recognize you and you'll have a real relationship and then approach and ask to guest blog post on their site - this should be a very different reaction.

There are also lots of other ways to build links besides guest blogging - it ain't easy, and no one is saying it is, but you should probably diversify your strategy - here is a great post with various tactics and strategies from Jon Cooper - enjoy!

Good luck,

Mark

This should be ok - if you're going to link between the two sites (I've seen lots of site networks interlink between them in the footer) I'd recommend not using keyword rich anchor text in your links between the sites but rather your brand name as the anchor text or the clean url and not use anchor text at all.

I've seen lots of sites/networks get hit due to this overoptimized site wide anchor text in the footer, so link cleanly.

But I don't think you'll have an issue of duplicate content in the regular algorithms.

For Google Local, you may want to consider getting a unique phone number (and address) if you want a separate place listing, but that may not be enough and you may need more unique info - see this blog post from Mike Blumenthal for more info

Good luck,

Mark

Firstly, why add the no follow tag - let the pages be followed - so if you link back to your parent site, some link juice may flow.

Secondly, I agree with Nigel about the canonical tag. In terms of robots, the no index tag is more effective than blocking the site in robots.txt. You can also implement the no index tag via the http status responses in apache using your .htaccess file - see here for more info

This way you can control this site wide from one location and also it won't be as apparent to anyone who looks at the code of the nonbranded site that it shouldn't be indexed.

Mark

Have you outsourced link building / SEO services to anyone? It could be they used a tool or outsourced this work to someone else, and these articles only went live in Oct. and Nov, even though they had technically gone through the pipeline a few months prioer?

It doesn't seem like someone would attack your site in that manner with a few articles on a crappy site - they would use sitewides, thousands of directory submissions, social bookmarks, etc., for much cheaper than having 3 unique articles written and posted with anchor text.

I'm more of the opinion these are remnants of an old link building strategy than of a malicious attack to hurt your site.

Mark