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Everything I have seen points to a sitewide dampening effect. A big change with Panda is that poor quality pages on your site can drag down the entire site, which is why some SEOs are advising that you get rid of the low quality or duplicate content. Hubpages tried to get around the sitewide effect by moving pages to a subdomain which Google usually considers separate from the main site.
For analyzing backlinks of competitors my approach is to download the CSVs from Open Site Explorer for the top competitors (filtering for the entire domain and followed links).
Put these CSVs into an Excel workbook and convert each sheet into an Excel table (to make it easy to filter).
Sort the rows of each sheet by descending Page Authority.
Go through each sheet and highlight any URLs that catch your eye as potential link opportunities.
Lastly, filter the list to put the highlighted rows at the top so that you can look into these opportunities later.
The following Google query has worked well for me:
keyword phrase inurl:links
I like your idea of providing some historical context like some of the most influential events in the past or even some interesting facts could add value to the user. For example: The Roman empire spent the X% of their money on their military prior to their fall. Last year the US spent Y% or 1 zillion. Find out how that money is being used. You might also explain why the topic matters.
I agree with EGOL. It should still help the rest of your site, although having the blog in a subfolder is better at passing link juice to the rest of your site.
Speaking of blog directories, I recommend submitting to AllTop.com. They are a pretty high authority blog directory and it may actually send you traffic.
Yes, there is some benefit since shorter URLs tend to rank better. It also future-proofs your URL if you change to a different website platform in the future that is not HTML. The file extensions are unnecessary for search engines. If you decide to change it, make sure to 301 redirect the old URLs to the new URLs so that you retain credit for the inbound links pointing to the old URLs. (Source: the book Search Engine Optimization Secrets).
One idea you could consider is pay for StumbleUpon traffic. If enough people give it a thumbs up (hopefully it's something remarkable) then I believe you can stop paying and it will continue to be served to people. If a lot of people discover your linkbait on StumbleUpon and like it enough, they might share it on Twitter or Facebook.
I would leave these as normal links.
No-follow is designed for links that you don't want to pass value. This could include advertisements (Google wants paid advertisements to be no-follow) and comments on your blog.
There was a previous theory that no-following internal links would result in the other links on the page passing more value (page sculpting) but this was debunked by Google. An internal link with a no-follow would not pass link value and the link value would be lost (not funneled to the do-follow links).
If it is a press release, the most popular PR submission sites can be worthwhile. In the US, PRWeb is pretty good because news sites will see the story and republish the press release or write about it and link to your site. It helps a lot if your story is interesting. Another tip is to use a tool like Followerwonk to find journalists on Twitter in your area and then build a relationship with them. In the US we also have Help A Reporter Out http://www.helpareporter.com/ where you can list yourself or your CEO as a source so reporters can contact you if they have a specific question or need a quote from an expert in a specific area.
If you don't have many links to your site yet, I think that could reduce the number of pages that Google keeps in its main index. Google may allocate less resources to crawling your site if you have very little link juice, especially if deep pages on your site have no link juice coming in to them.
Another possibility is if some of the 10,000 pages are not unique content or duplicate content. Google could send a lot of your pages to its supplemental index if this is the case.
Facebook Likes play a significant role in Bing search due to Facebook's partnership with Bing. When you use Bing and are logged into Facebook you see when your friends have Liked something in the search results which can strongly influence click through rate.
Losing rankings is a definite possibility whenever you change the code or content of your site. If you are moving to a different domain you will lose credit for the links that you've earned unless you execute a 301 redirect. If you are staying on the same domain, you want to ensure that the content remains as close to the previous version as possible including using the same URLs for your pages. You should also make sure that the internal links are carried over to the new version of the site. Any changes to your site's home page links can significantly impact how your internal pages rank (for example if you remove the homepage links to important category pages).
Search engines are increasingly using signals from social networks to determine the trustworthiness and value of webpages. If people are bookmarking your pages or sharing on other networks, this suggests that you have a quality site and are less likely to be a spammer.
No, I would not recommend that. Keyword cannibalization becomes an issue when you have multiple pages on your site that target or focus on the same exact keyword phrase which results in pages competing with each other.
Removing the canonical tag would not result in duplicate pages. It is just a tag to give a suggestion to search engines on which page is the canonical version.
For example if there is a duplicate page and it is not easy to 301 redirect and you can't easily get rid of the duplicate, adding the rel canonical tag would tell Google which version is the main version.
Here is a good resource on Rel Canonical Tags: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/complete-guide-to-rel-canonical-how-to-and-why-not
The good news is the the non-www version automatically redirects to http://www.ap-mg.com/. This is the optimal setup because you only have 1 url for your homepage, and so if someone links to http://ap-mg.com/, most of the link juice will be passed to http://www.ap-mg.com/ and you will not have to worry about duplicate content.
Thesis is a great Wordpress theme for SEO because it was built with SEO in mind and most of the technical aspects should not be an issue. I use Thesis for my personal blog.
If you can't spend money I would suggest Twitter. Ask your followers to retweet your job opening. You might also offer to write a guest post for a local blog that will get in front of a lot of your target audience.
What you are describing sounds like a linkfarm, since you are creating many sites that link back to you. Google can detect linkfarms and I think this could have caused a penalty. Nofollowing these links should help. However, Blogger blogs often have a followed link to Blogger.com and I don't think Google would penalize Blogger.com for this. I think the fact that all the links on the sites point back to you might be the issue.
I would personally always avoid the hyphens in your domain if you can. I agree that the usability is a big negative factor. When you tell someone a domain at a networking event you will have to give them extra instructions and hope they remember it. If someone sees your domain offline, like in a newspaper or billboard, they may have difficulty remembering the hyphens. Also, when people are linking to you they may forget to add the hypens or put them in the wrong place and so you could potentially lose links that you have earned. Since people are so used to typing domains with no hyphens, it will make SEO and marketing more difficult in the long run.
I think it is a good idea. Usually your personal Twitter account is more focused on your identity as an individual and your business account is more focused on your identity as a business. You might not want to share the same things about your personal life on your business Twitter profile, but sharing those things on your personal account can definitely help build business relationships through shared interests. You can also have your employees contribute to the business Twitter profile to increase the frequency of updates and having conversations with people, which can help increase followers. An added benefit is that you can Tweet your own blog articles from both accounts, which can help a little in terms of getting the ball rolling with social media promotion of an article that you write.
Maybe something like BobWeikelCo or BobWeikelTeam would work.