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What are you comparing to - if not Etsy what do you believe should be first position?

Etsy has a very high domain authority, a large link profile and social footprint.  The keyword is in the URL, the meta title and in content so for me it is a perfect candidate for grabbing pole position.  It also has a good volume of reviews.

I think it really depends on your blog, the market and what you want to achieve.  A tight niche could be very lucrative if you become the authority.

Say a keyword has approx 100 searches per month and you rank well and achieve a sale/signup/commitment per month from that.  Then there are 30 other search terms with similar volumes you can rank for.  Is this valuable to you?

If you are selling 'blue widgets' at £1 per widget and a typical customer only ever buys one or two then your niche blog may not be worth your efforts.  But if they are repeat purchasers then again that changes the landscape.

Generally speaking if you have site-wide do-follow  links (typically footer) I would switch to no-follow immediately. If you are purely inter linking your portfolio Google is likely to spot those links are there trying to game the system.

Even if those links are offering real value to the visitor I would set to no-follow, but the way you describe that does not appear to be their primary purpose.  What context and how do they appear on the page?

Also you say that you have been hit.  Was this a manual penalty or an algorithmic penalty?  So you are fighting the right fight have you compared your analytics with the algorithm history dates?

I have not delved deeper but running the site through Screaming Frog you have a massive amount of malformed URLs that have 301 redirects - example: /summer-2013-belt-testing-requirements//

So it looks like you have an internal rewrite issue creating double slash that you then need 301s to correct.  You need to check your settings and htaccess file to troubleshoot the core problem.

This is a very useful article which I hope you find of help - http://www.blindfiveyearold.com/what-is-a-c-block-ip-address

yes agree - set as no-follow.

Everybody will direct you to the foot of the page to take a look at recommended companies - http://moz.com/community/recommended

For all new content it is important to get indexed fast.  There is the scenario that if your site is crawled infrequently another site may get that copy indexed first and by default is viewed as theirs.  So with any new content I would post on social media as quickly as possible - G+, Twitter etc to get noticed and to mark as yours. G+ author attribute will help.

Would you prefer to browse a site that is flat in terms of just providing static one dimensional information, or a hot site that is offering external resources and links to further information to give you the best experience possible?   Always think of the user experience.  Google probably knows that if you add links out within your content and in context to external authority sites you are attempting to give value to the visitor.  So if you do link out don't use no-follow, as you are telling Google you don't trust the sites!

Cut the rope and run!

To build links you need high authority (mixed with some lower authority), highly relevant in context sites that suit your niche.  Imagine how many thousands of niches there out there, now imagine that company has such a complex portfolio of opportunities it can cater for anyone who buys a 'package'.  It's not going to happen!  That would be like the holy grail.

You would be far better spending on time $200 for 1 single powerful link than spend $xxx + for the privilege of getting penalized.

You'd be better off investing time in:

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkLFlaWxgJA
• http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/growing-popularity-and-links
• http://moz.com/blog/category/link-building

"Check your robots.txt, meta noindex, and other exclusions to make sure you are not blocking your own content (once you are live)."

Yes, this is far more common than people like to admit.  I'd also add it can be useful to use the Fetch and Render function in Webmaster Tools to check what Google can see once live.  Occasionally robots.txt needs a tweak to stop blocking a particular resource.

Name, Address, Phone - you should provide comprehensive contact details.  Part of your service could/should be to double check their details on their site and make sure it identically matches on your listing.  Businesses are still lapse in this, or try to extend their address to capture more than one county, as if it will somehow do them good.

They also need to give you fresh new content about themselves, not some default directory description.

Go into the Adwords account >> hit Help on the right >> you should have a phone link within Contact Us

I would make sure you check the links in any case using something like Backlinkwatch.com, there might still be toxic links in there as well as the good link you mention.

This should go a long way to answering your question - http://moz.com/community/q/what-are-the-good-strategies-using-satellite-sites-in-seo

This is a good point.  I am working on a group of sites on wpengine.  So dev was using something like name.staging.wpengine.  When they went live the directories etc switched to the live domain but scattered throughout the site within the content the URLs remained the same.   ScreamingFrog is your friend.

For me longtail keywords are purely more finely focused keywords cascaded down from the big money/focus keywords whatever they may be.  So it doesn't matter if they are model related or how any words etc, they are just one way or another the closest thing you can get to a finer granularity exact match the next level from the big volume main keyword.  I think the target is selecting the ones with modest competition and a search volume.

The right format means ensuring everywhere online that your business appears the address is identical.  The same goes for the telephone number.

So for example

Acme Ltd
Some Street
Bigtown
AB1 XYZ

is not the same as

Acme Ltd
Unit 1
Some Street
Bigtown
District
AB1 XYZ

or

Acme;
Some Street;
District;
AB1 XYZ

How that is coded into the html is not so important as long as the text is crawl-able and presented in an address format.

You will lose the page to page 301 passing link value.

I would just point out to them the importance of maintaining/developing links at a deeper level in the site, even throw them a couple of example URLs if possible.  If they don't get it, turn the table and ask them to explain how doing a name server redirect will maintain the internally flowing link equity.

Yes you are perfectly right.  Any visitor will expect to land on a corresponding page, so they get what they want, there is trust and they don't jump of the site.  I would have thought having information on the page relating to the domain change puts people at rest.

If you have mod_rewrite enabled on your server you could try something like this in your .htaccess file:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^(.).htm$
RewriteRule ^(.) /$1.php [R=301,L]