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I would steer clear of removing 250 blog posts from the other web properties.  They may be driving traffic to those websites.

The client is requesting 250 particular blog posts to be rewritten.  This isn't the best content strategy in the world, but that's what you're being asked to do, so the BEST way to handle it is to completely rewrite every post so they are 100% unique.

If you were to remove the blog posts from the other websites and simply post them on the new website, you're running the risk of taking traffic away from the already established websites.

"Would google pick up on the fact that these blogs are already appearing elsewhere on the web and thereby penalise the new site for posting material that is already indexed by Google?" -- Yes, you run the risk of being penalized by Panda with such a large amount of duplicate content.  Google wants to rank websites that provide value to visitors.  If a website is entirely made up of content that already exists on another website, you're providing no added value to visitors.  Again, you could remove the content from the other websites and 301 redirect to the new one.... but you're taking a lot of value away from those websites if you do that.

If you decide to remove that page from your site, disavow will not be necessary.  Once the links point to a 404 page, they wouldn't count against you.

You could leave the page on your site, and use majesticseo.com, ahrefs.com, opensiteexplorer.org, and webmaster tools to compile as many of the links pointing to that page as you can -- then disavow them.  But first, check your analytics and see if anyone ever visits that page anyways.  If the traffic is 0 or anything you're worth parting with... just remove the page and 301 it to his homepage  That's a hilarious idea, btw.

Hey Robert!

There are a few tools you can use to get a good idea of when an external link was created.

1. opensiteexplorer.org (a Moz tool) will give you a "date discovered" date.
2. ahrefs.com will give you a "first seen" date.
3. majesticseo.com will give you a "first indexed" date.
4. Google Webmaster Tools will give you a "first discovered" date when you export "recent links."

Between those 4, you should be able to find the link you want.  Webmaster Tools is free but will be limited.  The others show you some data for free, but require a monthly subscription for all the details.

First thing that comes to mind is maybe the site had a lot of site-wide links before.  If it had 5,000 or 10,000 links coming from 1 single domain and that website went down, that would be a huge loss of referring pages in a short amount of time.  Maybe they were in web directories and asked to be removed?  While simultaneously attempting to build some high quality backlinks from more referring pages?

It's all speculation of course, but plausible.

Hey Chris,

Unfortunately, Google didn't give you any secrets

"Meta tags" is broad.  It doesn't specify what the attribute is.  You can have meta keywords, meta descriptions, meta charsets, etc.  You can read a bit more about exactly what a "meta tag" is defined as here.

As for the meta keywords tag, Google does not use it at all.  Without looking up the exact date, I believe Google announced this in 2008 or 2009.  It's been a longggg time since the meta keywords tag was used as a ranking factor.  A couple years later, Google announced that the meta description tag was no longer used as a ranking factor.  HOWEVER, unlike the meta keywords tag, Google does still look at the meta description tag.  It just isn't taken into consideration while ranking pages.  Meta descriptions are important for click through rates, but they won't give you a rankings boost.

Why aren't you ranking for anything?  Well, at least 90% of the backlinks are spammy.  I only took a very brief look, but I saw a bunch of directory links and not much else (maybe nothing else).  If you don't have a manual penalty yet, you might be due for one.  I would highly suggest getting those spammy backlinks removed.

Assuming all the content on your site is original, it isn't a terrible site.  It could use work in some areas, but then again, that can be said for 99.99% of websites.  If you really want to learn about what you should be doing to improve your rankings, take a look at the Learn SEO section of Moz.

Ah!  I misunderstood the bit about reverse proxying.  In that case... to be perfectly honest, I'm not sure.

When you setup a reverse proxy, what happens to the sub-domain?  Does it go away or does it still exist live?  If it remains live, you'd end up with a duplicate content issue.

EDIT >> I found this at the source you linked to (which answers my question) -->

"The next thing you can do is add a robots.txt file to the sub-domain that stops robots from indexing it. As Reverse Proxying keeps the requested URL the /blog/ URLs will use the robots.txt from the main domain rather than the sub-domain.

The final (and most extreme) thing you can do is to register Google Webmaster Tools for the sub-domain and remove it from the index. If you are doing this, you need to do it in conjunction with robots.txt."

Where are you seeing the trailing slash?  If I go to threewaystoharems.com in my browser, there is no trailing slash.  I do see a trailing slash if I do a Google search for "site:threewaystoharems.com" but that is normal.  Every website will show that trailing slash.

I think you might be obsessing over a non-issue  Let me know if i am misunderstanding.

The Google Disavow tool doesn't work like that.  It won't actually remove links from any pages.  It is basically just a signal to Google that you want those links to be nofollowed.  Ahrefs would have no clue if something has been disavowed or not.

Canonical will pass link juice almost exactly like 301s will, so there's no harm in going that route.  Matt Cutts explains that in this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zW5UL3lzBOA

You sound like you're good to go.  You've got duplicate content worked out, and you've got a plan to retain link juice (canonical).

