Hey Robert!

There are a few tools you can use to get a good idea of when an external link was created.

1. opensiteexplorer.org (a Moz tool) will give you a "date discovered" date.
2. ahrefs.com will give you a "first seen" date.
3. majesticseo.com will give you a "first indexed" date.
4. Google Webmaster Tools will give you a "first discovered" date when you export "recent links."

Between those 4, you should be able to find the link you want.  Webmaster Tools is free but will be limited.  The others show you some data for free, but require a monthly subscription for all the details.

I would steer clear of removing 250 blog posts from the other web properties.  They may be driving traffic to those websites.

The client is requesting 250 particular blog posts to be rewritten.  This isn't the best content strategy in the world, but that's what you're being asked to do, so the BEST way to handle it is to completely rewrite every post so they are 100% unique.

If you were to remove the blog posts from the other websites and simply post them on the new website, you're running the risk of taking traffic away from the already established websites.

"Would google pick up on the fact that these blogs are already appearing elsewhere on the web and thereby penalise the new site for posting material that is already indexed by Google?" -- Yes, you run the risk of being penalized by Panda with such a large amount of duplicate content.  Google wants to rank websites that provide value to visitors.  If a website is entirely made up of content that already exists on another website, you're providing no added value to visitors.  Again, you could remove the content from the other websites and 301 redirect to the new one.... but you're taking a lot of value away from those websites if you do that.

First thing that comes to mind is maybe the site had a lot of site-wide links before.  If it had 5,000 or 10,000 links coming from 1 single domain and that website went down, that would be a huge loss of referring pages in a short amount of time.  Maybe they were in web directories and asked to be removed?  While simultaneously attempting to build some high quality backlinks from more referring pages?

It's all speculation of course, but plausible.

Where are you seeing the trailing slash?  If I go to threewaystoharems.com in my browser, there is no trailing slash.  I do see a trailing slash if I do a Google search for "site:threewaystoharems.com" but that is normal.  Every website will show that trailing slash.

I think you might be obsessing over a non-issue  Let me know if i am misunderstanding.

Ah!  I misunderstood the bit about reverse proxying.  In that case... to be perfectly honest, I'm not sure.

When you setup a reverse proxy, what happens to the sub-domain?  Does it go away or does it still exist live?  If it remains live, you'd end up with a duplicate content issue.

EDIT >> I found this at the source you linked to (which answers my question) -->

"The next thing you can do is add a robots.txt file to the sub-domain that stops robots from indexing it. As Reverse Proxying keeps the requested URL the /blog/ URLs will use the robots.txt from the main domain rather than the sub-domain.

The final (and most extreme) thing you can do is to register Google Webmaster Tools for the sub-domain and remove it from the index. If you are doing this, you need to do it in conjunction with robots.txt."

The Google Disavow tool doesn't work like that.  It won't actually remove links from any pages.  It is basically just a signal to Google that you want those links to be nofollowed.  Ahrefs would have no clue if something has been disavowed or not.

Canonical will pass link juice almost exactly like 301s will, so there's no harm in going that route.  Matt Cutts explains that in this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zW5UL3lzBOA

You sound like you're good to go.  You've got duplicate content worked out, and you've got a plan to retain link juice (canonical).

If you don't make them VERY unique from the originals, the new site won't perform very well.  If the new site consists of nothing but 250 blog posts that were already discovered on other websites, you won't get good results.  Simply keyword optimizing the posts won't be enough.  They should be entirely re-written to avoid potential problems with Panda.

I'm not sure what you mean by this -- Would the articles need to be completely taken by all current publishers?

I wouldn't recommend hiding the date because you don't want users to know that the content is old.  What about when you publish something fresh and someone lands on the page but they can't find a date?  They won't know how up to date that information is.  I think a lot of people look for dates on blog posts, and rightfully so.  They want to see that they're getting good information.  You're right, if something is 2+ years old they might look for something more up to date.  But you can update old blog posts and re-date them.  Add something new to it, make some changes, and update the date.

Imagine an SEO strategy blog that didn't date the posts.  You would be doing your visitors a complete disservice by hiding the date.  You might have a post all about article directory submissions and they won't see that it's from 2008.  That's not enhancing user experience, and people won't be happy with you.

Old content won't always be a bad thing.  Read #4, "Burstiness," on this blog post: http://www.seobythesea.com/2014/03/incomplete-google-ranking-signals-1/

It's really interesting and a great read about how older content will sometimes receive the boost in rankings over fresh content.

