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Yes, directory submissions are completely white hat (unless you're spamming anchor text) if they're reputable.

To make sure that a directory is in Google's good graces:

1. Do a site: search to make sure they are indexed
2. Search for their brand name, to make sure they aren't penalized
3. If it's a paid directory, look to see that you are paying for manual review and not paying for a link

On the off chance that the directory gets penalized, your will not be penalized, their link will just stop passing value.  Unless you're submitting your site to hundreds of directories, you should be safe.

The drop in rankings don't seem to correspond to any named Google updates (Panda/Penguin), but Google is constantly tweaking their algorithm and rankings for sites fluctuate all the time.

It's impossible to tell what happened to your site, without knowing more about what happened. Have you purchased or sold links? Have you built tons of low quality links with exact-match anchor text? Did you make any technical changes to your site that may have caused indexation problems? Did you lose any high value links? Etc. There are countless reasons why sites drop in rankings, including just random fluctuations of Google.

Exact match domains are definitely still worth it.  Check out this case study on a couple thousand sites, which shows that exact match domains suffered LESS from Penguin than other sites:

http://www.jonathanleger.com/anchor-text-optimization-how-much-is-too-much/

Penguin tends penalize sites that spam anchor text exact keywords, instead of a more natural link profile that includes your branded keywords.  However, when your brand IS your keywords, then it's very hard for Google to penalize you.

You almost never want to nofollow your own links.

Nofollowing your own links does not result in more link juice being passed around, it just results in link juice "evaporation" where you lose the value that would have been passed to that page without the nofollow. See:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-maybe-changes-how-the-pagerank-algorithm-handles-nofollow

If there is a page on your site you don't want indexed, use noindex,follow in the header instead. That will keep the page from getting indexed while preserving link equity.

Rankings for individual keywords change all the time, but in my experience drops to specific keywords have usually been the result of link over-optimization (too many links with the same, unnatural anchor text).

Other potential causes: losing links that you used to have, competitors optimizing their pages, any changes you have made to those pages which may impact relevance, changes to your internal linking, or Google updates devaluing previously values links.

There are many reasons why keywords fluctuate. Google controls the SERPs, and your position is not guaranteed even though you may have been there for years. If there are any obvious site errors, fix them, but beyond that you just have to focus on building authoritative links and creating high quality, relevant content.

Try Xenu's Link Sleuth, it's a free program that crawls your entire site and shows you all your links.  You can then export the results to Excel and sort out all the PDF links.

"Domain name" is a pretty competitive keyword. Google is giving more weight to brands these days, so focus on building your brand and providing the best service in this space.

How can you make your website better than Godaddy? Why does your site deserve to rank above your competitors? How can you get people talking about your site?

If you can figure out the answers to those questions, a lot of your SEO will take care of itself.

Any examples of pages that are blocked?  I don't see any pages being specifically blocked in your robots.txt: http://www.jobshadow.com/robots.txt

For nofollow, it's perfectly normal to nofollow thousands of links if you get a lot of comments.

Google Images doesn't send much traffic anymore since it was updated, and the quality of traffic was never that good to begin with. However, if you have a lot of high quality images, using an Image Sitemap can help them get indexed:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/178636?hl=en

Also, in addition to the alt tag, make sure to give your images a descriptive file name, so "panda-eating-shoots.jpg" vs "IMG0001.jpg".

Are you asking what social media profiles have an impact on SEO? As far as I know, only Google+ has a direct result on search results. Your company absolutely should have a profile on Google+. Adding Google+ buttons to your site can improve your page's rankings for logged in users if people +1 your content, and Google authorship markup can introduce author snippets in the SERPs which can increase clickthrough rates.

Another great social network for SEO is Tumblr, which is the 5th largest social network in the world, but unlike every other network has dofollow links. It's a great source of social media traffic and backlinks.

Finally, if you are on Pinterest you can get a dofollow link from your main page.

Beyond that, none of the other social networks have a direct impact on SEO, but many of them can have an indirect benefit. Focus on the ones that the majority of your users/potential customers are using.

Your sites both look new, how long have you been running them for?

It's pretty normal for new sites to see traffic fluctuations as Google tries to figure out where they belong in the search results.  Unless you've made some major site changes lately or received warning messages in webmaster tools, I would focus on getting more backlinks as neither site seems to have very many at the moment.

Definitely use a tool like OSE or Majestic to take a look at their link profile. Where are their high authority links coming from? Are they hard to duplicate links, or something you could get yourself? Are they links that could be removed once the site is sold? Are there any spammy or blackhat links?

Make sure you do a thorough analysis of the site's backlinks to make sure you're not getting a lemon. Also, PageRank can sometimes drop when a site is sold to a new owner, so be aware of that possibility, especially if you are going to be changing the site's content a lot.

Could just mean the data in GWT isn't current or Google hasn't re-indexed all the content yet.  How long ago did you put in the canonicals?

Are you asking about crawls or indexation?

I can't think of any reason why you would want to decrease crawls, but you could probably do so by getting backlinks removed, blocking sections of your site from being crawled through robots.txt or nofollow links, and decreasing the change frequency in your xml sitemaps.

It's hard to tell exactly what's going on without looking at your site, but the file you want to edit is called single.php. If you add the authorship code there, your snippet should show up for every post in your blog.

There was a Panada update on January 22nd... Panda generally hits sites that have lots of thin or duplicate content.  So my question to you would be is the content on your site duplicate or spun content?  Are they high quality content or are they being written on the cheap?  These things can lead to a Panda penalty.

As far as backlinks, it doesn't look like either site has very many of them.  Both are pagerank 0.  You could improve your rankings and get a lot more traffic by getting some quality backlinks.

Don't panic, it's a bug related to the recent domain consolidation update:

http://searchengineland.com/site-command-limited-to-30-results-google-says-a-temporary-domain-clustering-bug-160594

Google's algorithm is changing all the time, even out side of the big named updates, so it's natural for rankings to fluctuate for specific keywords.

Have you noticed any fluctuations among the other sites in SERPs?  If that's the case, Google could have rolled out a change that affects queries of that type.

It could also be possible that your competitors have stepped up their SEO efforts over that time, how have their backlinks been growing, and how do their link profiles compare to yours?

Finally, links tend to lose value over time as blog posts are pushed into archives, sites go down or get penalized, pagerank goes down, etc.  How has your link building been during that time period?  If you're not suffering from an actual penalty like Penguin, the best strategy would be to make sure your on-page factors are solid and continue building better links.

One thing I've done before is putting the linkable content in a tab within the product page. Then set it so that you can directly access the content via a hashtag:

http://www.become.com/munro-shoes#guides

If you take away the the "#guides" in the example above, it will show you the product listing, and if you click on the tab in the upper right, it will show the content again. Since Google ignores hashtags for linking purposes, you can get people to link to the hashtagged content and still pass link juice to your main page.

That's a pretty big hack, though. The much easier solution is to just let the viral content be its own separate page, and just add a link from the viral content to your product page. The link will pass most of the link value that the viral pages acquires.

You can use OpenGraph markup for images that you want to use as a preview in Google, but don't want displayed on the page:

Just place that code in the header, and the image will show up as one of the options when you share your link on G+.