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It is very frustrating when you see something like that - things you know are "wrong" but a competitor gets away with it.

I am going to skip the whole preaching about "don't worry too much about competitors or what they do" thing, and point out that if you are going to count/compare links, it is best to look at number of linking domains rather than total links.

100 sitewide footer credit links from one site is not really the same as 100 links from 100 different sites.

Rob's advice is very good in regard to sending people to the more effective inner page.

I would not mess around with canonical tags, unless the content is actually duplicated.  Rethinking your internal links might be helpful.  One thing I have done in similar situations is to use a keyword anchored link from the category page to the home page.  Moz Analytics will tell you this is keyword cannibalization, but it does often work to nudge Google toward ranking the home page.  So on a page about "Red Widgets", you could link to the home page with "Red Widget Company".  What is likely to happen is that you will sort of split the searches based on user intent, and searches that are more than just the base keyword. Searches that Google thinks are more informational would go to the Red Widgets page, where someone looking for a supplier or maker of red widgets might be sent to the home page.  Similar links throughout the site where they are appropriate would also be good.  Like, if you have a page or a blog post that mentions red widgets, link to the category. If it says something about manufacturer of red widgets, link to the home page.  Just like incoming links, you don't want to overuse the same keywords, though.  Mix things up a bit within the same topical theme (red widget maker, manufacturer of red widgets, red widget company...)

You may be over-thinking this, or taking that "one keyword per page" advice too seriously.

You are right that you should accurately describe the category page, and using that keyword (and anything else that accurately describes the topic) is going to be part of that. Since that page is the one that is actually about the category, I would not un-optimize it.  I wouldn't even worry about removing the keyword from the home page, either, since it is also relevant. You may want to link from Home to the category where that keyword is used, though I don't think that would make a huge difference.

The good news is, you just might end up with both showing in the SERPs.

Where on the page is this link? If it is the logo in the header, use the company name as the alt.  If it is a text link in the footer or somewhere that is site wide, company name is probably best.

If it is in a navigation menu, it really depends on how that menu is set up, but there isn't really anything wrong with "Home".  A lot of people don't bother putting a Home link in the menu since the header logo usually goes to the home page. But a lot of users don't know they can click on the logo to go home, so think about what type of readers will be visiting the site and whether or not they will be able to find their way around.

Home page navigational links don't make a huge difference regarding ranking most of the time, unless you have stuffed keywords into the alt tag or used the same keyword repeatedly instead of Home or the company name. Home, company name or simply the logo with the company name as the alt are all kind of interchangeable.

For your on-page strategy that you have described, ask yourself how each part of that benefits the reader. If it really doesn't benefit the reader and you are only doing it because you believe it might help SEO, then skip it. 
Put keywords in the back of your mind, not the front when writing titles. Sometimes, that means not having the keywords at the front of the title as well.

I looked at the example page you gave and the title looks a bit repetitive: "NLP Practitioner Training, NLP Practitioner Certification" To a searcher, that doesn't look very appealing in the SERPs. The repetition of "NLP Practitioner" could even keep the page from ranking as well as it could. Try something a bit more human, like "New NLP Practitioner Training Locations in California & Utah". That's more people-friendly, and if I gathered correctly from a quick skimming of the article, is a better description of what is on the page than simply two keywords stuck together.

So think firstly about what a person will think when they read that title in the SERPs, THEN worry about where you can fit your keywords into it.  Really, this is how you should think about ALL of your content, too.  Write about the topic, and make it your priority to convey your message well to readers.  If you write about it effectively, you will probably use your keyword enough times. The idea is that instead of worrying so much about one or two keywords, you will be able to to get more visitors who were searching for a variety of things related to your topic, in addition to ranking better for that keyword. Not to mention you will run less of a risk of over-optimizing. If you haven't seen the Blueprint yet, do check it out: http://moz.com/blog/how-to-rank 
The part about "Dream Your Theme" goes into more detail about the way optimizing for a theme or topic works.  I have also touched on this idea in a few different articles: http://kercommunications.com/tags/topical-optimization/

I am currently doing an audit of a site that has used clicksubmit for several months as its main method of link building. I am not very deep into the link profile yet, but it doesn't look good. Almost all the same anchor texts, the linking sites look as though they were made specifically to host links... so far the client site doesn't have a single link that I would consider "good". I hate having to report that.

I will check in with my findings later, but I have to agree with Michael York above - Great Reviews + Dodgy Looking Product + Sounds Too Good to Be True = A client website that will be looking for penalty remediation services soon.

Last time this happened, we went about 2 months without an update. I remember because I had been recommending SEOMoz memberships to a lot of my clients who wanted more in-depth info about their links & competitors that they could take with them when they no longer need me. I had some 'splaining to do when some of them discovered one of the key features they were paying for wasn't there.  When MozScape did finally update, it was indeed much better than before. So I am very curious to see if this update with that "new section of the internet that we never crawled before" closes the gap between some of the other link monitors (that do have way too many of the garbage links in their indexes).

When you say "we have put up a link..." I assume that means it was not entirely editorial on the part of styleshout, right?

