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I would recommend trying to get citations and / or links from all kinds of local directories based on your niche. For local rankings, citations are pretty useful as well. It really depends what your niche is to think of other ideas, but local business, schools, libraries etc are all good opportunities worth pursuing depending what kind of business we are talking about.

Also think about local events, sponsorships and donations possibly. I would also recommend the following articles:

http://searchengineland.com/10-unorthodox-ideas-for-local-citations-links-77468

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-places-citations-5-tactics-to-earn-links-for-your-local-business

How many PDF files are we talking ? Are they indexed ? Is there unique text content or images that have text that google has OCR'D ? If yes, I would suggest keeping them on www and therefore keep it simple. Again, it depends how many PDF files in number as well as their size in gigs would make it an easy answer.

I agree with Robert. There could be multiple other factors. The search landscape has changed and evolved drastically in the last 10 years. And it will continue to. The economy adds to the competition because everybody is trying to get online and get a piece of the pie. You are definitely as the right place in terms of trying to figure it out. I would suggest getting an SEO Audit done as well as a competition analysis and create a plan for the next 3-6-12 months to regain your position, strengthen your domain, brand and do whatever it takes to get back on top. What it would take, depends on what your competition is doing. I hope this helps.

Rand, that's a very interesting point about Google trying to find the details about the sneaky techniques a webmaster might have used. I see how that makes complete sense for them to find the source and get it off the roots like they did with BuildMyRank.com network.

Jesse, yes, I would recommend doing this for any site with a considerable number of images. If you want your images to be found, it won't hurt to do an image sitemap. Definitely recommended. Google webmaster console then gives you a good read on how many of the images you submitted are already indexed as well as a count of the pages those images are on, that are indexed.

Interesting link Majid. It does detect the malware on Emily's website.

http://sitecheck.sucuri.net/results/funeralhomeoptions.com

Clearly, it's the code injection we have been talking. I hope you are able to find the malicious code and remove it.

Diego, As Paul said, do not chase the page-rank. You can however get a better idea using SEOMoz Opensite Explorer.org's DA/PA (Domain Authority and Page Authority Score). Again, this is just to get a rough estimate on a relative score comparison between you and your competition. I hope that helps.

All the 3 options are okay. You have to keep in mind, that with the nature of the Internet, you are not really going to be able to control which one of the 3 technique people/other website owners you, so essentially you can't know what people decide to do.

Another oppurtunity would be to implement something like www.repost.us (I saw that discussed here a couple days ago) and when I took a look at it, it looked interesting. Check it out.

I hope that helps. And yes, the most important aspect would be to make sure the content you are adding should be seen by Google on your website/blog 1st. If you are using WordPress or something like that, I would suggest using a plugin to publish and ping to Google an updated XML sitemap as soon as a new article is added. That should so it for you.

Akhil, at any given point, there's only 1 of those 3 URLs of the images that would appear on the site. I would therefore only choose 1, the one that is primary / most important to you.

It would be best to update the canonical URLs to go directly to the new location. Having too many redirects, canonicals can often create these complex situations causing issues in the long-run. The intent of the canonical tag is to pass the bots a strong directive about what the correct URL is. So it would be wise to use the correct URL instead of a URL which does not exist (301'd). I hope this helps.

It might be just me, but if these are brand new videos, it makes sense to just add them as new videos and do nothing to the old ones. Your #2. "Add the new videos, and leave the old videos untouched". I'd do that.

Here you go... Visit http://linkprospector.citationlabs.com/

This tool does a great job in find potential guest post sources based on your niche/keywords.

Let me try and give it a shot...it might be my 1st SEOMoz article. Good idea...Cheers Jesse.

I agree with Gerd and Marisa. I would recommend you to consider doing a Cross Domain canonical tag on your buyproduct.com product pages and any other duplicate content to your product.com pages or vice versa, depending upon whichever one you want to keep in the search engines.

Since both your websites have strength and our gaining the SERPS (which does not guarantee that they can't fall tomorrow for getting penalized for duplicate content), I would suggest you take the opportunity to put a plan and strategy together and get this taken care of sooner then later.

Robert

I completely understand what you are trying to do. It can and will work. However, I'd suggest you look into your current backlink profile and see if there are diverse kinds of links, natural links. Also, don't overdo any one kind of link building tactic. This is not a 100% Bait and Switch, but, I'll ask you this, if SEO did not exist, would you still do it ? Think of this as a Custom Acquisition and Brand Awareness technique while helping towards SEO.

I would strongly recommend the Link Prospector tool from Citation Labs - http://linkprospector.citationlabs.com/

Is it a local business ? Correct me if I am wrong, but judging by your question, it does not sound like it is.

Honestly, there are tons of other creative ways of building content and links. I would take a deep dive into those opportunities and if you have exhausted all such options, I would take a 2nd dive. But why build links only for SEO reasons. Try and build something that actually helps the business otherwise get some brand awareness and helps acquire customers. I know it's easier said then done, and vary drastically by industry.

OMG, that does not look good. I completely understand. The best way in my opinion would be to add a noindex meta tag on these pages and let Google crawl them. Once they re-index them with the noindex, that should take care of the problem. However, be careful since you want to make sure that noindex tag does not appear on your real pages, just the AJAX ones.

Another option might be to consider the canonical tag, but then technically these pages are not duplicate pages, they just should not exist. Are you verified and using the Google Webmaster Console ? If yes, see if you can get some of these pages excluded via the URL removal tool. The best way is to add the noindex tag in my opinion.

We are basically discussing Video Optimization. Here's the thing. If you optimize your video with better titles, descriptions and it sounds like your descriptions already contain a backlink to your website. As Tom said, Embedding the video helps the video page (if at all), but not the site embedding it. In your case, it sounds like you are embedding it on the site that your video is linking to. So I agree with Tom. Answering your question directly, linking to the video (and embedding it) from other places on the web, helps your video page which in turn helps your money site if you are linking to your money site from the video. Just don't over do it. Too much of anything is bad. I hope this helps.

This is not a manual response, it's actually an automated response. I would continute to build content and links to the site. I hope you explained your effort in trying to get rid of the links etc. That should take care of it. However considering the massive penalty messages sent by them, you'd wonder how long would it take for them to do anything for each one of those. Has to be something somewhat automated, but it can't be.