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Great, that could be it, thanks so much for the response,

Very difficult to contact/remove these links - I starting to think it would be easier to start again...

Thanks Seowoody, will give it a try!

aamato, I don't know how many you had up or how large they are and that would be helpful. Assuming they are smaller there are two things that will help. First, resubmit the sitemaps to Google. In that way you are letting them know you are up and going. If they are smaller and if you are familiar with Webmaster Tools (WMT), go into WMT and Fetch each url as Google. (per site you can only do up to 1000 per month, but I would not do if sites are hundreds of pages except for home page, etc.) I have attached a screen shot of the WMT Dashboard, note that Fetch as Google is under Health. If you have any problems, here is a help link. Once you are recrawled, you should start to see your rankings rising. Obviously, if you have lost traffic over the time you were down, it will take longer. Hope that helps, Robert LMMrBCV.png?1

Hi Grant.  I might be interested in this  I work on my own as a freelancer. I have to say though that I would never advertise myself as a link builder  though. I view SEO holistically and work on creating content that earns links and also I recommend (and build) a strong social media presence.. If you are interested drop me an email jo@socialitesos.com. More than happy to have a Skype call to run through the details with you. Cheers Jo

Agreed, for confirmation, look at the core.js file linked in the code.

Alan, I cannot think of an answer I have seen recently with the clarity of thought and ability to refute a very bad practice. (Especially on a security level). One thing we do with clients and upgrades (we do not handle clients on other peoples platforms) is to take a new update, give it a few weeks for bugs to be discovered and then do the upgrade on our end. We have clients sign off on us handling the upgrades, etc. from the beginning of the relationship. For Erik I would suggest showing the client what has been said by someone with a lot of savvy experience. If the devs are worth their salt, they will change. This was a good question and Alan delivered a great answer. Robert

I don't believe this is an ad. This seems to work on a number of sites I've looked at, including CNN, Fox News, and Search Engine Land (but not SEOMoz). I took a look at the Open Graph tags for the sites, but didn't see anything out of the ordinary, and I haven't been able to replicate it with my site. Definitely something to keep an eye out for.

Again, if you are working on an existing site, see what people are using to link to you already, and go with the one people are using more. If it's a brand new site, go with whatever you feel is best, just be sure to be consistent and ensure that external sites are using your chose url structure.

thanks marie - thats what i needed to hear

Thanks Dave! Here are my settings: Categories - noindex, follow Tags - noindex, follow Format - noindex, follow Author Archives - noindex, follow and disable author archives Date Archives - noindex, follow and disable the date-based archives Media - noindex, follow

Thank you Irving and Matt, The previous companies were removed but their names and emails still exist in the history (they were given an Owner authority). Is there a way to remove them from there? Also, what authority should a company be given? Thanks

Thanks, Irving! I am trying turning on/off the plugins - the person who designed the site used a WP Boxer plugin and Multiple Content Blocks plugin, and that is how the homepage is designed (feeding info from pages/posts) so I was wondering if that could be part of it...but when I turn them off/on that doesn't seem to help. So I'm trying the other plugins too (there are just a couple), and if that doesn't work, I'll try a fresh install! I also tried changing the permalink structure to just /sample-post/ and that didn't seem to work either...but I'm going to keep working on it! I haven't tried the Twitter approach yet - because I don't actually have a Twitter account (I'm trying to keep social media from taking over my life) - but if that's where the answers are, I guess I need to get on there!

Might sound like a silly question, but did you set up a WMT account and verify the site? Doing so tells Google to crawl your site ASAP. If you don't have any links to your site, then simply opening it up to the world isn't enough for Google to come along, you need to tell Google you exist.

Thanks Ben - much appreciated!

I think you will find this post by DR Pete helpful, as I know I did in the past - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/why-wont-google-use-my-meta-description