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The write would be able to link up the profile via a Rel=Author Tag. You can learn more about Rel Author tags here. Here is a good article about Rel Authorship from Search Engineland

Interested to know if the indexing and rankings of the pages came back, David? Paul

So just to keep an update coming: so far no improvements.  My traffic did drop by about 25% between two days ago and yesterday.  I did find one failed sitemap in google webmaster tools.  I'm not sure if this would have an effect on this or not, but I've re-submitted that, so maybe that will help!  Hopefully I'll see things back to normal soon or at very least webmaster tools will tell me what's going on!

Worth noting that meta desc isn't one of those 3 markup styles. it is a different thing completely so you aren't actually mixing schema in your example.

The difficulty here in giving a reasonable opinion is we do not have the domain or pages to look at. If we did, we could give educated opinions.  RY.com.au makes a good point if you have pages that are ranking, it is easier to change a page than a domain. It becomes a question of risk/reward. You have to decide.

Hi, You should really fix your XML sitemap, at the moment it appears as a regular webpage within your site (http://www.leatherup.com/sitemap.xml). By adding the XML sitemap you can list all the URLs in your website. Upload your sitemap URL via Google Webmaster Tools. Also, as your lower level pages are similar in content (keyword name/targets) it is possible that Google has grouped them together and decided only to index one of the URLs for each group. To move away from this it is really important that each webpage clearly communicates to Google what your keyword targets are. Some things you can do: Meta descriptions: At the moment they are not unique and for lower level pages they talk more about branding than the page. This will help with your click through. Title tags: these look okay, but to be sure just go through your website and ensure that they are unique and have the category name followed by branding only Meta keywords: remove this tag from your site, at the moment you are keyword spamming and could be penalized Add permanent introductory content to your category pages. Ensure they are unique, use the keyword targets of that page and are interesting and informative to the visitor. If applicable you can link to other sections within your site from this content (but only do 2-3) Build links to your lower level pages, ensure links are from quality websites and that the anchor text you use is the keyword target of the page you are linking to. Hope that helps, Davinia

just to update everyone... just like last time, we're "mysteriously" back in the rankings one week to the day after submitting a reconsideration request... we know it wasn't a manual action, so maybe the reconsideration request pings someone that can fix the algorithmic mistake? not sure... but it's definitely interesting that both times, we're "back" one week after sending in the request...

Not sure this was a glitch, sounds intentional (imho): A vitamin vender who claims to have been able to reach a Google AdWords Specialist says he was told to contact Google's legal department at legal@google.com for more information. This department could not immediately be reached for comment about the Google Shopping anomaly, but the vender believes the issue stems from the European Union (EU)'s recent ban on vitamins and herbs, and Google's attempt to thwart potential trade sanctions...

There was also the June/July 86 pack released on the 10th August. Check out Search Engine Lands overview of the changes, they do a far better job of explaining the changes than I could http://searchengineland.com/googles-june-july-updates-130392  It seems the updates focus on quality, the new algo has been updated to help users find "high quality content from trusted sources" That suggests to me that quality of backlinks and possibly social shares may be factors, so in addition for checking items already mentioned by Oleg and Donnie, I would certainly do some backlink analysis against the sites that are now occupying the spots you used to. Hope that helps

Some great feedback here - firstly, thanks EGOL - I'm focusing 100% on content on a new site. Should be interesting - and that's a good point re: vandalism. I am concerned with the consequences of negative SEO / scrapers, clones, etc., though. Would be so good to be able to cut nasty incoming links in some way (I can but dream...) Love that saying too Donnie! Good points there Marie - yes I get plagued by that stuff too - I'm beginning to wonder whether many of these comments are more about hoping some lunatic will click on the link than about manipulating SEO though. To be totally honest, I wouldn't mind if Google laid down specific rules for linkbuilding. We advise that site owners should only proactively build no more than 10 links/page from relevant sites. The rest should be generated naturally. Something far more specific than we have at the moment. And thanks Arpeggio. A very good point indeed. I agree.

But my site is not SEO related, and it is very hard to find sites that I can get links from in my industry.

Either one works, as long as you tell G which one you choose via rel="alternative" Either is fine - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/03/working-with-multilingual-websites.html Mark up multilingual - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/12/new-markup-for-multilingual-content.html

I do tend to agree the quality In Google has gone downhill, I blogged about this In March after the latest Panda, there have been so many updates it looks like Google has lost its core reason for being the best search engine out there I predicted that profits from Google would rise from those last updates as you have genuine businesses that were doing ok on Google demoted to the nether regions to be replaced by garbage sites, non relevant sites or massive brands like Amazon These business now have to buy their traffic or go under, the same will happen to these garbage sites that have been promoted to the first page their revenue will rise whilst they are there, they will employ more staff to help cope, Google will fix whats currently broken and then cycle continues Just search for SEO UK , have a look at the backlinks , total manipulation yet been promoted to top spot, the company's earnings have been 10 fold since it's promotion

Yes, you probably wont do too well in rankings if you just have a single number/name difference for many pages. Maybe add in more unique information related to that person? e.g. where you got your information, where you got information from, last 3 tweets/status updates, etc. Although this is all aggregate content (which Google still considers inferior to unique content) it should help you rank in addition to giving your users more useful information.

How old is your site? Is it an e-commerce site? How many URLs? Have you always had the same domain name? The reason I ask these questions is because I am seeing the same thing on our site. We have many technical issues probably contributing to this. Some of them might be the same if we have similar sites.