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Thank you all, this is brilliant.

Thank you Geoff, that makes sense to me... I will try to pursue what you are suggesting. Thanks you again! All the best, Fab.

Sweet, thanks for the reply!

Thanks for the great replies all.  Just to clarify, this is the page we're referencing: http://www.knackhq.com/business-directory-user-demo/?escaped_fragment= You can see the one pagination var "next" that points here: http://www.knackhq.com/business-directory-user-demo/?escaped_fragment=home/?view_3_page=2 As you can see this is pretty simple.  There's only one potential variable (the "prev" and "next" links) for introducing these huge numbers and that's pretty limited.  We tested the Google URLs up and down the app and haven't seen anything that would send it fishing for larger numbers.  But Google keeps hammering us with: GET /business-directory-user-demo/?escaped_fragment=home/?view_3_page=1000251 For now we're trying to respond to those with 404s and hope they eventually die. Unfortunately we can't avoid hashbangs.

Hi Joseph, This is definitely not the ideal scenario.  If the two brands are targeting separate markets, why would the copy need to be the same?  Your two options would be to change the copy on one of the sites, or just redirect one to the site that is currently performing better. Hope this helps, Chris Wilson

Thank you Tuzzel, I will take a closer look at the article, there might be some ideas there. We have looked at the authorship options, but as you say. It's not what I'm looking for.  Thank you

Bryan, If you go to google's cached version of one of those and don't see a title or description in the source code then for sure google isn't seeing it.   In that case, Google will create it's own meta date for the page based on the page's content.  While this isn't actually  the worst case scenario, (creating bad meta data yourself would be the worse case), it means that you're giving control of that data to the search engines and not being specific in what you want the page to rank for or how you want to present the snippet to the visitor.

D.D. I had a feeling re the .htaccess piece, so glad to hear things improved. I can tell you that with both Rackspace and Firehost I have had very very good experiences and would recommend either heartily. I did find your company interesting and I wish you the very best going forward.  Robert

Cheers Tom. Exactly the answer I needed!

"If it aint broke...."  Hard to argue against that!    I'd test removing it on a category though... I'm like that I'm off to do some window shopping then.

Hi Remus & Kurt, Thank you for your advise. Mark

Okay, thanks Alan!

It would seem like you are creating a giant web of backlinks that you really have no control over. Especially, if they are pushed down the post by other comments and if they are short lived what is the point because they do not generate any traffic to your site? What happens if one of the sites you are building the links to, in order to increase your own backlink value, suddenly goes spammy or something happens and they are penalized? If these sites let you build links easily without using a "no follow" then they let everybody and could eventually attract unwanted attention that might result in a penalty. How soon Google figures this out is based on your total link profile and whether the links are to sites that are relevant to yours. I agree with T & R above and this type of tactic seems like something Google would catch on to eventually, if it has not already. It is my understanding that the Google/Bing search bots can differentiate between high quality links and links from forums and other low quality sites. If so, the secondary links you are trying to build are not being given as much value as you might think. Time spent pursuing ways to skirt the algorithm is time wasted that could have been spent developing the other high ranking backlinks.

And the legend grows.......

Let's say you have a travel site.  Information only.  You have dozens of articles about New Zealand destinations and you get your best images, shrink them down to common size thumbnail, place a few words beneath each.  I bet that page will have a kickass CTR. Maybe you have a site about Czech glass, with articles about the many different types.  A huge page of images with a few words beneath each would be kickass for generating pageviews. People really like images and if you have superior images I think that this will generate a lot of action on your site. Doing this in a small way (but scaling across the entire web) are the content advertising from Taboola and Outbrain.... (also the merchandising activities for goofy products uses the outlandish image to generate clicks)

This will be part of my webinar today on SEO for Madcap Flare. Here's a sample project to show how we were able to make a more crawlable webhelp: http://flarestrap.com/. I've put a demo of the output there and have a sample Flare project for download.

This is perfect! Thank you so much.

As you said blogs setup for different geo locations. Would it serve purpose if you redirect all of them to a single website/blog? I mean they must been for varied geographic targets. I case you are contemplating to discontinue all of them and redirect them to one so that you can focus all your efforts at a single place then it can be a good idea but make sure you redirect (map) specific pages/posts to the corresponding new pages. Simply redirecting all the domains to a single domain will not help much. You should keep in mind the user comfort as well. Regards

Check their analytics, see how far they've fallen. Monitor the rankings first and study it. If you see dancing URL's (changing urls, dropping to 50-200 then to the original ranking) etc then that's an obvious penalty. You might want to start with cleaning out and ironing out the existing links, try to improve those. Get new strong links, all the while analysing and creating a spreadsheet for the bad links to submit. Since this is local, it might just be because of the local changes, the business listings ,etc that hurt their visibility. You might want to optimise their local seo process + links first and see if they improve. If they do, then that makes things easier.