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I agree with Ryan. I sounds like you are very new to SEO so I am going to recommend that you print this and go grab a cup of coffee: http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo/keyword-research (read this one for your answer)

I started to put in a response - but then noticed, you are trying to optimize the content going on your sites static section which I then have to agree with Francisco here. It for sure is going to be very difficult to explain the A-Z best practice for static OPTIMIZED content. But if this is any help to you - here I go. When I am writing content for blog/audience purposes there are a few things I have been doing that set the tone for OPTIMIZED content. AUTHENTIC - of course First link is now a  LONG tail keyterm pointing to another article/sub-page to your site (internal link) - but now post penguin, don't use a keyterm you are trying to rank for. 2nd link is an authoritative link relevant to the topic and the site could be a potential partner to link back to you at some point. Secret recipe number 4, private message me and I will share it but it truly has set my clients site on fire and has given them a 50-65% faster increase in rankings - WHITE hat too.

I've got a couple of recommendations. First off you can demote a site link in Google Webmaster Tools. You can find the option in configuration/sitelinks. Although Google is obviously assuming that the pages with current site links are important somehow so it might be a good time to recheck your site architecture. Secondly you should probably remove the no-follow attribute from internal links on your homepage. They won't be having a beneficial effect and could negatively impact how search engines view certain pages on your site. Hope that helps.

Boomajoom,   I like that idea.  Space is a little bit of an issue right now, but I will keep that thought around for a while.  Thank you!

The sites have decent DA and PA but most of the links in question are in blogrolls and sidebars rather than relevant bodies of content.  You or I would pick them straight away as paid links so I don't think it would take Google long to come to the same conclusion.

Yup, example.com is ranking for a few terms example2.com used to rank for. We do not have access to analytics for example.com, but my assumption is that those keywords are driving traffic as some are ranking on page 1. The rankings have dropped very far. For keywords we were ranked on page 1, now have dropped to page 5. For some keywords we were ranked on page 2 have dropped to page 10+. What odd is although head terms have had a bigger impact overall, there are a few head terms that have had a smaller drop then long tail terms. Yes, surprisingly still ranking for the brand name but now example.com comes up first.

Well thought out question. A lot of tech related (including SEO) sites seemed to be hit by Panda, but this may be because these types of sites tent to over-optimize. I wouldn't be too worried about your SEOmoz profile link. The links that Matt Cutts talked about were off-topic links. So an SEO link from one SEO site to another is completely natural, and in fact should help you. (Now, if we could only get that link to be an in-body text link surrounded by lots of relevant text, instead of that damned sidebar link.... You earned that SEOmoz link. Enjoy it with pride!

Thanks Ben. I hadn't heard the idea of using Amazon turk before. I'll give it shot.

Identify and actively report those sites/links to Google. Here are some links to help understand and to report your issues: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/negative-seo-myths-realities-and-precautions-whiteboard-friday http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com.au/2010/11/how-to-help-google-identify-web-spam.html http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/calling-for-link-spam-reports/ https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?formkey=dEVxdmdRWFJRTjRoLWZVTHZkaTBQbkE6MQ http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=164734

Thanks for your responses. @EGOL - I would agree that merging the sites would be ideal given that they share such a large database. Unfortunately, this isn't an option for our company (at this point-in-time). Acquiring new content for our product pages has been tossed around, but would be a HUGE undertaking, so its on the "back burner" for the moment. @Ben Fox - We came to the conclusion that it was content because it was the only clear "offender" on the list of potential problems. However, the fact that only 3 of our sites got penalized perplexes me as well. It would have made more sense had all of our sites suffered a penalty (luckily only 3 did). One response I got from another forum was: since google removed enough duplicate content (3 sites in our case) it deemed that the others were "original". We didn't point canonicals to any one site (like 9 going to 1). We only added the rel=canonical to our manufacturer category pages (a small percentage of pages). Since some of our domains sell products that aren't "niche specific" we told these pages to send preference to their proper niche domain (hope that made sense). For discussion purposes, here is a response I got from another forum: Why has only one site recovered?I suspect/assume the other sites will bounce back the same way after their own 30 day penalties expire.>Why would only 3 of our sites be affected by this "filter"/Panda if many of them share the same content????? maybe removing the first site allowed the scoring penalty applied to the other sites to shrink in size.  as each site was removed, the penalty applied to the others correspondingly shrunk.  ?????>Is it a coincidence that it was an exact 30 day "filter"?No.  30 day is a common penalty.Does anyone agree with these? I've heard of the 30 day penalty before. If this is the case, then a warning from Google would be nice.

It works with ajax (some javascript and some css). The content is rendred inside the page, but is only displayed (via javascript) when the visitor clicks a tab.

Hi Again, The (Not provided) category isn't showing up in March 2011 because they only started obscuring data from logged in users in October of 2011. This might account for at least some of the traffic difference between 2011 and 2012. I think this is the blog post that they announced the change via: http://analytics.blogspot.com/2011/10/making-search-more-secure-accessing.html You can potentially get some idea of what terms the (not provided) traffic is coming in on by looking at the landing page. You can also use PPC data, but I'm a little fuzzier on how that is done as AdWords isn't something I use a whole lot of.

I think it is a little early to do a universal 301 redirect of all of those sites to your main site. Some of my sites affected last month have already started to come back. I would try to continue to get them to come back a bit. You could get some more topical content on them and maybe clean them up a bit. Then wait. If that still does not work and you don't want to maintain or track them you could do 301 redirects. I dont think you will pass any penalties. I have done this myself and did not see any ill effect. It seems that when penalties happen they tend to be to a directory or a domain. The penalty does not seem to get passed along. Anyone else seen any bad things happen when a 301 redirect was done?