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I can understand your dilemma. If I say you to rewrite all these pages, it will be an uphill battle for you but if you do not do this, you will leave the all these insurance agents sites and the main website at large. Now, if you feel that the rewriting the all these pages overweigh the risk involved, go ahead and do this. No more wasting time mate J

Morning Nick, A big thank you for taking time out to look at this. You've confirmed a vague hunch that the site architecture is inherently jinxed and morre importantly given me hope i can get the dismal ranking sitution out of the mire Have a great weekend & thank you again

Hi Stephen, Does your website has search functionality ? I think these URLs generated whenever someone search on your site. The common solution for this is to block  search directory. If you don't want to share URL, you can PM me so that I can suggest you exact solution.

Thanks John!

1.  Yes it needs to appear, but not several times.  It is best if it appears in a title tag near the top of the page keyword . 2.  Keyword tags only tell your competitors what keywords you are targetting.  They have no weight for search engines anymore.  Title tags and description tags help with click through rate(CTR).  When a user sees a compelling title with a good description in the search results, they click.  Titles have some weight on SEO. 3.  Internal linking will help, but make sure they make sense to the user and are not just there for the search engines.  It's pointless to have a website that only makes sense to a search engine and confuses the people who find it via the search engine.

That's a good point.

from a HTML point of view i think you should never use "&", it should always be "&".

I didn't think there were any issues with the  blog being crawled. I'm not seeing any errors in webmaster tools, and I'm def not doing anything tricky on the server side. I don't even go near that stuff for fear of breaking summat. Really appreciate your help Barry. All the best,7 Pete

Hey Letty If I request the full link in webbug I get a 200 okay response. http://www.zylom.com/nl/help/contact/9/?sid=9&e=login If I request the link less the variables in webbug I get the 404 as reported by the moz crawler. http://www.zylom.com/nl/help/contact/9/ I would go into analytics, check to see which pages you have 404's for if it is just  '/nl/help/contact/9/' then I don't think you have a problem. I think nofollow would be a good solution and if we look at part of the nofollow page on google webmaster support: "Before nofollow was used on individual links, preventing robots from following individual links on a page required a great deal of effort (for example, redirecting the link to a URL blocked in robots.txt). That's why the nofollow attribute value of the rel attribute was created. This gives webmasters more granular control: instead of telling search engines and bots not to follow any links on the page, it lets you easily instruct robots not to crawl a specific link. For example:" Now, I am not 100% sure if the seomoz crawler respects nofollows (I would imagine it does) but certainly, if other robots are following this link and generating 404's (again, head into your analytics to get a handle on this) then it will certainly help there. After all, this link is not for robots, it is not to be indexed, it is just a log in form for users so nofollowing that link seems to make perfect sense. Hope that helps! Marcus References: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=96569

You don't have to worry about this.

It's hard to say without looking at the URLs. You can either PM or post here so that you can have more concrete answer to this problem. If both sites are needed for users, only one of them should be served to the BOTS, so decide the one you need indexed in the Search Engines and then you can do a cross domain canonical from one website to another if that makes sense. I hope this helps. I can clarify further based on the URLs current situation.

Hi Neil, Yes, Google does look at the footer and they actually look in the footer for spammy links. Heres a video for internal linking footers etc.. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/internal-linking-strategies-for-2012-and-beyond Hope this helps.

Hi Dan, So glad to help. Do hang onto the idea of putting schema encoded NAP in your footer - it's kind of Local SEO 101 to do so. If, for some reason, it would be easier to put it up in your masthead or in a sitewide nav bar, that would be a good substitute.

Okay after some research the only thing that I have found that has changed since the 23rd is an increase in missing meta descriptions, around 700 of them. Could that impact SERPs

This was what I was looking for! The pages are indexed by Google, yes, but they aren't being crawled by the Googlebot (as my Webmaster Tool and the Matt Cutts Video is telling me), but they are occasionally being crawled by the Rogerbot probably (not monthly). Thank you very much!

If they can't track their current site, then you are right, they don't care enough. Good thing they can't get what they want, because if it were that easy to de-list a site without having any back end access to it,  then competitors would be doing it to each other non-stop. If they refuse to make contact then they get to have everything working against them. If you can make contact, then the action items Matt suggested are the next steps. Good luck with them as a client

Thank you for your input. We remain lost on all of this. I guess the only option we have is to shut the domain name down, get a new one, and start over. It is a shame as we have been using that domain for years and have enjoyed page 1 rankings for years. Our organic traffic has dropped from about 1000 per day to as little as 1... yes 1. As have asked SEO companies, staff, even Adwords who did go out of their way to see what is happening with no solution. I guess Google is not trustworthy... and a company ought not to waste 1 red cent on SEO as in a twinkling of an eye... they, Google, can toss you under the bus.

Hi! Just a quick note that a deep analysis of a website, especially with regards to penalties, is something that people usually are charged for. We do have a generous community here at SEOmoz, but be aware that you are asking for something that many of the people in Q&A would charge several hundred dollars to answer. You might want to visit http://www.mytrafficdropped.com/ for a lot of information that can help you determine if you have a penalty, if it was Panda or Penguin, etc. and that's all for free.

I agree with Doug - I would never have the H1 containing a logo. It should include 3-5 words that are you main targeted keywords/phrase for that page. (Be it company name, blog name, what you are offering etc) Change the template so the logo isn't inside a H1 tag. I think nearly every SEOer would agree with this.