I also do this. The meta description is supposed to have a nice sentence or so that is relevant to the page and makes people click. If the content on your page can't do that, you have a bigger problem than meta descriptions.

Wait... the town and county have the same name? Then there's no issue.

People don't search by county and rarely put in the state when searching a city geo. Your money term is variations of, "cleaning services in Winona". Even though this phrase and others like it don't have a high search volume, experience and years of data tell me this would be the way to go. Unless you wanted to focus on carpet cleaning, which is a different ball game.

To sedate your client, maybe discuss a local SEO play with G+. Then you can define the exact area you'd like to cover, which would include both no problem.

I wouldn't recommend using the disavow tool for this. The disavow tool is used to clean up spammy links that were not gained naturally.

A better solution is to use 301 redirects and redirect the 404'd pages to the new pages that work on your website. That way users will land where they should if they click the links, and Google will still give you juice from those links.

Here's a place to get started on how t do that: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93633?hl=en

Looks like a hack. A hacker somehow got in at some point, dropped a bunch of Ugg Boot affiliate marketing pages and left. Not sure why they are 404ing unless someone already discovered these when they happened and cleaned them up. That could've happened months and months ago.

The 404s shouldn't effect your SEO, but the hack has potential to if it hasn't been cleaned up properly. Do you see a spike in search queries if you look back over the last year or two? That may indicate when the hack occurred and was cleaned up. It's important to know how the hack was cleaned up, so you can ensure that the vulnerabilities have been resolved. If they haven't been, your site is still open to additional attacks, and spam like that can hurt your SEO.

For Wordpress, it's important to keep not only Wordpress itself up to date, but also your plugins (and only use well established plugins, and do a little research on them to make sure people aren't screaming about hacking issues). Hackers search for vulnerabilities in all sorts of places.

To Google, there is not. The R=301 at the end of the rewrite rule defines it as a 301 redirect, so it's practically the same thing. For a one-off redirect I wouldn't use the rewrite format. This is usually for when you need to grab big chunks of URLs and redirect them all at once. Still, if it works this way, there's really nothing wrong with it from the redirecting standpoint. If there was, when people used it for large quantities of redirects, it wouldn't work.

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.

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.

Yes, and have each one direct to the proper language on the website. If I'm a social media user, why would I want to engage with an entity that only speaks my language a third of the time?

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.

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.

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.

I have seen this done in order to help screen readers, but I definitely do not recommend this. They may argue that semantic rules of HTML 5 dictate that this is an okay practice, and it is for HTML 5, but not for Google.

Google doesn't adopt new rules or semantic changes right away. Changes have to take hold and become common practice. This isn't common enough, and hidden H1s do open you up for potential penalties.