Some years ago people used to make this claim about W3C validation badges too. A badge is a badge is a badge. It really is unlikely to affect your search rankings one way or another.

Very interesting! I don't recall seeing that before but I checked the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine entry for that URL and the quoted extract has been there since at least 2013.

Elsewhere Google has been pretty insistent on structured data being part of the document itself as much as possible so it does seem somewhat contradictory advice. As you say perhaps they've simply forgotten to update that particular entry to reflect current thinking.

Once upon a time it was possibly a good use of the meta description to include some salient structured data but today we have a proper way of marking up structured data. The meta description is best used for compelling, relevant copy to attract the user to click through to your site as the meta description is your one best hope of affecting what is shown to the user in the SERPs.

Search engines haven't shown any inclination to parse the meta description and I doubt they would do so in future. Structured data belongs in the document itself, marked up accordingly.

In 2011 Matt Cutts advised that Google does limit on redirect chains - he indicated the Googlebot won't follow more than around 3 or 4. No limit on the total number of single-level 301s.

In your specific situation I would redirect both the original and the first replacement to the new replacement so that users and bots can reach the new page in a single redirect hop.

You could use a VPN perhaps but it might get a bit expensive if you need multiple locations.

My apologies for overlooking your response. A good tool is https://github.com/jpatokal/script_detector. It is a library for Ruby and you can use the interactive Ruby console (irb) to use the function to identify script in an easy way. If you need help/guidance with that drop me a reply here or by private message and I'd be happy to help.

Shawn, a quick question to open up possible avenues: did you extend the Flawless theme or use it as-is?

They've messed up in general really. They should be blocking robots to what appears to be the CMS for their clients use as there are surely numerous effects on their clients (cannibalization caused by the duplication of pages, for instance). As Mike said they've not taken into account the SEO aspects of the way they've implemented their system.

Michael has it right. Online Agency (onlineagency.com) build websites for travel agencies. In the URLs you gave, Patrick, you can see some sort of ID for the site (starmandstravel.com). I guess that this content.onlineagency.com subdomain is the content management system to allow the travel agencies to update their content.

Google may be interpreting lots of similar/related websites on the same infrastructure as an attempt to game its algorithms (they have the same nameservers, although different c blocks but many of the other sites built by that agency also share the same c block [..170.140]).

Interesting question. The Government of Hong Kong uses standard Chinese in simplified characters on its website while the population largely speaks Cantonese which is now found in a written form frequently used online and in social settings.

I suggest you have a look at Google Trends for Hong Kong and see if the bulk of searches are being made with simplified characters or traditional characters. The demographic your website will be targeting will also be a factor.