How to see if your site has received a manual penalty from Google?  Sign up for Google Webmaster Tools (http://www.google.com/webmasters).

From within there you will be able to see if the website has received a manual penalty from Google.  Once you've got the account setup and verified, look on the left menu for "Search Traffic" and then "Manual Actions".  If there is a MANUAL penalty imposed, you'll see it there.  It will either be "partial" or "site-wide".  The former means that only some pages are affected.  The latter means that all pages are affected.

If you have a manual penalty, you will NEED to do outreach to get links removed, and THEN you submit a disavow for the ones you were unable to remove.  You're right, most spam sites won't have contact info, but you can check http://www.who.is and find an email address in most cases.  You will more than likely not get the result you're looking to get if you forego the link removal process and skip straight to a disavow.

One last note, if there's no manual penalty in Google Webmaster Tools, then the site may be penalized algorithmically.  If you know there are spammy links in place, you should act as if you were penalized manually, with the only difference being that you won't be submitting a reconsideration request to Google.  If the site quality is poor, you will want to research Panda recovery options.

By the way, www.SubconsciousMind.com doesn't seem to exist.  So either you typo'd the name, or you have an ever bigger problem on your hands now

If your main goal is to rank on google.com (and it sounds like it is), then you should go with the .com domain.

However, you should be aware that exact keyword matched domains are not as powerful as they used to be.  Google released an update to the algorithm that specifically targeted exact match domains and lowered the value that they provide.  You will not receive a significant chance of ranking higher just because your domain exactly matches the search query.

Although this particular post is 1.5 years old, it's still extremely relevant and has a lot of great info if you'd like to read more beyond my answer:

http://moz.com/blog/the-exact-match-domain-playbook-a-guide-and-best-practices-for-emds

3 competitors is the maximum that you can add for the rank tracking.

If you put disallow: / in your robots.txt file, you will tell bots not to crawl the homepage plus ALL interior pages.  You'd be shooting yourself in the foot (or head, really).

Are you sure the redirect is setup properly?  Is it definitely a 301 redirect, or maybe a 302 (temporary)?  How long ago did you implement the redirect?  If the 301 redirect is setup properly, and you're still seeing the homepage in the index, you might just need to wait for it to drop out.

Happy to help

And I took a quick look at the backlink profile for subconsciouschange.com... definitely spammy.  A nice cleanse will get you on the right track!

If you don't make them VERY unique from the originals, the new site won't perform very well.  If the new site consists of nothing but 250 blog posts that were already discovered on other websites, you won't get good results.  Simply keyword optimizing the posts won't be enough.  They should be entirely re-written to avoid potential problems with Panda.

I'm not sure what you mean by this -- Would the articles need to be completely taken by all current publishers?

Voila!

http://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-socializer/

That one is exactly like socialmediaexaminer.com's

The site just launched?  It sounds like I am right, you just need to give Google some time to drop the page from the index.

When you find the homepage in the index, and you click the link, do you get redirected?  If so, Google will eventually drop it.

I wouldn't recommend hiding the date because you don't want users to know that the content is old.  What about when you publish something fresh and someone lands on the page but they can't find a date?  They won't know how up to date that information is.  I think a lot of people look for dates on blog posts, and rightfully so.  They want to see that they're getting good information.  You're right, if something is 2+ years old they might look for something more up to date.  But you can update old blog posts and re-date them.  Add something new to it, make some changes, and update the date.

Imagine an SEO strategy blog that didn't date the posts.  You would be doing your visitors a complete disservice by hiding the date.  You might have a post all about article directory submissions and they won't see that it's from 2008.  That's not enhancing user experience, and people won't be happy with you.

Old content won't always be a bad thing.  Read #4, "Burstiness," on this blog post: http://www.seobythesea.com/2014/03/incomplete-google-ranking-signals-1/

It's really interesting and a great read about how older content will sometimes receive the boost in rankings over fresh content.

EDIT: I'd like to add that it's completely okay to hide the date in some circumstances.  You might have some sort of evergreen content that truly will stand the test of time and info may not ever, or rarely, change on the topic.  For instance, if you were writing a blog post about how to improve your basketball shot.  Who cares if the post is from 2006?  In that case, hiding the date isn't going to reduce the overall user experience.

Are the footer links internal links to other pages on your own site, or external links to other websites in your network?  If they're internal, there's nothing wrong it.  If they're external, you are basically passing almost no value to those other sites.  They may even potentially be seen as spammy links.

1. Do footer links have any value?  Very little value.  It's best to avoid trying to get a bunch of footer links.
2. Is this an old dated practice that no longer works?  Correct.  Footer links is an old and dated practice.
3. If we remove the footer links should we expect to see if have an impact on our SEO traffic?  You shouldn't expect a drop in SEO traffic from getting rid of a footer link.

Here's the Google documentation on multilingual and multi-regional websites: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192?hl=en

You will also want to read up on hreflang here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en

I would personally go with example.com/mx