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Yeah, the URL changes. That's duplicate content. Handle it with a drop down menu. You appear to be kind of borked for the category pages, if that's how you're going to approach it.

This stuff moves so fast, he will be wasting his time. The general things may stay the same for a year or so, but not long enough for the average program. The best thing for him is likely to apply what he knows to existing businesses and read up on what you should and shouldn't do.

As EGOL said, you can learn a lot here for free. I've been involved in internet marketing for a little over four years. I'm crazy and I put in 30 hours by Tuesday all the time. I've learned a lot in a short period of time.

It's really a matter of how dedicated he is to internet marketing and how he is going to help those in marine biology. If he think's it's easy mode, he will fail in a short amount of time. If he's genuinely interested, he has an advantage over half of internet marketers.

You can use Copyscape. You can also take a small piece of the copy and wrap in quotes and enter it into Google search. I would do the latter, before the former. Copyscape costs $.05 per page.

Throw that spam in the 410 can. It let's the crawlers know it's gone 'for good'.

Moz Local is a good place to start, as they are now the source of the Get Listed tool I've used in the past. Both were/are a little wonky, but you have to use your own discretion with any tool. You can also check out Yahoo. There is also Whitespark.

I'm pretty sure I'm leaving a lot a room for others to comment. I hope I am. : )

You find the rogues, and either delete or claim them. The process will vary wildly from aggregator to aggregator.

Send their host a DMCA Takedown if your site is a copyright holder. Secondly, to sanitize your GA data from this point forward by creating a separate profile and excluding traffic from the infringing domain. You do this via GA Admin>.JS Tracking Info > Referral Exclusion List.

Google won't index what it can't crawl. You should be alright, from a duplicate content perspective. If people, real live ones, are trying to reach the site via this link, then you might have problems. If they can't reach it, you can't sell. You'll have to check your server log files to figure that out.

If actual 'hoomans' are trying to reach that URL (Not me bro, you don't want to see me in leggings. I'm in Grapevine TX. You can discount that traffic.)

Otherwise, I like to do a little more than the standard here's a blog link response. This is especially the case when I have an actual site to work with, not a vague question. A portion of the secure version of the site can be crawled, while obeying robots/nofollow which can lead to duplicate content concerns.

Send me a message with your email and I can send you the crawl. At least you'll be able sort out that issue. Your main concern may be a non-concern.

I'm that guy, at least I am today. Never link simply for the 'SEO Juice'. If you follow that strategy, you will get your client/yourself in trouble in short order.

Is this link legit? Will it drive traffic to the target site? Is it even remotely related?

All of the numbers can be easily gamed. If you handle the situation intelligently, you'll have a happy client - without worry of penalties.

You have bigger problems. The HTTP and the HTTPS version of the site can be crawled in a limited fashion. Long story short, the site is generating it's own duplicate content.

My question is; "If they are paying to drive traffic to this URL, then why is it doing this?"

This isn't deadly, it's just not good.

I noticed that my LinkedIn profile picture is showing up higher in image search these days. I didn't notice anything close to what you report. I don't really pay much attention to my name surname queries, but I can say I'll do so a couple times a month. It's likely a fluke of attribution.

Have you attempted to crawl the site? If not, I would give it a little Screaming Frog. If I knew the URL, I would have done it already. : )

Sometimes crawl problems look and feel like penalties. That upward trend in pages blocked by robots.txt before the fall is making me a little suspicious. Plus, if it is a problem with crawlability - that's easier to fix than a penalty.

I ran into that and it was quite frustrating. I would double check the file and make sure your description didn't get split into individual cells. Also, I was using Libre Office - which took comma separated entries (categories) and split them into individual cells. I resorted to using Google Sheets, then exporting to CSV. That worked for me.

These are kind of some big questions with a lot of possible answers. So I'll go with the most general response.

Top 40 Results:

That can be a terribly unrealistic goal, or one that's tough. If these are branded queries (e.g. Product/Service Your Brand), it will be tough even for an established brand. Someone else always sneaks in there, somehow.

