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This may be that they do not know better or have limited resources. It doesn't matter what a competitor is doing as you can always do better. More than often the reason is because that is the default value for their meta tags. Meta descriptions and meta tags in general are for as you would say it "sales pitch". Meta data holds little to no weight in ranking as mentioned before.

That's where I'm at the crossroads, because we're not an eComm site, but we obviously want to be visible and provide great information for our visitors.

Keyword rankings for your homepage =  Yes. Because your homepage technically does not exist and is redirected to an inner page, which is focused on a particular city. So if your keyword is Bharat Desi, which is your website brand name, it shows: <cite>www.bharatdesi.com/</cite> Hyderabad Classifieds, Hyderabad Yellow Pages, Free Classifieds Hyderabad, India, Free Hyderabad Classifieds Online Classifieds Hyderabad, Free **...**And if your keyword is a regional keyword, like Houston Desi, then that page is not affected. In this case, this redirect is helping your Hyderabad page, because technically you are telling Google that hyderabad page is your homepage.Does that make sense ?

I think that you should just make one website and publish best possible content. If you take all of the time you plan to spend building hotdog stand websites stuffed with links and tricky maneuvers and place that effort into quality content creation you might have a kickass site that performs well. Just build what people want and will find useful.  Don't try to fool Google.

Thank you Marie for the insight! I think you've led me to a better understanding of this!

Thank you for your reply. I reported the site to google and now the have slipped to number 6th but I fear that the will be back with another site soon. Regards Chris

Nah. Ditch em. Article directory links are pretty garbage these days. Any miniscule benefit they may still provide isnt worth the headache of wondering if those are the links keeping ya down. Also if you ever have to do a reconsideration request it'll be one less thing for you to clean up because under a manual review there isnt  google engineer out there who isnt going to frown on them links.

Actually, what you need to build is more content.

Thanks a lot SanketPatel, I will remove them via robots.txt right now and will tell our Admin to remove those links from the site as well. Thanks a lot. I just clicken "Good Answer" and now the thread show up as solved, but it isnt ;( Activitysuper: I will install the plugin later on today for the canonicals and will see how it will work. Thank you very much for pointing me in the right direction, too.

I would let those domains expire and buy beer with the savings.   Or, if I was in a more aggressive mood, spend the money on my content attack.

Thank you so much. I see.

Let me know when you start.... I help with funding.

I see, that's certainly cleared that up! Thanks again

OK, thank you EGOL. I clearly have content duplication issues on many of my sites which I'll address by changing said content and hopefully that problem will go away or at least reduce. How long does that take? The linkback issue. Is it an issue? I originally assumed going by the date my problems were solely due to Penguin and therefore linkback related. Should I, in the light of this other content problem, assume that the linkback issue isn't a problem or should I still consider using the disavowel tool? Ian

Thanks very much! Greatly appreciated