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Canonical Tags help get rid of any potential duplicate page issues. I don't think this could be a reason for any kind of penalty/drop in rankings.

A canonical tag is simply a code used as a directive by search engine crawlers/spiders to tell search engines what URL is the original version of your webpage.

I would suggest you just nofollow them, so that you are not essentially giving out a link vote to each of those links. This will make sure you are not passing on SEO benefits/link juice to those sites/links.

You can do 301 redirects from the old page to the new page using .htaccess..however I would suggest you test the impact by doing it for 1-2 urls first and see if it does indeed help. The reason I am suggesting this is because when you do 301 redirects or canonical urls which also act like 301s, there's a little bit of link juice loss from the old URL. S if you have lots of websites linking to that page, you may loose a little bit of that link juice. Again, you have to do more of a risk/reward analysis and see what makes sense.

It really depends what your niche/audience is. A lot of these results vary by industry and region. I think you are on the right track to do some sort of an A/B test to see what works better. Sometimes what we think and what's right are like 2 completely different things. I always like to test.

Looks like a nice article. Thanks for the link Brent. Just clipped it for reading tonight. Glanced at the sub-topics, looks interesting.

I am not sure, but something like Join Now. Or if you have some sort of a giveaway, something to download, it could become like Free Download etc. I hope that helps trigger some ideas

The robots.txt would probably not be a part of the Wordpress Configuration. Allow indexing is controlled via Meta Data by the Wordpress Architecture.

I would look for something like this in yourdomain.com/robots.txt

disallow /

or something like that. If that does not help, PM me your site URL and I would be glad to look it up for you.

This is fine. Nothing to worry about. The link juice does get passed onto the canonical URL. There's a slight loss, but it's sort of like a 301.

This tag helps you avoid any duplicate content issues.

I agree. I would plug those starting point / core keywords into Google Keywords Tool and/or SEMRush and see what you get. Somebody well versed with the industry is helpful but so is someone completely unknown to the industry. Sometimes we call certain things in a certain way, but that's now how majority of the people on the web search.

As Phil said, I would not worry about the age. I would find a subject matter expert, I am sure there are tons of people available on SEOMoz who do freelance. Just see if someone is available, do a small test project and take it from there. If that does not work, sites like Odesk.com have plenty of providers, but then tons of them are offshore. So everything has it's pros and cons.

It looks like it's something to do with your Collapsing Pages Plugin. I see links like Old Freezer Removal in the code which are not visible on the page. I would try disabling that link and see what happens.

If you go look at the HTML source for this page (view-source:http://standupguys.biz/what-we-haul/commercial-junk-removal-services/computer-removal-recycling/) in Chrome and then do a Ctrl+F for "<a 105="" href"="" you'll="" notice="" it="" shows="" a="" count="" of="" links="" and="" highlights="" them.="" if="" they="" are="" part="" your="" navigation="" structure,="" i="" would="" not="" worry="" about="" it. <="" p=""></a>

<a 105="" href"="" you'll="" notice="" it="" shows="" a="" count="" of="" links="" and="" highlights="" them.="" if="" they="" are="" part="" your="" navigation="" structure,="" i="" would="" not="" worry="" about="" it. <="" p="">However, primarily for Usability, I would consider looking into and see if there are any links that are not being used, not adding value etc.</a>

<a 105="" href"="" you'll="" notice="" it="" shows="" a="" count="" of="" links="" and="" highlights="" them.="" if="" they="" are="" part="" your="" navigation="" structure,="" i="" would="" not="" worry="" about="" it. <="" p=""></a>

I would look at it from a different perspective. I would ask myself whether user's are using those monthly archives and if not, just get rid of them. From what you are trying to do, the noindex or nofollow tag won't do it unfortunately.

I would recommend you read this article where Overstock.com was penalized for offering discount coupons/discount to students/universities for links.

See: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2049969/Overstock.com-Lands-in-Googles-Penalty-Box-Over-Links-for-Discounts-Deal

Since you have those pages blocked via robots.txt, the bots would never even crawl these pages in theory...which means the Noindex,follow is not helping.

Also, if you do a report on the domain on opensiteexplorer and dig, you should be able to find tons of those links already showing up. So if my site is linking to a page on that site, that page may not be cached/indexed because of the robots.txt exclusion, but that as long as my site is follow, your domain is still getting the credit for the link.

Does that make sense ?

In that case, I would not sweat over it. If you think about it, companies can't control who links to them. Imagine all those Wordpress, Blogspot Blogs, which have a sitewide blogroll. If a mommy blogger created a blog 5 years ago and linked to Disney.com for example, and now she does not even remember that she created a blog...what can Disney.com do about it and they are all from username.wordpress.com kind of URLs, so all from the same IP.

Anyways, long story short, all kinds of links...add up to become a natural link profile. For Web Design companies, this is fairly common in my opinion and good news is that you are using brand as a keyword, so I don't think there's something to be worried about. Going forward, if I were you, I would nofollow the links. But leave the old ones as is unless there's an issue in which case you could add nofollow to those existing links as well.

So did you get hit by a penalty...which is drop in Search Engine Keyword traffic ? Do you still rank for a lot of keywords ? Are there any other things beyond the tags pages that you see as potential issues for duplicate content within your blog ? IMO, that may not be the only reason for drop in search engine rankings.

It's difficult to comment without looking at the exact scenario.

When they are natural, they are good. When there's manipulation (not natural) they can be detected by the bots and can face penalty.

I would recommend you read..

http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2049969/Overstock.com-Lands-in-Googles-Penalty-Box-Over-Links-for-Discounts-Deal

and

http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2049675/Google-Lifts-Overstock.com-Penalty

I would ask you the following questions:

1. Are all the client sites on the same server ?
2. Do you have a clients page where you link back to each of your clients ?
3. How does your link profile look ? Do you have lots of other links ?
4. How many client sites are we talking ? 10/20/50/500/1000 ? And then how would you compare them to the total links you have ?

If your link profile is mostly natural, I wouldn't worry about it that much. But going forward you could nofollow them. Also, what's the anchor text in your links ? Your Company Name or Website Designed ? Do more of Brand Name, combined with Anchor Text. So all sorts of variations. Do not make them consistent.

I hope that helps.

None of these are tools that build the links. These are more links tools that help you identify opportunities or some of the good links you should try and get. More like a starting point.

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