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The meta robots block sounds like it's a block from your CMS or something in your header include file or something. I would check on the pages that show as blocked to see if there's any noindex sort of code in those pages. Other then that, shift in rankings could be based on your competition optimizing for the same set of keywords. I would recommend to spend some time analyzing the backlinks of the competition and see if you can gain some of those kinds of links.

On a side note: It also looks like you own both the .com and the .com.au site. The .com is hosted in AU and the .com.au is hosted in USA. Did you intend to do it the other way around ? I would imagine your rankings for the .com.au get better if it was hosted in Australia instead of USA.

I would suggest you try the likes of TextBroker.com unless you directly find a content writer focused in that niche right here within SEOMoz community.

I think I agree here. It's difficult to have a standard "SEO" page count. It also differs/varies by industry. Whenever I am getting any articles, I give the authors/content writers a general idea of above 500 words or less then 500 words (Short article vs long article) and let them decide what's needed based on what they are writing about. If they have more to write about the subject matter, I don't like the length of the article as long as the scope of the article is focused. They might be done with 400 words and if I tell them 700 words, they might not have something to write about and then I don't want fluff copy in there as well.

I know that does not really answer the question, but we usually try to target small/big articles and the actual length varies by the subject matter.

It's only a matter of time. I know it's frustrating. Read this great article from  Wil Reynolds - How Google Makes Liars Out of the Good Guys in SEO

Wow, every since BMR (BuildMyRank.com) got booted down, lots of Private Network questions are out there. In simple words, private networks specially when owned by the same person and / or link to the same network of sites are identifiable by automatic algorithms (Think what those Phd's are doing at Google).

Also, you might want to read these similar questions 1, 2.

Keep in mind, you are still prone to risk and whois protection or not, if a human can find it, patterns in linking can also help them identify themselves as networks. Moreover, if these sites are not strong themselves, how are they going to provide value ? so now, you will have to worry about getting links for those 30 sites as well to strengthen them. Otherwise, if there's no inbound links to those 30 sites, there's not much link juice they have to pass.

Makes sense ? I hope that 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.

It could be that. Just sort them by domain and check unique linking domains. Whatever link building strategy you are using, I would suggest you put other kinds of links in the basket and if possible non-anchor text, brand etc. Make your link profile natural.

That is neat EGOL. Do you use some custom programs/plugins to "rewrite" the feed ?

Yes, you are essentially talking about Brand Building. The kind of efforts and initiatives you are talking about will bring different kinds of links, mentions, citations from all over the web including but not limited to Press Releases, Links to Press Releases, Blog Mentions, Blog Comments, "maybe" a Wikipedia page etc etc. It's very difficult to put a dollar value next to all this work, but if that's not the concerns, by all means go and do it. It does help in Brand Awareness/SEO which are technically directly related in my eyes. Don't try to target too much of "Anchor Text", that's the only caution I would like to recommend.

All in all, you are on the right track. Do stuff that makes people/websites talk about you and link to you.

I definitely think there's potential as long as it's not over used and instead of being semi-related, it's tighly related. See my response to a similar question here. You have to weight the risk and the reward and it's best done with bringing value to the user rather then just links (even though we all know the reason is links).

In my opinion you are fine when you are targeting individual the 3 keyword examples you laid. It's very similar to if I had a website about Toyota Camri. The homepage is where I might target that keyword, but then I might have a separate page for each year/model, so 2000 Toyota Camri, 2001 Toyota Camri and so on. No issues here.

The issue would be if from the 2011 Graduating Class page, you are linking to another page with 2011 Graduating Class as the anchor text. That would be more of an issue.

Does that make sense ? I hope that helps.

Having a quick look on your website, the use of canonical tag looks fine. What exactly is the problem you are having ?

As I said I completely agree with you. There's is certainly "some" level of trust passed on and WebSEO's comment sounds right, because if that would not be the case that blogs on xxxx.blogspot.com and xxxx.wordpress.com would rank like crazy. So yes, number of sub-domains on a domain as well as the interlinking between the domain and the sub-domain would certainly influence the strength of the sub-domain, a little bit more.

The most important factor here that should help you make the decision easily is the usability and brand awareness of the sub-domain when it's attached onto your main authority/brand site.

As I said above in my 1st post and EGOL agreed, it would have been much stronger if you were able to do it as a sub-folder but I understand the technology issues. You might also want to look into Reverse Proxy if sub-folder is an option.

If you think about it, what you are suggesting has some sort of "usability" built into it - (lawyer give the accountant a plug when discussing minimizing taxes on his blog).

The problem with a network is that it eventually creates patterns. So if you think about BuildMyRank network of sites. Let's say they had 1000 Blogs B1-B1000. Now let's say they have 100 clients buying 10 links each C1-C100. If you graph it out, you'll notice the links will develop a pattern, which is fine (to some extent).

The problem lies when the content is completely unrelated to 1 another within 1 blog. Also, every blog post is linking to atleast 1 external site. Further, a network that size would certainly have some level of overlaps in terms of Web Hosting, IPs, Class C's, Domain Registrars and so on.

When you do it only to tweak search results (and we all know we need links to rank), it always contains some element of risk. However, I would suggest you do it more with Brand Keywords rather then exact match with your keywords. So if it's ABC Law Firm you are linking to, let it be ABC Law Firm as the anchor text vs Los Angeles Personal Injury Lawyer. Mix and match, maybe even nofollow them. And as I have said several times in my posts, don't overdo any 1 kind of link building. A natural link profile consists of 100'd of different kinds of links, varying anchor texts and so on.

I hope that helps.

Have you tried using SEMRush.com ? Dig into that and you might be able to dig in your keyword data. Feel free to buzz me in a PM and I might be able to dig into it for you a little bit at no cost.

If you are looking for a full scale keyword analysis, I am sure there would be somebody here willing to take on freelance work :).

You are not, you are absolutely right on the way you are thinking. Except that I have not seen any of that "root domain" advantage get passed onto the sub-domain level.

If your main-domain is a brand domain, maybe you could do the sub-domain and I understand your reasoning behind it, however I would not expect the sub-domain to trickle through the SERPS and get the domain authority and trust like your root level domain does.

The sub-domain won't essentially help you. Think of your sub-domain as a separate domain, almost. If it's possible from branding and other reasons, do a sub-folder and if that does not make sense or is not doable, your best best is go got Option 2. That according to me sounds better from Search perspective both short term as well as long run.

I agree. Think of those forums as part of the overall strategy and not look at them as just providing link value. Provide value to the user's of that forum/community and then you get both the visibility/brand awareness/citations as well as the SEO value.

Youtube videos do not contribute towards your page-load speed. Also, site-speed is one of the hundreds of SE factors and I would worry about the rest of the stuff before I get too concerned about site-speed. I would also be concerned if my site is in the lower side or even close to the average site speed.

How old/established is this site ? Is this an authority site ?

EGOL is right on. I would also think about what %age of your blog posts have search engine traffic ? Look at last 30/60/90 days maybe ? Is there any seasonal content ? Factor all those things and then decide. In a lot of cases, it makes sense to update them. Sometimes delete them and redirect them to an updated/newer article. It might also sometimes make sense to merge multiple similar topic articles.

Think from a user's perspective and not SE perspective and you'll be good as long as you are thinking about SEO best-practices, which it sounds like you are.