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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.

I do sometimes see hijacked G+ pages, or other shady G+ activities, but in my experience flagging it or calling Google resolves the issue quickly. You're always going to have people trying to game the system, just make sure to know how to defend yourself against it.

As for +TacoBellCom, first you would have to have the business named "Taco Bell" and get that verified (good luck there). Then, you'd have to hope that Google lets you add characters to the end of the URL instead of deciding it for you. Then, you would have to hope you were never reported, flagged, or otherwise looked at by a human on Google's end. So, odds are it wouldn't work for too long.

That's not even getting into the legality of trademark infringement.

That would be helpful. Something along the lines of, "Any logos used on our client list are logos of companies we've directly worked for. If you represent one of these companies and would like your logo remove, please contact us at: blah"

It shows you're making a little more of an effort, but it still isn't ideal. Permission to use a logo is often just an email away, once you find the right person to email or call.

If you know for sure they are all bad links, then do it all at once and get it done with. Maybe you'll see an increase in traffic.

Once you disavow something, you're not likely to get it back, so keep that in mind. From the sounds of it, these links are obviously bad, so you shouldn't have to worry.

If it's a major corporation, there should be a PR department or "Press" section of their site that should give you a good place to start your search. Most brands are fine with you using their logo like that, but double-checking is important. Some brands coughRealtorcough are insane with how you use their brand, so checking is recommended.

At the same time, if you can't get ahold of them and you still use their logo and they don't like it, you'll just receive a DMCA-esque letter asking you to remove it. I don't recommend doing it this way, but in the past, the worst I've seen is a take-down notice.

When I have multiple listings under the same brand like that, I think it's good to add something descriptive at the end.

For example, if you have a brand with 10 locations in 10 cities, then you can make them +BrandLosAngeles, +BrandNewYork, etc.

The URLs are there to make for a better user experience, so adding a number to end of the brand doesn't really help much. Instead, think of a word or two that is memorable, and that makes sense to those who might see it.

If consolidating the domains into subdomains is inevitable, then 301s are going to be the way to go. Just be careful to redirect everything to where it should go in the subdomain, and do it one chunk if you can. You don't want to 301 some stuff, then re-301 or do a second round later.

Be as clear as you can to Google. once you are ready to move the site, do it all at once, so Google can clearly see that everything from the domain is now at the new domain. So yeah, wholesale switch, just make sure the client understands what he's getting himself into.

There is no exact number with regards to traffic loss, chance of recovery, risk of things not going smoothly, etc. Make sure they are aware of all the risks and how to best lower the possibility of something bad happening.

The difference in the ranking strength of those two URLs is negligible. Your decision should probably be made by deciding whether or not you're going to build out those directories and have the content to do so.

Having /properties/new-york/rental suggests you having multiple properties in New York, some of which are rentals. If a visitor went to /properties/new-york, would they see a page with multiple New York properties, some for sale and some for rent? If the visitor just went to /properties, would there be multiple regions for people to browse through?

If you have the content and ability to do that, then build it out with the subdirectories. If you don't, then focus on that single page with the keyword as the slug.

If you are worried about duplicate content in you search pages, that should be pretty easily solved with canonical tags. These will tell search engines which pages should be indexed, even if that pages' content is seen somewhere else on the site. Here's a link to more information on that: http://moz.com/blog/canonical-url-tag-the-most-important-advancement-in-seo-practices-since-sitemaps

Even though Cutts said it shouldn't be an issue, he speaks in general terms (to put it lightly). Maybe Google tries to pick up the canonical version, but there's no harm in helping point Google in the right direction, just in case it doesn't crawl your site properly.

There are a few automated tools out there to crawl tons of pages and the potential issues on them. ScreamingFrog may be of use. There are also higher-level enterprise solutions to the problem like Searchlight Conductor.

This is really a case-by-case basis, and a lot of different factors should be taken into consideration:

• I think the first things to consider is: why? Why do you want to consolidate the sites? If they are all somewhat different, all get traffic, and are doing their jobs, why change it? Is it broken? If not, why fix it?

