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This shouldn't be an issue. One of the benefits of authorship is it can be used across multiple sites to attribute posts. If you are attributing different posts on different sites, that's fine, and sharing those posts on your G+ is even better. It sounds like you're using authorship as it was intended.

Agreed, if you're doing it, don't rely on it to increase your website's PageRank, but powerful citations on those reputable directories can help with Maps and getting some targeted traffic.

It's pretty current. They released it a couple of months ago. It's a great learning tool and is still applicable.

It sounds like your client needs to be educated on how proper link building works. You can't just say, "I need good backlinks, and I need them NOW!"

In order to build good, relevant, safe backlinks, you need to create assets or other ways to attract people to share your content and build links naturally. This takes time and planning. There are quicker grey/black hat ways to build links, but this puts your client's site at risk, and your client needs to know that.

Moz recently came out with a good beginner's guide to link building. Perhaps you can pull some tidbits from that to help your client understand why his/her request is unreasonable. http://moz.com/blog/beginners-guide-to-link-building

PRlog.ru is really good about being annoying. They seem to scrape and pull the whole internet. Those links aren't providing you any benefit, and I think you should disavow. I disavow PRlog.ru links when I complete that kind of task.

As far as the IP links, I find that those can often be from dev sites or company backends. You may want to dig into them a little more to determine where exactly they come from, but if you don't know, disavowing shouldn't hurt you.

I don't think you or they would want to throw away the effort they already put in, assuming it's quality, unique content. 301 the old pages, and move the content over to the new site. That way, if there is any juice, it'll be transferred, but even if there isn't, people may find those posts useful, and this way you don't risk a duplicate content penalty.

The Schema markup is all you need. I've never had to do anything else besides that, and Google usually indexes the rich snippet within a couple weeks.

We've never had an issue. We test tag manager in our dev sites, they don't get indexed, but the tags will still fire.

Consistency is key. I would leave the 4+ off. From my experience and from talking with Google employees, the more identical the better for the actual NAP. A Googler who works in that area told me even the difference between "blvd" and "boulevard" can possibly have an impact.

And when it comes down to, "Who do I make happy, Bing or Google?" The answer is almost always Google.

Hi Nick,

A couple things here, but first and foremost: a good, honest, white hat, non-sleezy SEO will tell you every single thing they are doing. About 15% to 20% of my job is explaining my actions to my clients, which can be frustrating sometimes, but is also necessary. My mindset is that it's important for my clients to not only understand what I am doing with their website, but also for them to get behind it 100%.

Let's be clear about one thing: there is no such thing as a "trade secret" in SEO. There is nothing that, once you know it, you can just exploit it and charge business owners to do that one thing. Every account is unique and requires a different approach. If a company won't tell you what they're going to do, don't use them. The same way I wouldn't buy a car unless the dealer told me which one I was getting.

Also, giving out free stays for blog posts/links is walking a fine line on Google's guidelines and some SEOs will say it's straight up buying links. Be aware that this is a somewhat risky strategy.

It sounds like you have a good amount of content and social presence, so it looks like the first thing you'd want to do is figure how to best utilize those two things together in a content distribution strategy. If you can get you good content to the right audience, links will "naturally" come in without needing to target them with free stays.

Make sure not to ignore potential on-page issues or possible penalties incurred as well. Moz is a great tool to help with the on-page stuff, and this might give you an indication of a deeper penalty issue: http://feinternational.com/website-penalty-indicator/

It never hurts to do a little keyword research and do some optimization for blog posts, just don't go overboard and force keywords into a blog post for ranking's sake. As long as it's natural in the writing or headlines, it's almost always good to target larger groups of the traffic you want, as opposed to smaller or non-existent groups.

That's not an easy answer. It depends on your CMS, the goals, and any other factors like that security issue, which I haven't encountered before (but wasn't his issue to fix, only find).

Really, your dev would know better than me. Call him out on it. Tell him your confused about the hours and you were expecting much less. Then ask him for more specific details on hours spent.

In the future, try to get contractors to quote you an hour estimate.

I've never done this specific rule, but it would definitely be a rewrite rule in your .htaccess file in your root. You can give this piece a shot:

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /html/(.*).html\ HTTP/

RewriteRule .* http://localhost/html/%1 [R=301,L]

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /html/(.*)\ HTTP/

RewriteRule .* %1.html [L]

Jeez.... how do I get rid of all the extra spacing?!

Anyway, if that doesn't work, there are some other options here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5730092/how-to-remove-html-from-url

And if you need to customize the regex a bit, this can help: http://www.regexr.com/

My suggestion is to not add the geos. It's all well and good that the offline world might refer to it with the geo and you might not technically be going against guidelines, but it's still not something you want to risk getting flagged for, or have reps change without your knowledge, screwing up your citations. Then you'll find yourself on with the phone reps all the time trying to tell them how your situation is an exception.

Some SEOs say not to disavow until you know you're hit with a penalty, but I like being proactive.

These links are definitely spammy. These are the kinds of links that take down websites, and when I get a new client with a lot of this kind of stuff, I'll submit a proactive disavow report.

Recovering from a link spam penalty isn't exactly the easiest or fastest thing in the world, so making sure it never gets to that point is important.

It's important to look at webmaster and analytics data for this. The keyword planner isn't exactly accurate. I see traffic coming from keywords all the time that don't have a search volume in keyword planner, or have a vastly different number in keyword planner when compared to the data I get other places.

I think it takes a bit more digging than that, and you also need to consider the long-tail effect from the keywords you're optimizing for.

Asking some of the clients of the business how they search or look for your products can be very helpful.

With that being said, keywords with high volume in the keyword planner do usually offer much more traffic, but also much more competition.

You don't engage in content distribution like that for the value of the direct links of your ads. A content distribution strategy has to start with extremely high quality, engaging content. Content that is so good, people consume it and want to share it. Services like Outbrain allow you to distribute your super awesome content to your demographics, and then your demographics will naturally build links to your content by sharing around the web.

If your strategy isn't working, it's most likely either your content isn't good enough or you're not targeting the correct demographics with it.

In Webmaster Tools you can see if there are any manual action penalties. Just because there are none there doesn't mean the site isn't penalized, but if there is something there, then it's time to take action right away.

This little tool can help indicate as well if you don't see a manual action, but without historical data like analytics and ranking reports, it becomes more difficult: http://feinternational.com/website-penalty-indicator/

It depends on what you're trying to accomplish. I'd go with option #2 if you're looking to transfer your rankings from the old site to the new. Once Google reindexes everything, you should have most of your ranks back.

If you're keeping the same content on the new site and the old, then option #1 isn't really an option, unless you canonicalize the old pages, which will have the same effect on ranks as the 301s.

So then it comes down to what's better for users? Do you think they would rather clickthrough the old site and its calls to action, or would they prefer to be automatically redirected to the new property?

I would think that you would want the new website to rank instead of the old, since having the old site continue to rank would just create an extra step for users.

ColeLusby is right. Prices vary greatly depending on a lot of factors on your side and on the client's side.

For you: your talent level, experience, and what you think your time is worth all come into play

For the client: his/her industry, project scope, kind of website, and what they can contribute to the campaign should be considered.

Only you can know the answer to this.