Given that you've been tasked with doing that for hundreds of keywords, it sounds closer to the terribly unrealistic side of the spectrum.

Competition With Yourself:

It can be good and it can be bad. It really depends on the pages. Some pages can be better than others, given their purpose. So if you want someone to call and for some reason there isn't a phone number, they won't find what they need and you've lost the sale. If someone has many options from only one source, they may choose not to click at all for some reason.

Better KPIs:

A good KPI is something that's achievable and in line with real business goals. Good KPIs keep the lights on. Higher rankings don't always guarantee business goals will be met. Honestly, there's some real garbage pages out there that rank well for certain queries. You can virtually guarantee they aren't worth the cost of hosting.

Perhaps you want more service calls? Maybe you want to increase your email database? These are things that you have to establish with decision makers/stake holders within the business. A good set of performance indicators pay the bills. Rankings for the sake of rankings often deviate from that purpose.

Hopefully this was helpful.

Edit:

I forgot to touch on the .net to .com migration. There are a lot of variables there as well. I really don't know how well the migration was handled. If it was handled well, you might see some cached results from the .net version, but eventually everything will swing over to the .com.

If the migration wasn't handled well... you have a whole set of other problems.

You can honestly go with either, in my opinion. But how are you going to differentiate yourself from all of the other services? What if you partner with a food delivery service.. pizza... kebabs... whatever, and have something ready at or near the time of arrival.

I'm thinking about the bar crowd. What do you think? That's a bit of differentiation in my book.

Know that you're going to have to screen a lot of yahoos, but Craigslist is always a possibility. You could post a job on the North Pole and you would still get a couple of responses, especially if telecommuting is an option.

SEM Rush is one option, but it's a bit limited. Another option is using Advanced Web Ranking. Both deliver scraped ranking results, but AWR offers a little more flexibility and it runs locally. If you're impatient, or need to report in volume, you can purchase proxy IP addresses. I've made extensive use of AWR in the past, but I'm glad I don't have to use it anymore. I've long since established better KPIs.

In regard to AWR, you will have to configure it not to stop on the first positive result.

I had kind of a 'derp moment'. If you control the same domain, take a look at your historic traffic (if possible) and definitely do a link audit on the error pages. You can 301 the old pages to their newer, relevant, counterparts.

I would take that tact before removal.

Youtube is going to show ads on your video when it's displayed on Youtube. You should be able to opt out of ads on your videos via information in this link. You can also turn off related videos via query parameters in the embedded URL.

My personal favorite parameters are &rel=0 and &modestbranding=1. Happy experiments to you!

Do you mean that it's the same domain and the old URLs are still floating around? If so, you can try removing them via GWT. Just be very careful which URLs you list for removal. Make a list and check it three times.

If these are 404s pointing to your site from external domains, the best you can do is contact the administrator at the site and request they point to a relevant page with a 200 response code.

I'm laboring under the apprehension that you mean the site you listed in your profile. If that is the case, based upon what I've seen - the site isn't as mobile-friendly as it could be. I would recommend looking into responsive design.

What has likely happened is your content was pretty good for queries on mobile devices, up until recently. Competitors are likely serving up content that's 'mobile-friendlier' than yours in some way. That could mean anything from faster page load speeds to actual dedicated adaptive or responsive sites have started crowding the SERPs.

However, there are more pressing concerns that can be remedied now. The www and non-www version of the site is thoroughly indexed. If there's been a change to the .htaccess file, it would be a good idea to revisit it - the sooner the better.

Also, my crawler is picking up some 500 errors in the tag and category folders. Finally, it appears there is some weirdness happening with the /log-out page. It would be best to noindex/nofollow that page and/or block it with robots.txt. It appears to be sapping crawl budget.

So I suppose:

1. Look into the duplicate content issue.
2. Fix crawlability issues.

If you would like, I can share a Google Sheets copy of the crawl - free of charge. Just message me from my profile. Hopefully this has been helpful.