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It isn't against guidelines, but there are a few things you should know. Footer and sidebar links do not have as much value as in-body links. If you can naturally link (not try to shove anchor text in) to some of those categories in the main content of the main page, that would be ideal. If the anchor text isn't perfectly ideal, use alt and title tags to help indicate your focus. Hopefully your site structure is set up in a way that things can be navigated from the top nav, so you don't need to put in footer links for usability.

Put the canonical tags in the old content, and point it to the new pages.

If you believe there are penalties, then 301ing is a little risky.

De-indexing content doesn't mean Google forgets it was there, they still have it cached, so this isn't ideal.

It looks like canonical may be your best bet.

You would need to keep the site live to speed up the de-indexation. Then block all bots through robots.txt and force a crawl.

Make sure this is what you want to do. There are other options for this situation depending on your intent. Canonical tags, for example, would not transfer penalties and still show Google where the good source of the content is.

No. Not unless it is a subdomain of the same domain you are redirecting to, in which case you would put the .htaccess on the new domain.

So, the .htaccess file has to go on the old domain unless the old subdomain was something like reviews.newdomain.com and now you moving them to newdomain.com/reviews.

I hope that makes sense.

Is it possible to host the domain somewhere cheaply once it's shut down, just to have an .htaccess file on it? Then it can still be done, just make sure everything redirects somewhere in the .htaccess.

An .htaccess file on your new domain can't control web pages from the old domain to redirect them, that .htaccess file has to go on the old domain. .

Correct, you can cannot tag canonically if the old site is shut down.

Schema generators are to taste, pick one you feel comfortable using and double check the markup.

301 redirect the old web pages to the new ones using an .htaccess file on the old website. This will show Google that the content has moved to the new web pages. Check out the link for more information: http://moz.com/learn/seo/redirection

Are you able to access the .htaccess file on the old website? If so, it sounds like the best thing to do would be to 301 redirect from the old review pages to the new ones. With these 301s in place, Google can figure out that the site has moved, and you aren't just spamming a ton of new reviews and manipulating dates.

If that isn't possible, implement canonical tags on the old pages.

In either case, make sure to mark up the new pages in Schema.

Not directly, since Twitter links are nofollowed, but it could help indirectly if you are promoting good content that viewers may want to share and link to after reading.

Try to determine when the drop off started, and try to remember what kinds of changes the website was going through during that time. That could help point to the reason for the drop in indexing.

There are plenty of reasons why Google may choose not to index pages, so this will take some digging. Here are some places to start the search:

• Check your robots.txt to ensure those pages are still crawlable

• Check to make sure the content on those pages isn't duplicated somewhere else on the Web.

• Check to see if there was any updates to canonical changes on the site around when the drop started

• Check to make sure the sitemap currently on the site matches the one you submitted to Webmasters, and that your CMS didn't auto-generate a new one

• Make sure the quality of the pages is worth indexing. You said your traffic didn't really take a hit, so it's not de-indexing your quality stuff.

This should do it:

#begin redirect

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^subdomain.domain.com

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://domain.com/subfolder/$1 [R=301]

#end redirect

Regex isn't the most intuitive thing in the world, but it's a necessary evil sometimes. Here's a nice little tool to help when you have to use it: http://regex101.com/

Which niche you decide to target on your home page is up to you, but in general, the better user experience leans towards broader terms. You can focus deeper on internal pages, but be welcoming to a large crowd (an important, more general key phrase) on your homepage.

Why I say it's up to you, is because it's important to know the risk vs. reward, there is no definite answer. Going too broad will have you fighting against giants you can't yet compete with. Focusing too narrow will limit your demographic scope and traffic. As the SEO, it's up to you to do the research and discuss the levels of risk and reward with your client. What will take longer, what kind of results can they expect from each, etc.

In my experience, yes. I'm currently doing some further testing on it, but initial results and experience say Google absolutely prefers the address be shown, which is counter intuitive and frustrating, I know.

Also remember that this is only one little factor in a massive scope for local listings, there may be other areas to focus on as a better use of time that would make this point moot.

Yet. As with the majority of Google's penalizing, they do it when and how they want. Just because you weren't denied initially doesn't mean you won't put in a bunch of time into the listing just to have it removed.

It's your call whether you want to take the risk (or, rather, it should be your client's call if you aren't a decision maker for the company). And then it can be decided whether that's a risk you want to take. In order to build long-lasting websites that don't get hit out of the blue, you need to minimize risk, though.

I hate to step on another SEO's business modal, but for that price they should absolutely include the internal linking. I would be weary of an SEO that is trying to break down every single process into it's smallest parts in order to charge you for each one.

At an average reputable SEO company, that $7k would go a lot further, I feel.

This is just my opinion. When it comes to pricing a services, everyone does it differently and charges different things. So, in my opinion, you are getting nickeled and dimed.

Yes, I have known listings to be completely removed due to being at UPS stores.

As far as checking the box if the location is real in order to make the address show up, I can tell you from a lot of experience that having the address displayed increases local ranks. Do with the information what you want, but it is not the most in-line thing as far as Google guidelines go.

I order to not risk a penalty in this situation, you should keep the box unchecked and have a real address.

Miriam is right,

I didn't realize it was a mailbox in a UPS store. It would still need to be a real address. Google has actually targeted UPS stores in the past for people trying to use them as offices: http://www.billhartzer.com/pages/google-bans-ups-store-locations-for-google-maps-listings/

Charging on-page SEO at a per-page price is a bit out of the norm in my experience. Most SEO companies will charge a monthly fee and will then work on what they deem more important to the campaign.

Keeping that in mind, answering your question is difficult without the price points, but if it were me, internal linking would be part of the on-page service. If it's strictly a content company, they won't do this, but if it's an SEO company, internal linking is a given.

Once the content is complete, the internal linking that is involved is not a large undertaking in comparison. It takes some time and strategy, but a fraction of the content building efforts that hopefully took place.

Even if there is no point in people showing up to the address, is there any other reason why it might be significant to display it? For example, it is a company that might receive mail to that address? Like bills people are trying to pay and need to look up the address to send to? The address can have a purpose in serving customers without customers actually going to the location, and why would customers show up to a place if they knew it wasn't a store front?

It seems like a similar situation to service-based local companies like HVAC, pest control, landscaping, etc.

The page 2 URL looks spammy, and if it provide the same kind of content as on page 1, then I would agree that 301ing page 2 is a good option.

You have 3 options for the website.

1. Do nothing and hope links go away.

2. Keep the 301s in place.

3. Disavow them.

You know Google has already spotted your site and hit it, so keeping the 301s isn't an option. Doing nothing has unknown results and hasn't worked for you so far. That only leaves one option, unless you want to start from scratch.

I'm of the mindset that Google sees it as cleaning things up. Just because you submit the disavow doesn't mean you created the need for it, so why would Google see it as a bad thing?