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You need to diversify your anchor text.  Only 10-20% of your links should have exact match anchor text in them, and of your 180 domains you have 50 with "unlocked cell phones."  Plus, you have almost no benign links such as "click here" or "website."  If you want to get rid of the penalty you need to either start building links, or start changing the anchor text on the ones you have.

We strongly suspect that canonical tags lose a portion of link "juice" just like 301s do. Otherwise, they could be abused.

I'd first get a better definition of "top performing" SEO keywords. The ones that get the most visits? The ones that rank highest? The ones that get the most conversions? The ones that drive the highest-priced sales?

Have you logged into Google Webmaster Tools and looked for any notices? Having a duplicate website isn't a great thing, but let's make sure that there's also not some other cause. Was anything done to the code of the site? Any robots.txt or meta robots changed? Are you still fine in Bing/Yahoo?

The problem is that the domains have been online for years and they are all .com domains. So we will need to start fresh with new ccTLD domains. Also, for the duplicate content problem, UK and US would be considered as duplicate content as both are in English, unless we create content for each website. Thank you for your help Istvan.

Are you using category description for anything? If not, you can write title you want in category description, and then use %category_description% in title.

HI Bankim Google will allow you to remove your own pages. Here is some help with that.. Also what we do with our test sites is lock them down with .htaccess and .htpasswd by requiring a login you will never have to worry about any crawler indexing your test environment and thus worry about duplicate content when you go live.

I don't know why they would outrank but the simplest solution would be to add the hreflang tags to make each search engine see the right domain - that should give /uk a better ranking on google.co.uk and /es rank better on Google.es Getting the correct hreflang setup should help you on all the different Google variations.

Thanks for the reply Takeshi.  If i search site:www.cbuy.tv there are pages indexed with the #!.  We are in the middle of a fix that should increase the number of indexed pages though. I'm still confused about google image directing to the escaped fragment version instead of the #! version.  If you search site:www.cbuy.tv in google images you will notice this issue.

I would expect if he used the redirect domain function in google webmaster tools it would minimise this.

Yes, I misread your post. Best, Christopher

I don't need them. The client has them and I wanted to get a consensus before I suggested that they rip them down.

We put rel=canonical on it.  Now there are several other reasons that we have way to many pages indexed.  Big project coming soon, I hope!

yep - so if you have a service location in Dallas, TX, and the location-specific page on your site for that location has a URL of www.YourDomain.com/dallas-cleaning-services (using your cleaning example from earlier) you'd then have the URL for that Places/+ Local listing use that specific URL

Agreed - this is generally an issue with relative paths, and job one is to fix it. In most cases, you really don't want these crawled at all. I do think rel=canonical is a good bet here - 301 redirects can get really tricky with http/https, and you can end up creating loops. It can be done right, but it's also easy to screw up, in my experience.

thanks. Marc. interesting links. Still my doubt remains. If I have two synonyms which are both very important key terms, would you build 2 seperate optimized pages? I see that google is getting better at recognizing synonyms in some occasions, but still detection does not seem very consistent.

Hey Search Guys - it's been a while since you posted your question. Did you get the answers you needed or can you give us further clarification of what you're still needing help with? If you did get the answers you needed, could you mark as  "Good Answer" whichever answers you found most helpful and mark the overall question as answered? This will help other users who may come across the question in the future. Thanks! Paul