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I have added it to the index page of a client because they requested it (a competitor started first). A few people have clicked it, but not enough to really justify it yet. Basically its on a trial period for them. I could see it being more useful for blogs, if the content is good people will click it, but I am not sure if they will share it on FB, Tweet it and THEN click +1. Seems to be a lot to ask.

But if you sell football boots and you manage to rank for a competitors brand name, but the landing page did not mention the competitor brand name but delivered lets say 10%Off promo code as a call to action then I cant see anything wrong with this? Unless im actually wrong and you cant do this!

They position themselves as person-based analytics.

Have just made some changes to the site now, removed the SEO box - do you think this is better? Yes. I understand you may use that method in many other sites. I would suggest to you it is a mistake and with each of those sites you run a large risk of incurring this same penalty. It was done in a clear attempt to manipulate search engine rankings. I am confident 10 out of 10 Google employees who look at the page would feel the same way, and that Google's algorithms either can or should be able to detect such manipulation. You seem like a savvy guy and I have to think you agree on some level. The change you made is a great adjustment. It keeps the content on the page but positions it in such a way that it is not hidden at all. With respect to the URL removal tool, 404s are a natural part of the internet. If you encounter that situation again, my recommendation is to ensure your 404 page is current and helpful. There should be a search box along with your site's navigation. I would also recommend 301'ing any pages where a similar page would exist on your site. The 404 pages would naturally fall out of SERPs within 30 days in most cases. I can't say which of these two issues with your site led to your current ranking drop. I can share that I would classify both as major mistakes and you have done everything possible to resolve these issues at this point. If the hidden text was the issue, which is more likely, then check your SERP each day for when the cache updates. Presently your cache is from Aug 17th. When it updates, that is a confirmation Google has crawled the page and hopefully your rankings should return. PS. Your HTML sitemap is helpful for your footer. The XML and TXT sitemaps are not helpful and are unnecessary. I would recommend removing those links as a best practice, but they are not in any way related to your ranking issue.

The comment was for irldonalb, asking for more information about how it could be said that it wouldn't happen again.

First thing first, where do you get that number from? is it from alexa ? or google analytics ? or any other sources? In my opinion if you had a bounce rate that high showed up on google analytics, than you really need to made a further research where this bouncing visitors are coming from Other than that, i would suggest you to improve your overall site design , some of the reason is explained here ( http://www.seomoz.org/blog/replicate-googles-panda-questionnaire-whiteboard-friday ), a site that looked good potentially attract customer and encourage them to stay a while and surf deeper  .. (unless of course if your website is nike.com , where the brand trust can easily overshadow the lack of good site design)

Theo, did you ever find any more information on this? Would love to see anything you did find, as it is a topic others have asked about. Thanks!

On page optimization is only one factor of achieving the organic results you are looking for.  The next thing I would ask is how authoritative the domain and individual pages are from a link perspective.  If you haven't run the OSE tool on your home page and individual stock pages you wish to rank then do that, because that will tell you how strong or weak your website is from a link perspective.  You'll want to look into a link building strategy and will work best for your business/website.  On page optimization can set the foundation for your SEO strategy but links is what will give you the lift.

I consider great, include all addresses in the separate accounts Places. Always perform this procedure and brings good results. The important thing is to set the right places. Including as much information as possible.

Update them. Ideally every URLs on the planet that pointed to the old URLs will now point to the new URLs.

John is spot on. The other factor to consider is personalization. When people are in a research mode and visit your site via paid search, they are more likely to have a personalized organic result for your site since they've already visited it. On long sales cycle transactions, this can be a very significant factor!

I realize the full impact is not expected to occur until May of 2012....just trying to start discussion among the community to see how we plan to tackle this from a compliance and SEO standpoint.

When you put it like that it does seem a bit messy. Thanks for your help Ryan

Hey Aaron, good point, hard to always keep that in perspective. The reason that I am concerned about it is because from what I understand google is taking those metrics and using it in there search results. We have a landing page that is full of good content, people spend an average of over 4 minutes on it (a single page) and it had a good conversion value, however it had a high bounce rate. We have seen the number of impressions where this pages shows up decline quite substantially over the past month and I am wondering if it is do to the high bounce rate. So if the search engines are incorporating those stats, as much as it might not mean anything in terms of user experience (i.e. we are actually providing a good user experience), it might mean a lot for how the search engines rank you (i.e. they just see a high bounce rate). Thanks for the response!

Interesting idea but I heard meta refreshes have been looked at negatively as well from SEs. http://www.seobook.com/archives/000297.shtml

I noticed a lot of Adsense in prominant places on your pages, even a big banner from on-line dating. Is the site doing well with AdSense? If so, you visitors may read a little of what you offer then click through to the next site. I know if I see a site covered in ads, I am more likely to return to google and check the next option. The ads Google Adsense is applying are also quiet out of context. e.g. Imagine a big burly bikie visits your site to read about motorcycles, does he see an ad for Harley Davidson, no he is presented with ones on 'trying to conceive', how does adsense make that connection? Also people love to see active fresh content and the dates on your entries as I click each of the top links show 2009 or 2010 articles. There is also significant time span between articles inside the one topic. As Egol says have allok at high retention sites and see what you are doing different. If you cover such a broad range of topics, users may just be interested in the specific one they came to see. I would also suggest to move 'recent comments' and 'recent searches' higher toward the top of the column and login further down. If you want people to click through to other article on your site then make sure they are prominent. I also see 'leave a comment' but do not see any comments just ads. To lower bounce rate you need to provide information relevant to your visitor have fresh content make it easy for the visitor to find other interesting articles decide if you want ads or visitors There is my quick usability study.

Hmmmm...."feeding data to Google with rich snippets" Not sure how much importance Google would attach to reviews on a company's own website. I can say that I've had great success with authentic customer reviews posted on  Yelp, Google Places, Handyman review sites, etc... it's a very difficult, hand crafted approach that takes a lot of time and effort. But it's paid off.