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Bing has a relationship with Google, it's just not a very good one

Bing indexes different sites and weighs sites differently than Google does, so take a look at the backlink profiles of competitors who are outranking you to see what links might give you a boost.

Because Bing has a partnership with Google, Bing can also personalize search results based on Facebook likes, so getting more engagement on Facebook could help you in the SERPs.

Beyond that, just sign up for Bing webmaster tools and follow SEO best practices.

Yes, I was saying that many CSEs do something similar, i.e. they take product feeds and use templates to generate thousands of content pages which they fill in with details of the products (product titles, specs, images, etc).  Bonus points if you add spinning and randomization to increase the uniqueness of your content.  It's a decent scalable content strategy, but can get you penalized by Panda if they consider the content to be too "thin".

I haven't heard of this specific company, but I have done something similar with on-site search results on my own sites. It's also standard practice for many comparison shopping sites. If you abuse it too much you risk the Panda penalty, but if you have a high pagerank and not enough content, it can be a great way to get more traffic.

Broken link building is a GREAT strategy for building links.  I've used the tactic on a number of my own sites and seen great results.  It's a quick, easy, and cheap way of getting links from relevant sites, even your competitors!

Another way to do it is to go into archive.org and re-create the content that was originally on the 404'd page.  This is if the page has a lot of other links going to it, and you want to build out a secondary site instead 301ing to your main.  Then you can link the secondary site to your main, or use it however you want.

You can also do traditional white hat broken link building and use the broken link as a way to start a conversation with a webmaster, and get them to link to you.

You can find tons of broken links by looking for links pages on your niche, or running Xenu link sleuth and similar tools on pretty much any large site that's been around for a few years.

Bottom line:

Domain name registration = $10/year

A link from the homepage of a direct competitor = PRICELESS!

That's what the css code above does, it puts the link beneath the image visually when users look at the site, while keeping the link above the image in the actual code.

Depending on the pagerank of your site, it should take at most a couple weeks to a couple months before Google re-crawls the entire site and notices that the malware is gone.  If it's been longer than that, then likely something else is the cause.

Rankings and traffic fluctuate all the time, so first of all don't panic.

If you think about it, there are only 3 things that can affect your site's rankings: the content on your site, the links to your page, and google's changing algorithm.  So ask yourself, has anything on your site changed?  Have you lost any links lately, or have your competitors gained more links?  Has there been an algorithm change that affected your site?

If it's an onsite issue, then fix the issue and focus on building more good content.  If the issue is links or an algo change, focus on building more links.

You can try creating templates for your pages, and fill them in with details for each appointment type.  For example, something:

"Thank you for you interest in X, which is one of the best properties in Y.  To request more information about X, simply fill out the form below, and one of our representatives will contact you right away.  You can also find more information at Z"

Just add a simple template like that to your pages (obviously flesh it out more, include images, etc), and fill in the variables with specific details from each listing.  Your developer should be able to automate that for you.

Have to disagree here.  First of all, meta tags ARE used by a number of smaller search engines, including Bing, which uses them when they have no other information available about a site.

Also, beyond search, many directories and social bookmarking sites auto-pull meta tags to generate content for their pages.  If you use either of these linkbuilding tactics (which can be beneficial in moderation) having the meta tags will save you time.

I also don't buy the argument that meta tags will help your competitors.  Any competitor worth there salt will be able to figure out what your keywords are-- if it's obvious to the search engines, it's going to be obvious for them too.  So having your keywords in a meta tag isn't going to hurt you.

There's always the danger of being hit by Panda and other low quality penalties if you get too many of your internal search results indexed, but I've personally seen a significant boost in traffic by having my internal search pages indexable on many sites.  It's also a common strategy for comparison shopping sites and other similar sites.  So the answer is, it depends.  If you flesh out your search pages with keyword rich content, you could see a lift in your traffic.

All the things you listed are important.

As for ranking those factors, I would say #1 would be figuring out the goals of your site.  Are you trying to make money?  Build your brand?  What do you want your visitor to do once they get to your site?  What are your landing pages?  Once you have a better grasp of that, then you can start to figure out what keywords to target and how much effort you want to put into it.

On-page factors are important of course, most importantly having quality, relevant content.  If you follow SEO best practices and create content that other people find useful, then you're on the right track.

As for link building, MozRank, PageRank etc. it's all relative to what your competitors have.  Once you've identified your keywords, you can take a look at the sites that are ranking higher than you in the search engines to figure out how much effort you need to put into linkbuilding to outrank them.

Hope that helps.

It's not a penalty, but it sounds like it could be a duplicate content issue. Google doesn't like to show duplicate content in its results, so if the content you had on your backend is ranking, then that's probably why the new domain isn't.

It really depends on how much unnatural links we're talking about.  Hundreds?  Thousands?

If your current site doesn't have too many backlinks (aside from the spam), moving to a new domain could work.  Just check to see first whether your content is being scraped on other sites, as they may outrank your new site if so.  Not sure how canonicals would work in a Penguin situation.

Rankings in Google change all the time, so try not to panic.  There are a million reasons why your site could have dropped: An algo change that favors some factors over others, competitors building more links, some of your links being devalued, etc.

Bottom line, if your page isn't being penalized, then focus on building high quality links, especially to the inner pages that you want to rank.  It looks like your on-page factors are good, focus on building more links.

Search engine spiders still read websites from the top down, as far as I know.  Have not heard of any recent changes to the contrary.

What theme are you using?  Different themes implement dropdowns differently.

Yes, it is a problem because Google sees www and non-www versions of your sites as different subdomains.

Putting the following code into your htaccess file should fix your problem:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.iciclecreekrealestate.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://iciclecreekrealestate.com/$1 [L,R=301]

Yeah, that is weird.  Rankings shift all the time though.  If it wasn't a named algo update, it could be just some change that Google made to the algo.

For example, if you have a lot of sitewide links (or blog links, or directory links) it could be that Google lowered the value of those for your type of query, relative to other types.  Or some of the sites that are linking to you could have been penalized for selling links, or seen a drop in pagerank, or got shifted into a different niche from your site, which lowered their value.

Whatever the case, unless you're being directly penalized for something, your best bet is to just build more links.  If your competitors have high value links that you don't, that could be a good starting point for regaining your ranking for your keyword and improving your site traffic overall.

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.

I think it will only get worse before it gets better, with the recent combination of Google Place into Google+ and increasing G+ adoption in general.  We can hope the anti-trust regulations will eventually lead them to provide this data again.

In the meantime, you can get an idea of what some of the lost keywords are by paying attention to what landing pages they're landing on as well as seeing which keywords are getting high CTR in Google Webmaster Tools.