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A couple thoughts. I can't help but notice that this time corresponds approximately with Penguin 3.0 and a quick look at your backlink profile shows it does look spammy.

My second thought is that looking at the Wayback Machine, this site has been around for a very long time. Is it possible there were older redirects in the .htaccess file that were lost in the transition?

Go into Google Webmaster Tools and go to Search Traffic > Search Queries.

Click on the keyword in question. You will see not only which positions the keyword has shown in but also if other pages have shown for the result. This type of fluctuation is normal.

Yes, you will want to redirect it. Be careful though as a lot of times this isn't done correctly and creates a loop. There are multiple ways to do this including but not limited to DirectoryIndex or a RewriteRule

Read everything, believe half of it, test everything twice whether you believe it or not.

Came here to say what Ray already said.

Did you add a rel="publisher" tag?

You could take the tag section out of your template, stop using them in your posts, or in Yoast go to "Titles & Metas" > Taxonomies tab and check the box for noindex, follow under the tags section.

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/76329?hl=en

Use dashes. Underscores don't specify any specific function whereas dashes are specifically word separators.

Another vote for AWRcloud. It has the most accurate localization results that we've seen and also has the ability to track organic, local pack, and map listings separately.

I would go ahead and submit as this can have an affect on the algorithmic part of the penalty. You should still try to have them removed, especially if a manual penalty is in place and record your steps, but if you know the links are bad you might as well go ahead and disavow them.

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.

Moz has their own crawler and their own index. Roger (the name of the crawler) can't feasibly crawl the entire web at the scale that Google can. It's nothing to worry about, likely Google sees the links and Roger will eventually.

If you want to see if the link is indexed, just search it in Google. You can also see incoming links in Google Webmaster Tools. If it's in there, Google sees it.

Linda, I think the reason EMDs still work is because of their citations and links from those and branded profiles. Mostly, these type of links don't show in tools like OSE and Ahrefs. If you really look, those that have an address, and Google+ listing will have a lot more listings elsewhere because of syndication and include keyword rich titles, content on the page, etc. Those that don't have Google+ and haven't setup social and other profiles or have NAP listings typically rank poorly even if they are EMD. The other trend I've noticed is that some of these rank well for variations of their phrase (because I feel they are getting special treatment as a brand) but for something in the same niche but not included in their brand terms, they don't necessarily rank well for.

Yes, it overwrites. Always download the old list and make changes before uploading again.

http://parkerdubrule.com/index.html  This was the page linked in the their image on the old site, and it was never redirected.

http://parkerdubrule.com this is the old page, never redirected. What you redirected was the www. version of the domain, which is not what they were using.

Honestly though, a quick look at their links tells me they're not going to be in the ball park even with amazing on page optimization. Most of the major link sources I would expect to see for lawyers like avvo, justia, findlaw, lawyercenteral, etc are no where to be found. Spend some time claiming their profiles in the niche specific sites. Unfortunately with lawyers, there are tons of these sites and a lot of them require proof of identity, so a lot of coordination and time will be needed to gain these links.

As Miriam said, check if people search for the county. In the particular area where TheeDesign is located (Raleigh, NC) we are referred to as the Triangle (Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill) but almost no one searches this way. The county is Wake County, but few people search by the county name either (more in some industries than others,) and typically the city is the highest search terms. So you have to debate whether the extra effort and planning is worth the extra visitors or not.

This is probably the number one question asked in the Q&A section. I think it gets answered about every week. Subfolder is preferred as subdomains can potentially be treated as a separate website. Keep them in subfolders and you'll help the entire site.

You can pull the meta descriptions with Screaming Frog from the Wayback Machine if your site is archived. If you want to do this, let me know and I'll help you with the settings.

You can sort of get away with targeting 2-3 cities with a single page, but it's less than ideal. If you cover a lot of areas, consider breaking your site down into silos. /city1, /city2, /city3, then into the services for each /city1/service1, /city1/service2, /city1/service3, or even further into something like /city1/service2/something-related-to-service2, etc. The content needs to be unique on each page of course, but this will let you target multiple cities easier. How far your break them down and how much content you make for each can be determined by the volume of searches or importance of the city to you. Some cities you might want to just build a city page that lists all services (such as low importance, low search volume, or low competition areas,) others you may want just a few main service pages for, and other important locations you may want pages for all the services you offer.

You get an option after you enter a URL. If you do want to remove them, then you would just select "Remove directory" but I would be careful with this. You want to make sure all the old pages have the corresponding new pages indexed in Google, otherwise they may disappear from the index until the new pages are crawled again.