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Overnight we dropped completely off the rankings.  I have no idea what happened.  I was excited we were doing so well the past 60 days and ranked for many keywords and long tails.   This morning we disappeared from 100% of the rankings.

Hello Robert. There seems to be a lot of reshuffling going on right now. The old 80-20 rules still seem to apply. - 20% of the things you can do, account for 80% of the reasons for ranking well - or not. Take this with a pinch of salt, because I don't have proof. It is really a conversation starter. While not wanting to have a spammy title is a laudable goal, it is possible it was not only OK, because of the domain name and the name of the site, and its theme - but also the main reason it was ranking so well. One thing you could try is to add back the domain name in one or two of the previously best-performing pages and see what happens. See if you can get a couple of new links into them, from a couple of busy (relevant) sites, and maybe a couple of social signals, to prompt the crawler to revisit quickly.

Also, I suggest you read this article about what to do with Google Places: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/why-you-may-need-to-hide-your-google-places-address-asap The essence is that if you want to expand your local reach, you might have to hide the address in Google local results (as plumbers usually visit their customers and not the other way round).

Hi Jen, Thanks for the reply. That would be useful, social seems like a big area now for SEO and I think maybe even some SEOmoz input on the subject would be great. 1. Best practises for getting the most out of your social pages (facebook, twitter, plus1) and these types of articles.

Hi kchan, thanks for your reply. No, it was the homepage.that was the ranking page. GWT reported a drop in traffic warning but nothing else. Hard to see how this site could have been caught up as over optimised, as no SEO ever carried out!

OK thanks Alan. I used OSE and just sorted pages with links and set up 301's and will let the rest 404.

Hi! You can find info about adding it to your page asynchronously here: https://developers.google.com/+/plugins/badge/.

I'd also recommend checking out the SEOmoz articles on Link Building to give you some ideas http://www.seomoz.org/blog/category/4.

Hi, Ok, I will follow your advise. Thank you!

Yes I have read this thank you we just did both 301 and canonical. Do you think this is fine? using both? or can it hurt our current SERP results?

Can you give us the name of the hosting company by chance?

It is a do-follow link, and the page has good PR.  That's a nice link to have in the portfolio.  Not only for the juice, but because you may also get good traffic from it.

Hi, Please forgive my ignorance: in the case you have illustrated, I will not have to delete the old page, right? I simply have to copy a page from the old site, add a 301 redirect, and then paste the page in the new site? Please confirm this. Thank you.

yea. i would target the entire site for the hardest term and create an inner page(s) for the town term and county and optimize them well. it it's not a huge town you should have success, in the town page you can list surrounding towns and in the county page you can list surrounding counties. add a map and any other local related info you can think of that makes sense, the pages will need content. highflightdesign.com/yourtown-state highflightdesign.com/yourcounty-state

Are you seeing the images getting indexed, though? Even if GWT recognize the Robots.txt directives, blocking the pages may essentially keep the images from having any ranking value. Like Matt, I'm not sure this will work in practice. Another option would be to create an alternate path to just the images, like an HTML sitemap with just links to those images and decent anchor text. The ranking power still wouldn't be great (you'd have a lot of links on this page, most likely), but it would at least kick the crawlers a bit.

yes, thanks for the follow up. I have already done that and am awaiting results. thanks again