While it may not have immediately hurt your rankings, if this link is something you paid for, then you should probably remove it or ask styleshout to nofollow it.

Google's reactions to paid and other "unnatural" links are usually not so quick, so I would recommend that you take a good look at what kind of links you have been getting over the last few months, years... And check Webmaster Tools' new Manual Actions viewer to see if there has been any action taken due to links. That won't show you if you have an algorithmic problem like Penguin, but will show manual penalties.

And PageRank doesn't mean much when it comes to paid or otherwise unnatural link issues. It's about the link, not the site or page.

And Miki is very correct. That link is a fine example of what NOT to do. Keyword anchor text link that is obviously paid. By doing that, it is almost as if you would rather not rank for "business forms" at all.

Were any of those recommendations to reduce the amount of stuff on the home page? Like, the number of links to articles or number & prominence of ads?

Compare the approximate date your ranking dropped to the Google update history here: http://moz.com/google-algorithm-change and see if anything seems like it would have affected your site. I'm thinking the update about being top heavy with ads, or possibly one of the pandas may be part of the problem. The home page is really just a lot of links to articles (and ads), so you might do well to add some introductory text to tell users (and Google) what to expect from the site. Even adding article excerpts to the thumbnails or the featured articles at the top could be helpful. I know that sounds silly since it is clearly about Android, but some text that isn't a link would be useful for the sometimes stupid googlebot. (Yeah, I know, I am a hypocrite since I always say "for people not search engines").

Took a very quick look at the links in OpenSiteExplorer and it does look pretty clean.

Still doesn't hurt to either spring for a link audit, or try linkresearchtools.com to get a good start on finding suspicious links.

I hate to spin this off in another direction, but if you have great traffic and a huge following (assuming most of the 200k are real, not paid/fake profiles), where is that traffic coming from?

What I am getting at is maybe you are focusing too much on keywords, or looking at the wrong ones. Like, if you are hoping to rank for the generic "tech news", but your individual articles are all ranking well for whatever they are about, then maybe you are doing better than you think?

And the auditor recommendations - you say you followed a lot of the recommendations but not all. The ones you didn't follow may have been more important than you think, or the whole plan the auditor mapped out may be at its best when everything is done as per recommendations.  You might want to revisit the audit recommendations and do them all and see what happens before shopping around.

Agreed, and that is where a lot of small businesses end up in trouble with Google - by hiring the SEO provider they can afford, and that often means one that doesn't know or care what they are doing wrong.

$300-$500 is not unheard of for small business SEO, particularly a local business. The problem, I think, is how "small business" is defined when it comes to online marketing. If a company has only a few people or lower revenues, it is "small" by real world standards - but that doesn't matter if the site is competing online with huge companies that are in the same niche, marketing-wise. For example, a hardware store may only be competing with other "mom & pop" stores locally, but they still have to compete with Walmart, HomeDepot, TruValue, Lowes, etc online. Those all have been around a long time, have strong reputations & branding, and as a result have tons of links. It isn't impossible to rank among them or even above, but it is going to take a great deal of time and the best possible SEO & promotion.

This is why a lot of SEOs don't quote a flat rate. Getting a site about "bamboo handled solar powered grass trimmers" to rank well for all possible search terms is much easier than for a site about "lawn tools". SEO should be priced according to the level of competition.

If you think about all that is involved with doing SEO right, and then try to apply an hourly dollar value to it, $500 gets used up pretty quickly. Even if a site only has 5 or 6 pages and is not a total mess, there is at least an hour or two of analyzing and improving the site itself, just on the first go around. Those adjustments will usually have to be tweaked throughout a campaign. Even if you can get someone to do that at super-cheap hourly developer rates, it runs out quickly. A larger or more complicated site will require more, obviously.
If the SEO is going to be doing any content work and link building, you have the cost of the creative work which is not going to be cheap for good stuff, and the time to track down possible link sources and do whatever is needed to get those links. Even if the link builder is going the easier, riskier route of things like directory submissions, they still need to know what they are doing well enough to not do more harm than good.

Low budget "good" SEO is rare, but it can be found. There are trade-offs that you will need to be willing to make, though.

If you can find someone who is relatively new at SEO, but does know what they are doing, you may be able to to get an affordable rate while they are "hungry". But this is not a great long term plan because if they are indeed good, they will outgrow you and will be likely to put more of their time and energy into clients who are willing or able to pay.

Another option would be to find a provider who can work with your monthly budget, but do less work than they would for their normal rates. For example, let's say an SEO would normally do an analysis of the site and keyword research in the first phase of your campaign, then move into content strategy, social and other link acquisition. If they would normally do this for say, 1500 per month, and you will be paying 500, you could expect the set up of analytics and whatever other tracking & dashboards that will be used and analysis of the site's current state during the first month. More fine tuning of that next month, and maybe get into setting up your social presence. Keyword and traffic/usage analysis to start off your new content strategy after that. Then after a few months they may really start getting into outreach for link building. These are just examples, but the point is that SEO is really no different from anything else - you can only do so much with limited resources. If you need good content developed, like video or maybe some decent infographics, there goes your budget for a couple of months. Need a really good press release distributed by an above average press release site - that's a month or two of the budget...
This will take a heck of a lot of time to get anywhere, especially since there are thousands of tech news sites to compete with.

