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I hate to advocate full-scale blocking, but if you really took a hit, and you know the timeline coincided with the new content, it is possible. It might be better to scale back and re-roll out new content in chunks. One warning - if this is a regular filter (you added a bunch of duplicates), Google should start re-ranking content as soon as the blocking kicks in (this may take weeks, not days). If this was Panda-related or more severe, though, it could take a month or more to see an impact. Not to be the bearer of bad news, but don't Robots.txt block the pages for 2 days, decide it didn't work, and unblock them. A slightly less extreme approach would be to META NOINDEX all of the pages. That way, you could start to selectively lift the NOINDEX on content piece by piece. If you Robots.txt block all the new directories, it's going to be hard to re-introduce the content. You'll end up releasing the block all at once and potentially just having the same problem again.

100 links sets off the "too many links" warning. I'm not sure if the Add This app links are nofollow or not. Read Dr Pete's post on Too Many Links and what this means and what matters for you.

Try to focus more on those competitors who don't have an exact match domain, it's much harder to rank when your URL does not contain at least a partial match. Google still puts a lot of weight on exact match domains.  I would focus more on creating valuable content and post them on your site or use websites like Reddit, Digg or StumbleUpon to get the word out. Put a snippet on those sites and the rest of the article on yours. In addition, if you can share it with minded-like people, such as through Facebook, I'm sure that will improve the results. Try googling with industry-relevant keywords and advanced search operators to find sites that Google itself currently sees as authoritative, which are also publishing guest articles, then try submitting your articles to them if your website doesn't attract to many people.

Have you considered Expression Engine? Might be worth considering.

I know that link wheels and such like this are pretty popular right now and have been for a few years or so, and personally I think if it is done in a fashion that is genuinely helpful to the end user in finding relevant information about the subject in question then Search Engines will probably see this as well. But I think, with newer algorithm updates footprints left by tactics like this are looked at and scrutinized more for this type of activity as "manipulatory" or Engineered to Manipulate even if they may not be that in reality. It is a tactic in my opinion that should be employed, but employed for referential purposes and not engineered just to pass the most amount of rank and not always self serving. w00t! Shane

Thank you for your excellent response, Alan. Reviewing my post, I did not explain the situation 100% accurately. Rather than integrating all our shops, in fact we would just be taking one of the shops we run, our main site, and wondering whether to consolidate with two new shops running on two new domains (these domains being excellent keywords). An important point is that we changed the name of the site and domain name mid-2011, to a more international name. At first this clearly had an effect on our Google ranking, although having just had the best Christmas sales ever, we feel this has succeeded. (301 redirects were set up) It would appear that the decision whether or not to integrate now to a unified domain would be affected by this fact. The name of our current main site would not be suitable as an umbrella term for all.

I'm not a expert on the SEO-bit, but generally i wouldn't bother with it. You have existing domains that work well, you have site(s) that's known in your market-segment and a well-known brand. In my opinion it won't do you any good to use http://a.brand instead of http://brand.com . .com-domains and national TLDs are well known amongst the users of the internet, new things/weird domains tend to scare people. But if you/your company can afford to get a gTLD for your brand it would probably be a nice thing to just have "lying around" just in case. But i wouldn't bother spending a lot of work on it. Edit: Checked your company, seeing that it's a furniture-company i wouldn't bother with it at all. Your customer-base seems to be "all the people". "All the people" are usually happy as long as they can find your-company.com/.no and so on. OT: Nice to see more norwegians in here. Hi!

I agree with Robert on all points. A few other thoughts..... If your customers are "creatures of habit"... who visit once every six weeks, buy the same items and leave then I would not be changing homepage very much - at least not the parts that these people use.   I might have a few items that rotate and I would do that with server-side includes that are rewritten by a perl script. If you have lots of repeat customers who visit and buy diverse things then a homepage with more activity might make sense.  However, if most of your repeat visitors arrive once a month or even once a week then changing homepage daily is quite a lot.

Hi Robert, Thanks for your reply. Website budget and SEO budget are both an issue and so the sub directories route is definitely the way that we will be going with a .org domain. Thanks again. Ade.

As long as you replace the flash with substantive relevant content and link to the homepage from other internal pages or outside sources, there is no reason the page should not be re-ranked (based on the new content, overall authority of the site through other content and backlinking, etc.) It was not likely that this was a penalty, just a drop in any searchable ranking as a response to a lack of content on the page and therefore, there was nothing in which to rank the page for any particular keyword or authority by Google.

The answer for all major search engines is no. There are some third party crawlers that have been created that do accept cookies. If you are using a site crawler to examine your site you might want to check to see if there is a cookie recognition function in the algo. Usually you can select to accept or ignore cookies though an internal site crawl but Google and Bing do not accept them.

Thanks, guys! Both of your answers are right in line with my suspicions. I think at the end of the day, I'm going to opt for one domain, one URL-set, different wrappers, and canonical tags just in case the crawler ever wriggles its way through the pay wall... which, given callbacks to server-side user data, should be impossible. Thanks again, -m

Your are most welcome, DigiJoltMan! And yes, quite true about the proverbial eggs and basket!