Hi Joost. The reasoning behind noindexing category and tag pages is because they have a high tendency to show up as duplicate content--as you've just experienced. People like to keep them as part of their site due to user friendliness but often these pages on their own are a reshuffling of content and can be highly repetitive from a search engine perspective. Ideally you keep your top level categories that are unique within the index and noindex the rest.  Feel free to keep links within your site as followed.  Cheers!

Right. I get that they don't exist on your site currently, but when they did Google indexed them so they exist in some form within Google, but Google had never been told they had permanently moved (via 301). The good news is that you don't have to resurrect the entire site. You can simply modify the appropriate file (htaccess if you're on Apache, IIS if Window's server) and make certain that Google knows any page it's looking for at devsite.yoursite.com is now at www.correcturl.com.  Cheers!

Hi Sarah. Have you put in 301 redirects in the htaccess file for these subdomains? You may want to consider going through the change of address tool in Google Webmaster Tools as well.  The problem seems to be that Google crawled and indexed the old subdomains and still has references to the old pages that existed on them. Ultimately using NOINDEX on development sites and then using a catchall 301 redirect should help clean this up for you. Cheers!

Hi Eslam. A link via an image is perfectly acceptable especially if they're natural links. Some sites will tend to have an abundance of these if they're things like images sharing sites, online comics, meme generators, etc. And many of these sites do perfectly well with a high percentage of image links. The bigger concern is that the site isn't spammy, see Moz's new tool that's part of OSE: http://a-moz.groupbuyseo.org/blog/spam-score-mozs-new-metric-to-measure-penalization-risk and http://a-moz.groupbuyseo.org/blog/understanding-and-applying-mozs-spam-score-metric-whiteboard-friday Cheers!

Good work Adam! You pretty much have to go with the contact method at first if at all possible. As more sites transition away from this sort of thing though you'll likely run into more success as you do. It's abundantly easy for Google to spot sites like goarticles and ezine and spank them if they choose. Who knows, that could be something that comes up in the EU...

Generally forum links that are from useful and accurate comments don't bother me as they're semantically relevant to the conversation and pretty well established in the global scope of the web. I wouldn't expect them to bring too much value though as well, especially the sig ones. Still, if you're ranking highly within the forum, and your comments are adding to the conversation, the sig link would be good just from a users perspective. I'd leave it for that alone.

Hi Georgina. Having pages go missing after a redirect change is fairly typical for a given time period but they should come back eventually, minus any normal fluctuations associated with rankings. You can do a few things to check on your progress, such as site:YOURDOMAIN.com searches with the addition of inurl:SPECIFIC.STRING to try and find certain sections or products. Cheers!

Hi Georgina. This could definitely have an impact but since it's a more minimal change (root domain is remaining the same) hopefully it will be mitigated (or very minimal) since the 301 redirect was used.  Something else you can do though is go to Google Webmaster Tools, verify ownership of both the www and non-www and set the non-www as your preferred domain within that tool.  The same can be done within Bing as well. In addition you can update your sitemaps by uploading them there so that they include the non-www links as the target pages.  This should help speed things up and make the change over less pronounced. Cheers!

You're welcome Erik!

Right. Moz Local uses the matching verifired Google + and Facebook listings to verify those locations. So what you have there is what gets applied to the myriad of others. See: https://a-moz.groupbuyseo.org/local/how and:

Moz Local takes the time and hassle out of managing your listings across multiple sites and directories. When you submit a listing on Moz Local, it must match an existing Google Places or Facebook listing across all of the following attributes: Business Name, Address, Phone Number, and Website. Because you've already gone through the phone or postcard verification process with Google and/or Facebook, your Moz Local listings will be validated if they exactly match Google or Facebook.

Some of our partners—such as Infogroup and Best of the Web—may call or email to confirm your listing information is accurate, but no postcard or PIN entry is required.

Since Facebook will scale it they'll have a range to apply them from and it should work pretty well across the platforms. Submission errors come across one at a time so you should see which 3rd party services have issues with the submission, if any. Cheers!