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There are grey areas with a bit of wiggle room. That much is certain. I've worked with practices/doctors where you're always routed to a call center. I've also worked with practices/doctors that actually pick up the phone from time to time.

But business is business and people are people. Things can get difficult and messy quick. A lot of doctors are people, engaged in business, as well as medicine. Sometimes business relationships end on bad terms.

Sometimes another local SEO is actively throwing wrenches in your program. It's all local business, so it's always a small world. Say they somehow know Dr. Smith has left the practice.

"Hello, I would like to schedule an appointment with Dr. Smith."

"Dr. Smith has left the practice, may I schedule an appointment with Dr. Jones?"

"No thank you, have a nice day."

Goes on to edit all Dr. Smith listings as closed.

And that's just one potential outcome.

Is it plugged in? Is it turned on? Have you rebooted? Is it blocked by Robots.txt?

I think the understanding of the situation may be a little twisted. Say I give you a phone to review, FOC. Say I give you a duvet to review, free of charge. Or further, I give you a paper plate to review - free of charge.

All of these things cost something. They may be seen as gifts, rather than materials for review if they aren't returned. Giving someone a 'gift' for a 'link' is the very definition of a paid link. The 'gift' is the material.

Any material incentive for a link or links is a paid link, in the strictest sense.

Edit: I didn't adequately answer the question. Below is what I would do:

If you want someone to review a product, ensure that you have a return policy in place. It's not a gift at that point. If they don't return the product, they're a no-good scallywag.

I think Incapsula is throwing the false noindex tag. But yeah, that's just how Incapsula do. The home page shows just fine with a site: operator.

Judging by the anchor text I see pointed at the site... and the Timthumbs.php file... the site was very very hacked at some point.

Edit: Yep. It was hacked until late last year.

As Donna mentioned, it does matter which listings/directories you need to access and change. For some directories, you may have to use Yext. I personally don't care for the service, as it's a data overlay. Stop paying, and the data reverts to whatever was there in the first place.

Why would you claim and delete the listings? That sounds like it may be counterproductive, in many instances. Claim and modify the listings so they reflect an accurate NAP, where possible.

At any rate, here is a guide from Moz that should help you with your local listing problem. There are some opportunities for automation there. Hopefully the work has been priced accordingly.

You'll probably be okay, it appears most of it is ebbing. Though I would definitely look at your folder level traffic. Penalties can happen on the folder and page level as well. It's not so bad as to merit a domain level penalty.

I would be more concerned if the anchor text targeted something you do want.

In regard to disavows, disavow early and as often as necessary.

There's no guarantee, other than the site isn't likely to rank for Louis Vuitton. In general, Google will pick the best of the worst in any niche/vertical which has a proclivity for link spam. So that's something to consider, if such is the case.

Definitely disavow anything you deem inappropriate. Make sure to mention the circumstances in a properly formatted disavow file. A couple of good resources one should keep in mind are this Google Webmaster's answer and Dr. Pete's post.

You may want to buy the domain and get a simple, single, page up and running. Then connect it to Search Console/Webmaster Tools, to get a better idea of the domain's link profile. Robert Fisher's people, over at drumBeat, noticed that a lot of sites block bots associated with popular backlink reporting tools.

Once you have your link list, load it up in Screaming Frog and make sure to spoof the Google bot user agent.

Can you associate any sort of penalty that lines up with the time the domain went rogue? I'm sure it's probably difficult, given the nature of the case. No matter what, make sure to mention the circumstance of the links in the disavow.

Still, I would imagine it's probably not difficult to get the client to rank for his name. This is probably true if the targets are something like Name Surname Political Office Location. Without the ability to dig into it further, I would say the domain probably is salvageable if you take precautions.

I second, or third?, the notion that you should more than likely only have a single WordPress installation. It definitely would increase the maintenance involved. Take everything you should do to maintain an installation, then double it. I'm certain everyone in your organization could do without that.

But if your organization is willing to endure the duplication of effort, there are other things to be concerned about. Not every theme is created equal. Some themes are faster than others, some are more secure than others and most themes will differ in every other way. So one theme could be a hindrance, while the other at least pulls it's weight.

In regard to the subdomain blog or subfolder blog question, there was a time in recent history where I would have said it didn't matter. Supposedly the link equity/juice flows just fine either way. However, someone in Moz Q&A made a very good point. To paraphrase EGOL; "Algorithms change, if you install your blog on a subfolder you will always be right."

I'm not sure when your company made the jump to WordPress, but WordPress has had the ability to display static pages for years. My first agency used to run a combination of CMS Made Simple and WordPress, I think it was due to the page handling issue. That was over six years ago. They later made the jump to full WordPress about five years ago.

So it sounds like the site isn't properly configured for your purposes. Here is how you should handle that, direct from the WordPress codex. From there you can setup your site's page structure through parent/child relationships. So if you're selling widgets, your structure may look like:

**Page Hierarchy **

site.com/widgets/

site.com/widgets/blue-widgets

site.com/widgets/red-widgets

Posts Hierarchy

site.com/blog-diggety/

site.com/blog-diggety/sweet-post

There are Pages and Posts. You bring the hierarchy. And speaking of which, should you change your site URL structure, you will definitely want to research 301 redirects.