- Does the brand of the strongest domain make sense as an umbrella to the other websites? Don't try to force domains together that don't make sense for the visitor.

• If it is strong enough, are the sites similar enough to where you could fold them into a single domain and brand (subfolders instead of subdomains)? I would recommend subfolders to subdomains if it still makes sense for the website.

Trying to consolidate multiple established domains into one domain, or a domain and it's subdomains, is possible but risky. Ask yourself if it's worth the risk to do all this, or if this is just one person's whim to organize domains without knowing what could happen.

In my experience, 301ing one domain to another (if done properly), should take about 2-4 weeks to recover the majority of organic traffic. Rarely have I seen a domain recover 100% of their organic traffic after a 301, but you will recover the majority of your ranks. So, if you are 301ing multiple domains, that would mean you are losing a sliver a traffic on each of them, and that doesn't count the downtime during the 301 transition.

And of course, the above is assuming all 301s are done properly, which could be a pretty big undertaking from the sound of it.

Google isn't good at continuing to check to see if links are live after they add them to your link profile. It's likely a link used to be there to your site, then was removed, but Google didn't update your link profile or bother to look to see if the link was there.

I ran into this exact issue about six months ago. It was solved within a couple weeks by updating the disavow report with those examples they listed, plus some others I found after going through the link profile with a stricter mindset on quality.

What do you call a porn-addicted Mozzer? A person with a lot of link juice.

Yeah, I heard Moz gets a lot of porn traffic. I also heard they get a lot of unauthorized backdoor entries.

Something something DDOS attack. Something something too many partners.

I'll be here all week, or until Moz bans me.

I'm sorry. I'll go back to spreadsheets.

It's OK to have his name, just add more to it to differentiate the photos.

Try to be more descriptive than that in the alt tags. Quickly describe what the image is about. You never want to duplicate alt tags on different images, because those images are not the same. Alt tags are there to describe the image in a short, concise way.

Google tries to be smart enough to recognize when this sort of this is going on. They get it right the majority of the time, but I've  encountered times where Google didn't recognize some sites as scrapers like this, and our client's site was still incurring a penalty. I know for a fact that is was scraper sites like this, because Google told me as much when they responded to my first reconsideration request.

Short version: Probably won't hurt you, but it is possible. I would disavow this stuff to be safe.

Check this post out, it may help https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93713?hl=en

EGOL knows what he/she/it's talking about. You can report and disavow if you'd like, but worry about yourself. These people don't go away and are better off ignored if they aren't directly effecting your marketing efforts.

They would likely get merged or penalized eventually. You can speed up the process by reporting the additional listings as duplicates. There is a place to flag them on their places page. Google is pretty good about looking into those things within a week or two.

The thought behind canonicals is this:

• One of their uses is to fight against scrapers and such by still having the canonical tags in place when these spammy places grab your content.

• If penalties passed through canonicals, then the penalties these scrapers have would effect your site terribly. This is not the case, in my experience.

• So, unless Google has already implemented the human tracking that was discussed a few Whiteboard Fridays ago, this should work. And even with hardcore human tracking for penalities, I think its yet to be seen if this would focus on small sites trying to fix penalities as opposed to the large black hat spammers.

There is a bit of theorycrafting here, but in RoxBrock's specific situation, it looks like he has to pick the lesser of all evils.

Moving the content over and 301ing the old URL will do that. You'll see a dip in ranking, then a recovery period (usually weeks as opposed to months). That's your best bet when you are forced to make a move like that. Ideally, you'd find a way to keep the content where it is, but if that's not possible, then the 301 will do.

If you are referring to adding new content to the new homepage after the old home page is redirected, than yes. You can add additional content to pages that have 301s redirecting to them and they will update in the index.

If you are referring to adding content on the old homepage that is 301'd and have it update on the new page, that will not work. Browsers and bots read the .htaccess and move on. Bots won't crawl that old URL anymore.