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Hi Kyle, Thanks for your resopnse.  The <title>validates no problem.  It is the <meta name="title" content="etaojfopahfopasjfio" /> that does not validate.  I realise this is depreciated, however I still think it is important to include surely?</p></title>

Hi Joe, THanks for the response.  One thing: given that my URL structure gets everything beyond /professional/number/blah blah blah from Zend, does that automatically count as a 301 forward.  Meaning, if I get the entire URL in the sitemap, will I still awaken the ire of the google-god? thanks

Hi Joe, Thanks for the comment. Its one of those things that its very hard to establish a cause and effect relationship or a correlation. What i've found is a increase in traffic not only to the home page but to the internal pages as well. I'm keeping my eye on this to see where it all goes.

Thanks for your time Hash.  We will digest all of this information and will certainly try the testing that you suggest

And now Google has shut down the Google Directory, so it's just DMOZ. http://searchengineland.com/final-nail-in-the-google-directory-coffin-86505

Thanks for the reply Chris. UPDATE FROM GOOGLE REONSIDERATION REQUEST I got a response back from Google after submitting a reconsideration request (they got back to me in 4 days!). Basically there is no manual penalty in place, thus I'm assuming its the new algorithms from panda. But this still puzzles me as the clients website is outranked by even the most basic 4-5 page weak authority websites and subdomain 2.0 properties for its own 20+ word exact match content! Answering your questions: The website ranks no.1 for all of its domain searches The bounce rate is up and down, from 50>70%, really depends on the source of traffic a paid search brings in some high bouncing traffic (but at cheap costs). The avg  time on the website is around 1-2mins. There is no active social sharing activity at all on the website except youtube. (However I would say 60% of the ranking competition are in a similar boat) In terms of links, OSE doesnt indicate a big drop in links or anything. Steps I've taken to address the issues you mentioned and other considerations: Redesigned website from the ground up (SEO friendly IA) Conversion optimisation (UX design + usability) on every page Rejigged every single page with new content (rewriting from scratch) Strong focus on best practice keyword targeting in content/headings/internal linking Added 15+ new relevant, unique pages New XML Sitemap + created html sitemap So far no improvement has been seen but Google HAS indexed the new pages within 3-4 days. Should I expect significant changes when the next Panda update comes out? The next steps are to add social sharing and an activity plan for Facebook/Twitter, add a blog, continue to focus on good content with some potential viral programs. The only areas I am not 100% sure about are the more technical sides such as server hosting/index issue. If anyone would like to take a look at the site I can provide the url privately. Thankyou Hash

Good to hear. Hope your site doesn't bounce back out of the index again.

I think archive.org may be my best bet. Thanks for the good advice

It's an interesting article, what I don't get is why my rankings in Bing and Yahoo used to be completely or nearly identical, and then all of a sudden they aren't even close. Just seems odd to me.

Doing it this way is indeed pointless. But if you adjust the strategy a little, it can work very well. What do I mean?  Instead of satellite sites (new domains with no link history, no trust or authority), create satellite pages on established authority domains (Web 2.0 sites, blog platforms, etc, youi know the ones I mean). It's all about the domains (domain authority, links from domains are more important than page metrics). And don't just stop at one page. Publish multiple pages/articles on those authority sites. Of course, you must also build links to your satellite pages

lol SEOMoz has nothing to do with your pagerank.  You must do all of the work to earn pagerank. However, SEOmoz can make you a smarter webmaster so that you can get more out of the time that you spend. But, all of the work still must be done by you.

Any other advice from the experts?

Hey Tim, It's not a bad idea, but i'd try to balance both options. What I mean is, I wouldn't remove your URL completely from everything... but If you do, please write a youmoz about it and let everyone know your results But yeah, it would be helpful for users if Google monitored demand for brand terms, and applied some kinda of precedence to those that have a growing demand. Be careful not to spam this yourself (I had a client try it before hiring us), because it would obviously be easy to detect.

Keep in mind that PageRank is based soly on the backlinks pointing to your site. Having a "nice site" won't directly influence PageRank in any way. Also, PageRank is only 1 of many Google ranking factors...I recommend that you not pay too much attention to it.

Thanks Casey.

Agree 100%!!! We got a VERY powerful keyword ranked #3 in Bing. Two days later, Bing sent me an email through webmaster tools letting me know that they dropped the keyword from us because our website had no content about this keyword. However, our website is almost exclusively dedicated with original content specific to this keyword. I have never thought that a competitor could rat you out to the SE and get you dropped. That said, I find myself thinking this was almost certainly the case. I have no idea how. The good part was Bing was kind enough to give me a way to solve the problem. I was out of the country at the time, so I ended up doing it though chat and email. It took a few days, but the person was extremely helpful and even gave me some good SEO tips. It took about a week to solve and get back on the SERPs, but I am still far away from my original #3 position. The entire process took about two weeks. Getting a real human to verify our content took the longest. I would have never been able to fix this problem had I not been using webmaster tools.