EDIT: I'd like to add that it's completely okay to hide the date in some circumstances.  You might have some sort of evergreen content that truly will stand the test of time and info may not ever, or rarely, change on the topic.  For instance, if you were writing a blog post about how to improve your basketball shot.  Who cares if the post is from 2006?  In that case, hiding the date isn't going to reduce the overall user experience.

Here's the Google documentation on multilingual and multi-regional websites: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182192?hl=en

You will also want to read up on hreflang here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en

I would personally go with example.com/mx

I've never seen this before so I don't have much to say, but if I ran into this I would think to check for double implementation of the analytics code.  Give the source code a look-see and CTRL + F for the UA code.  See if it's there twice.

First of all, I assume that by "using the keyword" you just simply mean an instance of it on the page somewhere.  If you happen to be referring to the meta keywords tag, that's a whole other topic, but you shouldn't be using that meta tag.

Anyways, there is nothing wrong with using the keyword "gear oil" on multiple pages.  Since there are different types of gear oils available, it's simply unavoidable, and Google understands this.  Imagine you have a site about food, and on that site you have a lot of pages about pizzas.  Pepperoni pizza, sausage pizza, sardine pizza, Hawaiian pizza, etc.  In this scenario, it would be as if you're posting the same question as you did, but asking if it's okay that you used the keyword "pizza" on multiple pages.  Of course that's okay

The whiteboard Friday from a couple days ago actually discussed almost exactly what you're asking.  You should definitely check it out: http://moz.com/blog/keyword-targeting-density-and-cannibalization-whiteboard-friday

It's a good idea to include your main keyword in the meta description because when Google does show your custom meta description, the keyword will be bold if it matches the search query.

However, keep in mind that meta descriptions do not help your rankings at all.  Google announced this a while ago.  Despite not helping rankings, meta descriptions are still useful because they may help increase click thru rates on the SERPs

Matt Cutts did a good video on meta descriptions back in November 2013: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4gr88oHb-k

Dillon,

Thanks for the additional explanation.  I do see the canonical tag in your code and see that it is being placed by Yoast's WordPress SEO plugin.

Honestly, you should not worry about the trailing slash.  Google and Bing are intelligent enough to understand that .com and .com/ are the same website.  You are receiving credit for your backlinks regardless of whether or not the trailing slash exists on the link.

Having said that, here's how you can remove the trailing slash if you still really want to.....

Login to your WordPress backend as an administrator and look for "Plugins" on the left menu and go to "Editor" within the plugins menu.  From there, find the dropdown menu near the top right and go to "WordPress SEO".  On the list of files that display on the right side, find "wordpress-seo/frontend/class-frontend.php".

In that file, use CTRL + F to find this line of code: $canonical = home_url( '/' );

Remove the / within the ' '

Click on "Update File".  Refresh your homepage and you will see that the trailing slash is gone from the canonical tag.  Keep in mind, this is a hack.  When you update WordPress SEO, this will most likely be overwritten and you'll have to do it again.

Imran,

I looked at semrush.com and it looks like you had a spike of traffic in August 2013 and then it quickly died back down.  I also looked at your backlink profile and I see that the overwhelming majority of your links are from blog comments.  It's okay to have some blog comments but you don't want that to dominate your backlinks.  You also want to be sure that you're using your actual name for the anchor text of the link (and you are, so that's good).  I also noticed that you have some links from other sites linking to you, like androidcentral.us.  Since you also own that website, you're effectively creating your own little link network, which could become an issue, if it's not already.

The quality of the content is also lacking.  There are a lot of grammatical issues and that may be because English isn't your first language.  Your English isn't terrible, but Google wants high quality and unfortunately the level of English on your site won't be considered high quality.

What you should do is work on getting more high quality backlinks and diversifying your backlink profile.   I checked a few of your pages on copyscape and they didn't turn up any duplicates found.  Assuming this content is actually 100% unique and not just spun/rewritten from another source, you should also have someone fix up the grammatical issues.  If the content is spun/rewritten from another source, start adding new content that is completely unique and original.  You also need to remove the "Example Widget" text in your sidebar ASAP.  That makes your site look incomplete.

If you haven't already done so, please check Google Webmaster Tools to make sure you didn't receive a manual penalty from Google.