To me, there's no question in my mind. You should stick with one WordPress install. Hopefully that helps.

I actually started working nights at a business class hotel. It made sense to me. Get paid extra while working on projects in the back, and overcome my hermetic ways. (the level I like to isolate myself is totally unhealthy, for a number of reasons)

I mean, I was staying up all night and making coffee anyway. If business is slow for a month, the bills are covered. Ah yes, the rough & tumble early days. Plus I have strong incentive to do that whole 'hygiene' thing. (remain presentable in button-down shirt, tie, slacks and dress shoes - does wonders for the morale)

Most people, if they're unfamiliar with the property, are most concerned with what the rooms will look like - after price. And with the listing changes, they would see both - from the drop - before they even call. I know the Wyndham family is in the midst of a big 'photo refresh' push, across all of their franchises. (sorry, photogs... it appears they've already selected their people)

Point being, exterior shots aren't being prioritized - it would appear - though there will be some exterior shots.

It all seems entirely reasonable.

If I remember correctly, GWT Highlighter outputs HTML with Schema once all of the highlighting is done.

I would like to chime in here. It appears no one has mentioned links to domains. In my experience, multi-location efforts generally make for a bit of spam.

If I can't see the domains, I can't tell you it's an issue. Though it's generally better to make a page per location.

I would like to know more about the domains you own.

A common thing a lot of people run into is using Apache redirect rules on nginx servers. Your server headers return nginx. I don't have any real world experience with nginx. Perhaps someone else does. In the mean time, here's a link from the official nginx docs which should help you with the nginx rewrite module.

Have fun storming the castle!

Yeah, the Oatmeal comic was correct: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/working_home

Degradation of social skills. Plus no real sense of urgency to acquire new business. It's too easy to sit back and play in graphs and sheets all day. Then with the increased interest for the development side, I could feel productive chasing shiny objects all day. After all, I was 'working' wasn't I?

I could work for one of the agencies in the area, but I don't want to sign non-competes/covenants or a NDA. Unless it's mine, never another agency.

But yeah, one does meet a lot of business people at a hotel, made for business persons. I'm not a dyed-in-the-wool sales person. It keeps conversations natural, as well as likely.

Plus, I get pretty decent discounts on hotels everywhere. Should a convention or client require travel, that's nice.

Just have to Guerilla/Science things while the momentum builds. In fact, I received a prospective client recently - due to my previous answers in Moz Q&A. That was nice.

But yeah, rambling. Lots of new photos should be coming from Wyndham family hotels, at least for the next year. It's mandated by corporate. Perhaps it would be interesting to note if a set of fresh photos does much for them organically - as a hotel family (in aggregate).

Once you are done highlighting and selecting the type of data, you will need to click the red 'create HTML' button and add it to the page. When that's done, you should be able to see the verified markup with the rich snippet tool.

You have the correct URL for the tool, so you may not have added the marked up HTML to your page.

I would imagine they took that route because it's fast/easy. I would find using a site that cares that little about usability more than a little annoying. Imagine hitting page after page of 'whoops' pages. It's not something anyone wants to do.

There should be 301s put in place for relevant pages with good/clean links. Then they should 410 unwanted pages. Both the search engines and site visitors win.

Googlebot certainly fetched. And it definitely rendered. But it didn't scroll, so the animation never took place.

Barring anything unorthodox, the content is there - it's just waiting to be animated when the scroll event triggers the function. (onScrollInit).

Here's more about animations and Waypoints.js. There's a pretty concrete example toward the bottom of the linked article. It will show you that, yes, the content is there in HTML form. It's just waiting to be displayed in whatever fancy way.

The JavaScript approach could be problematic, in some instances. For some reason your JavaScript might not load on some sessions. Or perhaps someone will visit the site with JavaScript disabled in their browser.

The former is more likely than the latter, for a number of reasons.

Barring any concrete example, beyond the image (we need URLs!!! ), you can the check the live URL. You would do so using the cache: operator. Usage is as follows:

cache:thesite.com/the-fancy-javascripts

This will show you a cached example of the page. Should it be live, and unblocked by various robots (txt and/or meta), it may be cached by now.

If you can see the animations firing on-scroll, the content is indexed. Though it's generally preferable to show all content as soon as possible, without much hand-waving (fancy javascript animations, etc.).

Edit: I also forgot to mention one pretty critical thing. Make sure legit search engine bots have access to the site's CSS and JavaScript. If they don't, that will create problems as well.

Pretty much what Ian said, but we would need a site name to say anything with any sort of certainty. You can PM me via my Moz profile and let me know which domain I should look at. I think I already have an idea though. Does the company name rhyme with 'thrill'?

Edit: Don't worry about losing a client or your career. My client base has grown considerably in the last two months. And I generally dislike people that scalp good campaigns, as well as campaigns that aren't going so well - but the person/agency is working on a fix. I consider it professional courtesy.

That option is initially unavailable until you start highlighting elements (Name, etc.). The button will change from muted/grey to red in the top right of the highlighting tool.

Here's something a little more visual.

Yep, and Christoph Cemper has stated that you see ~15% of your actual links in Google WMT.

Indeed.com usually has quite a few listings in the SEO field.