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My first thoughts are, I would not suggest posting to a.blogspot.com or .wordpress. You want any links that your content builds to be directed to your website, so it's important that you put your best content on your website and not on something else.
There is a lot that goes into ranking a site and generally the more authoritative the site, the more it can get away with. A few backlinks like the one you posted wouldn't even hurt a normal site. On top of that, you don't know if these companies have these links disavowed in Webmaster Tools. If you have SEMrush, check their rankings over time and estimated site traffic for anything suspicious. You can also check Ahrefs for anything unnatural in their incoming links graph such as spikes. Even with this you're only looking at a portion of the data and missing many link types that most backlink checkers don't show such as NAP listings or social/web 2.0 links which rarely show up in OSE or Ahrefs.
Look into them but don't dwell on what a few are doing. If you want a better picture, look at some of the sites from other major cities as well and look at what everyone in your industry is doing to find ideas how to improve, without wasting energy complaining that someone is getting away with something.
The sites you are checking may not be in the index for OSE, Majestic, or Ahrefs. These tools don't have the resources to crawl every site and page on the internet, but they are growing all the time. Don't let it not showing in OSE stop you from going after a good link.
You site doesn't really follow on-site best practices. For instance, you have a large amount of links on each page, few images are using alt text, the titles look keyword stuffed and most are far longer than they should be (some are 6x longer than they should be,) your sorting system is causing duplicate content issues which looks like the solution for was to noindex and canonical the pages, which should never both be done. I'm also not seeing any real product descriptions other than what are likely manufacturer specs.
I would stop worrying so much about your competitor and get your own site in order.
While you're link building, I would also check out your local directories and make sure that your address/link/phone number is updated on all of them. You can check out GetListed.org... an SEOMoz bought company to see if your information is accurate everywhere.
Pedram,
No worries. By packaging, the process in which we are sending content out their to get viewed.
For example: A picture can be optimized for a variety of social networks including Flickr, Google+, Facebook, and Twitter, which is great, but you need to plan how you are going to send it out there for people to see. Is it going to be an album as part of an event or is it just going to be a simple picture upload, because it's something funny that your audience will enjoy. Twitter you can't create albums, so simply taking pictures "live" during an event is great but then you can upload a 100 photos later on to Facebook/G+ as part of an album. You can even on Facebook create that album as part of a historical event and add it to your timeline.
The overall point is that each social network is different so just because you have one piece of content, doesn't mean that you can't use it in different ways.
I hope that explanation helps out.
Cheers,
Richard.
It sounds like you are looking for a link manipulation guide. Don't buy social media links on fiverr. You also should not worry about link velocity if the links are natural.
More information on the business would help, but in general go ahead and claim profiles on social media and web 2.0 sites as this will help establish your brand. If you have a physical address, make sure you get your Google+ business profile and submit to the major data aggregators and other NAP sites. Look at the backlink profiles of your competitors or do a bit of searching to find sites in your niche where you can acquire links. Submit a press release about the launch, maybe do a few interviews if the site is something people would be interested in.
I would start by cleaning up the on page. There is a lot wrong from ridiculously long title tags, no H1 tag, and missing alt and title tags on the images. A lot of the subheadings you use could be h2s as well. Also, don't forget to use internal links in the blogs back to other pages.
I would also make sure the articles you are writing align in content with what people are searching for.
Use the subfolder. The problem with subdomains is that they can be treated as a separate website and if that happens then the strength/signals do not pass to the rest of the website.
John Mueller actually very recently addressed this as well on the blog: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2015/07/googles-handling-of-new-top-level.html
Basically, all TLDs are treated the same.
You're pretty much doing what you can. Continue to disavow and continue to build high quality links. The stronger your link profile, the less likely you are to receive a penalty.
Yes, it overwrites. Always download the old list and make changes before uploading again.
Read everything, believe half of it, test everything twice whether you believe it or not.
Google came out earlier this year and said that they would change some meta titles and improve them as they see fit.
This post from Yoast.com, might help you out: http://yoast.com/google-page-title/
There were many webmasters who reported drops around October 11th which appears to be what your screenshot from Webmaster Tools shows. This could have been when Penguin actually rolled out (rather than when it was announced) or could have been an update to the previous Panda update. A couple references:
https://www.serpwoo.com/blog/review/scam-reporting-sites-drop/
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-panda-4-1-poll-19330.html
As for redirects, no they are not permanent even though a "permanent redirect" does sound like it would be doesn't it? They are permanent as long as they are still in place if that makes sense? An easy way to see this is redirect an established domain to another site. i.e. let's say microsoft.com redirected with a 301 to google.com for a period of 6 months. Those searching for Microsoft would actually see Google in the SERPs instead for those 6 months. When the redirect is removed after 6 months, Microsoft would be returned again and Google would be no where to be found.
http://www.mobile-tronics.com/Catselect.asp?DepartmentID=1&RepID=&MenuID=sub3&BasketID= this was your url for computer furniture from 2001-2008. I'm guessing after that a SEF plugin was used to change the urls. If this was the case, this redirect was in fact in place until you changed the structure recently. You may have lost the value of all links to this page (and most of the rest of your site) that you had accrued from 2001-2008.
Did a search for site:thinkstrategy.com prescription, check out the meta descriptions. Look at the cached version of the page, links and everything are there. Looks like whatever is infecting you is showing users one thing and crawlers another.
Could be that you used the same or mostly similar content on the city pages so Google isn't showing them. It also could be that your main product page is the one where all the links are pointing and none on the city pages, and probably in the menu or even the footer of this product page you have the city name pages linked as well and Google is simply weighting all the factors and determining the stronger page that may only show the city name once is more relevant than the city page which would be better optimized.