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Just to update people on this topiuc and what has changed / not changed My URL is http://www.grangewebdesign.com and target keywords are website design Cork, web design Cork and Cork before each of these as well as that is the city I live in I made some subtle change to the address (removed the area I was on as Google Maps did not recognise the actual area and now it matches the people above me. I made sure my content was solid on the page and guess what For the search terms website design Cork where I was 5th on the Google Places list I am now on page 2 For the search terms web design Cork where I was bottom of Page 1 for SERPs I am now on Page 3 Time for a stiff drink.  But really I have really worked hard on this and now it seems I am doing more damage than good..

I agree I went too far. I was trying to edit the comment myself after posting it, but the edit link was broken. Sorry for my lack of control there... I think my reaction was because based on this "go google it yourself" style of answer, and since he has a high forum authority, it looked like he was trolling for Mozpoints by answering questions without really answering them. (Think Ehow.com). Again, sorry for the rudeness.

Great advice from Matt and Aaron - also make sure you have no duplicates. Two listings for the same business means you lose trust. All the citation stuff Matt is on about is Trust - show Google your listing is for a relevant, functioning business and you will make it in the local results. Also try getting your business listed on the sites recommended on http://getlisted.org/

Yeah, it's been generally positive. I'd always used elance in the past, although that was primarily for development tasks, so moving to oDesk was a bit of a worry at first. If you do a time-based project you're at relatively low risk as you get screenshots every few minutes of what your staff are working on. (ie. If they're looking at YouTube videos you'll be able to see and refuse to pay them). A lot of people will offer services for very little outlay so it's worth spending time investigating their feedback and interviewing candidates properly. I generally keep it quite informal and just try to work out if the person I'm talking to is able to string a sentence together and have a bit of banter. If they are I'll give them a week's trial limited to 10 hours or so and see what the results are like. Virtual assistants are really low risk as the outlay is so low... at worst you lose $30 and at best you find someone that will work with you for the next year or two doing all the tasks that you don't have the time or inclination to do yourself. In the past I've always done the outreach part of a link building task myself, although there are those that take the view that it's possible to outsource this effecively so I'm giving it a try at the moment. Will most likely YouMoz how I get on at some point Matt

Thanks Steve. That clears things up for us. It would be great if the backlinks were indeed the cause of the drop but unfortunately now we have to keep on searching for an other answer

Those are commends added to the code. My site has is part of the effort to rid the internet of IE6 browsers. You can read more about it http://www.theie6countdown.com/join-us.html. There is a simple script placed in the site which detects IE 6 & 7 browsers and asks users to update their software. TYNT is a SEO tool http://www.tynt.com/. It allows webmasters to track any information which is copied and pasted from their site. It creates links back to the site, and tracks all activity on those links. Both of those scripts are working normally and neither should negatively impact crawls. My Google WMT show my site being crawled normally, no errors. I have multiple pages ranked #1. With that said, there are plenty of opportunities for me to improve, which is why I am here. The position of the Title and meta tags within the head should not be a factor at all. I did hear Matt Cutts share once that webmasters could move the information to the top to help if there are other issues such as a page where the tag is not properly closed, but that is not really relevant in this case.

Yes! I just noticed that now too, I'll have dev get this fixed asap. Thanks

Quite correct.  I unfortunately assumed that everyone already knows this bit of information.

It depends on how long it will be before the new content is up -if it's a couple days, might as well leave it.  If it's weeks or longer, it's best to change them, though honestly making the change one way or another at this point is not necessarily going to move the site in any significant way - it's difficult to judge how much, if at all.

Thanks. I'll give it some time.

In my experience you see exact match domains ranking higher than they "should" all the time. I have talked to another SEO who prefers to go with an exact match over a brand name almost every time.

For one, do not use rel=nofollow on any internal links. Matt Cutts has said this in the plainest of language. Don't do it. PageRank sculpting like this does not work. What you describe is true. If your home page has a certain amount of link juice, the more pages in your site and the more links per page will diminish the amount of link juice each page receives, at least from your own pages. You can increase the amount of pagerank of any page with external links. At the end of the day the way you try to funnel around pagerank on your site is almost entirely meaningless. Unless you have a ton of pagerank, you will put in a lot of work redoing your architecture for nothing. Think of your users first and what makes the best user experience. That's the most important. From there, simply get some external links to your most important pages. That's what I would recommend for this.

Thanks!  What I meant by "hurting progress so far" was that some of these pages are highly ranked and we are trying to improve their ranking further by changing from dynamic (?page=) to static addresses without hurting the ranks--since the whole point is to improve the ranks.