One other thought - you could have a reputable SEO do a thorough analysis or audit, and strategy development. Then you handle all of your own social media and other link building efforts. That should run you the same as about 2-3 months of your budget and could end up being much more effective than trying to turn a full time job into part time.

No worries re: parrotting. If you look here in the Q&A and on things like Disqus, you'll find me repeating myself pretty often.

Travel sites like yours can be really difficult. There are so many of them, most have virtually the same content, and it seems that most are extremely committed to link spam (and are often still succeeding with it).

My gut instinct would be to try to come up with some really useful travel planning guides as a linkable asset like a PDF or maybe video. Some general guides for specific parts of the world (things like "How Not to Offend People in _____"), and maybe some for more specific locations. Then the tricky part is promoting that content in a non-spammy way so it will get shared, Liked, linked to, etc.

That's a lot of work, but if Google ever drops the hammer on the travel site niche which is competitive and pretty spammy, you will have a better chance of survival.

I am not sure how knowing whether or not one particular piece of Google's algorithm found a problem with the site is going to help, but since Panda is generally going after copied or thin/weak content, I think it is safe to say that a lack of unique and "quality" content is to blame. All those links using the anchor text "cheap holidays" are also a potential problem, though not specifically a panda thing.

If I understood correctly, the site dropped from #2 to #10 and back to 7. Still on page one, so count your blessings. With a relatively small drop like that, it is probably just the Google algorithm in general or external factors like lost or devalued incoming links, rather than a specific filter against the site. Not every ranking change is due to a named algorithm update.

If I had a dime for every "professionally recoded" website that was completely hosed from an optimization standpoint...

Not sure why people are throwing out link distribution and other wild-ass-guesses that would have nothing to do with disappearing incoming links. The simplest answer is often the most accurate.
Did your site's domain change? Or did any inner page URLs change? If so, then you'll need to 301 those to their current counterparts. ScreamingFrog is good for finding broken/missing links, but you can also take a look at the Crawl Errors in Google webmaster tools to see if Googlebot is having any problems finding your pages. If no URLs were changed or removed, then it probably doesn't have anything to do with the redesign.

Check with majesticseo.com and ahrefs.com to see if the links have been marked as lost or removed recently. Both of those are pretty quick to spot new and removed links.

The sharp drop in number of links could have come from one or more sites removing your link or the page/site just doesn't exist anymore.  If one site with 20000 pages disappears and they had a sitewide link to you, that would explain it. Do you happen to know how many linking domains you had, compared to how many you currently have? That would be a better indicator.

And your second question (missed that the first time):
If the page is still accessible from somewhere, it won't be a "problem", but it may not rank as well. That really depends on a whole lot of other things - external links to that page, other internal links to it from and the crawlability of the site in general. But in general, no it won't be a huge problem - I have a few pages on my own site that only have one internal link from the sitemap and no external links, yet they still rank for some things.

It does take some time for Google to remove pages from the index.  You can speed it along a little by using the "Remove URL" link under Optimization in Google's Webmaster tools. You should also disallow the url in your robots.txt file as well, to be on the safe side if you don't want the page to show up in searches.

And there is also Google's page about removal: https://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=59819

If it isn't going to be so much work that it will wreck the budget or take someone off of something more urgent, I would use schema markup on anything on which it can be legitimately used - regardless of whether or not Google is currently showing that particular itemtype. Google currently only uses some of them, but will probably add more later.

Other sites are starting to use the markup for things like Offers, too. Pinterest just announced that they are now going to have "rich pins", for example.

So you can add the markup now and be a little ahead of the game, or wait until you need to catch up.

I think I understand now. You would have the customer generated listings ending up with duplicate titles so you were adding numbers to the end.

Maybe you could automatically add the location or the date of the listing to the title, or some other thing that would be unique to the listing so your titles would look like like "Home To Home Move in Mytown on May 20"

While it may not be important for these pages to show up in search, at least then they would be unique rather than looking like a bunch of duplicates.  This could also help you with local searches in the areas where your users have posted a listing.

1. If you are talking about the meta keywords tag, don't bother. Google and other search engines don't use it for anything that would benefit you.

2. Does putting those words in bold do anything to benefit users, or are you doing it because you believe it will bold words somehow help improve your position in search results? If it makes something more clear to users by making certain words bold, and doesn't look ugly or stupid, then do it. If there is no benefit to your readers to have seemingly random words in bold, then don't do it.

"LSI" is just a fancy term for synonyms, which are something any writer (SEO or not) should be using so your writing is not repetitive. "Long tail keywords" is just a fancy term for "things people actually search". Write naturally, and think about how people speak and write if you want more "long tail" search traffic.

Yeah.... it sounds like a "don't bother" situation, with these possible exceptions:

Testimonials - You can use aggregate review markup your testimonials page, just make sure the reviews are all legit and verifiable. Not sure if or how Google might verify these, and it seems prone to gaming it

Does the company provide specific service packages like "3 Rooms for $X.00"? That may work as an "Offer" even though it is not a tangible product. http://schema.org/Offer