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Dr. Pete doesn't cover case (though it's mentioned in the comments), but just about everything else you might want to know about duplicate content is talked about at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-in-a-post-panda-world, including ways to remedy it. It sounds like you've got a plan here, but I'm also adding it for the benefit of others looking at this thread.

Never tried the geotag, I will give it a shot. I am redesigning the HTML format, to try and better fit it into Panda's regulations. So, if it looks a bit "wonky", that is why. I appreciate the advice. I still don't know why it plummeted down so fast, but I will certainly implement your techniques. Lastly, another tidbit of info, I performed a lot of social bookmarking and other forms of link building in August, September, October...  I have yet to see ANY backlinks from the work I have done on SEO Moz or in any other 3rd party tool. Don't know if that sheds any light on anything

In my clothing retail e-commerce experience, I had much the same issues. Most people tend to search more refined than just a brand name, and men's or women's is a pretty basic distinguisher. That said, I'd do a couple things: 1) figure out what keywords you want to target and make sure your copy's robust and 2) linkbuild. Especially with luxury brands, there are tons of fashion blogs to partner with, and it's pretty amazing what you can get by sending someone an article of clothing.

Did you end up removing the rel=canonical tag? I don't see it in your source. If you did, that is the right move. Canonical link tag should be used as a last resort. And should only really be used if you are currently having canonical issues or the CMS/cart you are using is known to have these problems. Ideally canonical problems should be fixed from a technical standpoint first.

The best way is to make sure you have a alt tag, and use the imageobject schema to mark it up. http://schema.org/ImageObject

thanks for that, i will try that now. i am getting different results for my site speed www.in2town.co.uk and would be grateful if people could put the site speed here so i can see real results

Thanks a lot for all your responses, they have been of great value. I'm getting the info about the keyword behaviour from Seomozpro campaign. The same keyword has gone up 10 positions this week without doing anything, so it's quite strange this going-down-going-up without any aparent reason... Maybe it's going up to its previous position? Let's see.. Thanks a lot for all your help!

Don't forget Google only allows three ads per page. It looks as if you may have more than that.

Thin content is something penalized by Google's Panda, and to avoid it, definitely use James' suggestions depending on what you want from your site.

Thanks for your reply, Alan. I also considered a screen scraper removing the canonical tag, but to me screen scraping seemed lazy in the first place and so maybe they wouldn't bother in most cases. I guess that a best practice with canonicals is really situation dependent.

It should be the same, I believe this was to avoid giving you a link, but i have noticed lately that many links like this are being picked up in WMT. If you find it in WMT you can say its the same value.

The reason that your site's not being indexed is because your robots.txt file is blocking (see: disallow) bots from searching it.

Yes, adding canonical tags will help. Or just 301-ing the other URLs to the SEO-friendly one.

Can I just make a generic comment. Webmasters 'can't understand" it when a site goes from from, say 1st to 5th and consider that something must be wrong. Yet are not surprised when a site goes from 5th to 1st. I don't get it!

What CMS is the site using rich snippets ? I am thinking along the lines of finding a plugin or contribution that will bring rich snippets setup 100% correctly. Perhaps it is implemented incorrectly. Maybe drop the URL on here and I can take a look.

Hello Vlevit, You could do several things. I recommend giving Google your product feed, which should accomplish your goals. Another possible solution would be to make those search pages noindex,follow so they don't end up getting indexed, but Google can still use them for discovery. Thanks for explaining the situation. Below is more on submitting product feeds. It is for Google Product Search, but I would imagine the "link" field where you put the URL to your product detail page will help those pages get indexed in the standard results: http://support.google.com/merchants/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=188494#US Everett

I'd give it a month before you'll see that bounce back. I wouldn't expect the same rankings as before as Google will be reevaluating your pages, but you should have a pick up in traffic.

In my experience I have been pleasently surprised by the performance of sub domains. I have a blog sub domain that has the same page rank 4 as the main site. So performed really well.

Hello and thank you for your quick response!  She'll be happy to hear it and I'll be sure to 301 each page from the migrated site to the new one. I appreciate your help!