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Hi! We're going through older questions that are marked unanswered. Since it's been a few months, I'm wondering if you've recovered, or figured out why your rankings dropped, and if you have any insights to share with us. Thanks!

Thank you once again. I will get in touch with you. Please PM your contact details. We are located in downtown Manhattan.

I'd also updated a clients listings which meant dropping about 1000 pages of older content That is clearly a large change which should have been mentioned up front. When you drop a page from your site, you will of course lose any traffic that page generated. Even if those pages were low traffic pages, they did generate some traffic. When you say the old content was replaced by fresh content, exactly how was this change done? If you have a page named "homes currently for sale" and you update that page with new information, the URL remains the same, the backlinks remain and the overall effects should be positive. Even a normal change such as this one could have a negative impact on traffic though in a corner case such as you listed a popular address or area before, the house sold and was replaced by less popular listings. There is a lot of analytical data to analyze. How much traffic were the old pages generating vs the new pages which replaced them. How many back links did the old pages have pointing to them? Were all these pages properly redirected? With respect to links, if your client has money to spend use it on other methods of traffic generation. Pay for high quality content to be created. Pay for advertising. Pay to be entered into the couple of directories that actually make a difference. Pay for A/B testing of the site's pages. Don't pay for junk directory submissions.

I figured out the root issue. The site's facebook page had an Age Rating of "alcohol related". It seems if you have any age setting other then "13+" then the page is not publicly visible unless you are logged in to facebook. Mystery solved. Thanks to all for sharing your ideas.

If all /home directories should be removed, and they all correlate directly to the same URL without the /home then the best means to correct the issue would be a single regex expression to redirect the URLs. Once you add the redirect Google's index should be cleaned up in about 30 days.

I was afraid it would be in the technical area instead of a magical button solving my problems. I'm not exactly sure how I am doing the redirect, however I do believe it is ASP so I will give it a try. Thanks for the Answer!

You could do that too. The win/win is to always try and do something that's also of high value to the user and good for the search engines at the same time.  As long as its of value to someone visiting the site, go for it!

This is something a lot of websites do and something the crawlers can recognise. If you have say, a 150 word block that's the same on every page, and 400+ words of unique content elsewhere, you won't have any problems at all. There's no particular science to those numbers by the way, I'm just pulling them out of the air - but there's a helpful quote below from here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/beat-google-panda Here at SEOmoz, our PRO platform uses a 95% threshold to judge duplicate content. This means if 95% of all the code on your page matches another page, then it’s flagged as a duplicate. To check your own ratios, try this nifty duplicate content tool. What you suggest in the last paragraph is cloaking. You need to be very careful when you're serving different versions of the same page to crawlers and users.

Hey Justin, Basically the bots follow the links so it might follow example.com and example.com/index.html once it get to your actual page it then reads the canonical tag which indicates which version is the correct version to use. Hope that helps

Depends what type of website you have is it a brand then I would opt for a .com domain if it is a more fun style site then go for the .net. to be honest do not worry a whole heap about keyword rich domains and domain buying if the numbers are close.

very good and well thought out answer.

yes it really does help thanks and I will definately try your suggestion regarding the list title. btw shared your page on twitter

Thanks John