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Hi Tom, Thanks again for your valuable reply, I appreciate it. if you consider those 1 page links from extremely related & trusted websites as "Low quality" links then I don't know what a good link is. However, those links you mentioned are links from partners we work with and none of them are sitewide, it doesn't violate TOS in any sort of way and those links are also bringing us relevant and converting traffic, regardless of SEO. the blogohblog you first mentioned is indeed a terrible mistake and it's under investigation. If you will check closely you will also see that we do not try to "push" any specific anchor our anchors are mostly general/related to the text anchors. This edu link comment you gave is worthless, i have no idea who put it there but in no way it should harm our website. Even with the blogperfume bug and the blogohblog mistake I honestly don't think we deserve any sort of slapping from google or our brand name to disappear so I think it is something else.

Teehee, being a bounce board sounds fun. I think you're right to err on the side of caution with regards to confessing and repenting to Google as well, but that's just me being a sceptic.

Thank you very much for the quick response, I will take a look at that solution

Can anyone recommend or offer to assist me with this project? I'm understand the model Darin has proposed and would like to find that 30,000 ft specialist who can review my site, analytics, Google Webmaster and offer a priority list for any on page changes and then get a proven link building specialist involved. Makes sense to me but still would like a more experienced SEO driving the charge vs. me guessing what to do next. Link

These pages are extremely light on the content, and they have barely any search traffic, if any. A user reaches these pages by clicking on a call-to-action button (contact us, or get a quote, or make an offer). The resulting URL would pass through dynamic url parameters from the previous page, but the content on the page itself consists only of a form to fill out and one paragraph. Though that one paragraph would have different text depending on which call-to-action button they clicked on, it's entirely the same in structure and code, with the exception of the parameter-laced URL. We're still keeping the call-to-action buttons, but our developers are changing the form structure so there are not hundreds of these pages that are duplicate content. It's going to be a vast improvement for the user. Thank you for all of your suggestions. I'll definitely use them in the future if we decide to re-purpose pages on our websites.

You should be fine, Bankim. You've implemented a rel=canonical solution on your website, which will tell Google that you are the originator of this content.  Anyone who scrapes your site as a result will be seen as Google as just that, a scraper, and won't be providing original content.  Plus, the meta description is not the biggest ranking factor out there - does have a slight influence, but not a big amount. I can't say you'd have anything to worry about over a website that scrapes your meta descriptions and even leaves in your brand name.  I mean, seriously? That's just lazy from the other website! I would say though that your meta descriptions do look very long, over 270 characters in some cases.  The general consensus is that 155 characters (with spaces) is the maximum length you should use, as anything more than that will not show up underneath your search results. Also, 270 characters you might be seen as keyword stuffing, so I'd recommend changing those descriptions into something more Google friendly. Hope this helps!

Hi Sean, Thanks for your response. the urls' are different so i also thought this may be an issue. But from reading in the webmaster guidlines if the sites are targeting a different international audience google may recognise this and distribute pages accordingly to a local audience rather than penalise. I think the issue i have is that they are differnt url's and im concerned this maybe seen as duplication. So xyz.co.nz and abc.co.uk but both using the same content on 1,000+ pages. Id appreciate all input from anyone that reads or particularly anyone thats faced this scenario. Thanks Zak

Hi Mark Currently there isn't anything out there that will list a G+ profile by Author Rank specifically (or an estimation of one), but there are a couple of tools that might help. First is Author Crawler, which is best explained on the website. Second is FindPeopleOnPlus. This can let you search for profiles by keyword, industry they work in, job title and so on - as well as letting you sort by circle count. Naturally, one would assume that people with greater circle size might have a higher author rank, and then a quick google search for their name ("By First LastName") will show you if they regularly use author markup, which again would theoretically increase their author rank. Hope this helps.

I read somewhere that the meta keywords did matter for some search engines still like Yahoo but not for Google. Not sure where I read it...maybe I am mistaken though.

Good to hear you are already working on the search bar. Expandable categories on the samples page could be a very good alternative as well. Just test a few different options to find the best solution!

Agreed, I'd approach this as a custom acquisition and brand awareness project as well. Especially given that the website would have a short life span and SEO is a long term investment. If this was me I'd optimize the website for the competition name and use social networking to build awareness (ie. facebook, twitter, pinterest etc).

i did leave shortened url link at the top

I have the same problem with so of the sites I manage. Luckily the search engines have never found or indexed the duplicate url i.e. domain.com/secondsite. Have the search engines indexed it for you? If not is it really a problem? I have considered a 301 or robots.txt but due to it never being found/indexed I did not see the point.

I ran that but it only told me about what links the page had going out from it now coming in. After just checking tons of links I found it but for future reference I would still like a more efficient way.

It will help if I know what is it about? Is there no way to find out if its something to do with the link profile or  onpage issues ? another this type in web browsers and google itself is on 3rd page.

Your checkout and/or converting process is something that should always be optimised for mobile. I've seen on so many sites have a huge spike in drop-off rate, cart abandonment etc from mobile devices, just because the process has not been optimised for the devices. Make the form easy to fill out - increase text box sizes, scroll bars and other things if you need to.  If your industry requires quite a bit of detail in the form, this may not be enough.  For those cases, I've seen solutions that include providing a pop-up box allowing you to email the form to yourself, allowing you to fill it out a later date or when you're back on the PC.  This is a fairly easy thing to implement, simply make it trigger when it detects a user agent from a mobile device (iPhone, iPad, Android etc).

A few people have mentioned a refresh, supposed i'll have to wait and see.

Hi Jake, Thanks for the reminder, and I'm so sorry I didn't respond earlier. This had gotten overlooked in my inbox. The delay in response was my fault, not the fault of Miriam.

Thanks Cyrus, Well domain age is very important and the link clean up for up to 90% can be achieved by me. There could be a correlation between the huge rise in footer links by the CMS`s and the period of the ranking fall, that just coincides with the Penguin update, then got noticed. I really think that this could be the major cause of the problem. 13,000 footer links optimised for anchor texts in 6 months? Not a good sign. WMT is by far the most valuable tool for me as all is listed. Analytics show a 68% average drop in organic traffic...ouwch! In meant time I can boost my adwords budget and hope. Removing comment links? Just a case of contacting blog admins? *Shall I keep the highest page authority links and make real effort on the blog comments and less quality domain authority first? I surely must be able to have anchor text links....I see lots of sites still ranking well from text link pages only and very thin content. Cetainly no WMT messages from Google. I just dont have the time to build thousands of manual links.....and if I do for SERPs its surely for trying to improve ranking. We all know that good SEO is really about improving ranking, else why do it. ....its a bit of a contradiction by Google. NB. Have removed over 19,000 Links with unnatural anchor texts so thats a start!