Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I heard Matt Cutts on a video say that meta description is not a ranking factor anymore. But have the same meta description repeat many times throughout your site can sound like a spam site. I personally would write different meta description. If it's only a couple hundred, just hack it out and get it over with. If it's in the thousands, well you have a problem.

I see no problem doing this - like you said, just republish and you should be golden

Yea, no one.  And even if it is a niche directory, you still have to be careful I think.  Just because someone took their General directory and decided to split it out into 50 "niche" directories doesn't means it all of a sudden holds value. And I'm thinking the niche directories that have added real SEO benefit for me in the past, might not (to that extent) in the future.

No problem Let me know if you need any further questions answering. Andy

If they are for the same business and carry similar information than I would say the very best thing you could do would be to bring one down and redirect the domain to the other website.  Make sure to do a 301 (permanent) redirect.

In my opinion, you still run a small risk of having items filtered out due to being too similar. If you feel the balance of unique content compared to duplicate is much more on the unique side - you may be ok. You may have less risk of being "penalized" compared to just filtered. Meaning your domain as a whole may not face penalty, but some of those pages still might have difficulty showing up due to being too similar for a given search. A decent way to explore this is to do searches for phrases that might be exclusive to those pages that have similar content. Do they all show up? Then you are probably ok. How about an exact phrase match using quotes around the search query. Do some testing and see if you are hitting a filter or not.

Yeah, report it. Lazy SEOs shouldn't benefit, it sends out a bad message.

We previously bolded keywords a few times per page but are now moving to bold phrases of 3-6 words each that we find are usual for the user. Eg the key benefits, what differentiates it etc. it looks better, delivers a more valuable user experience and the search engines like this more (with seen positive results)

Have you used Google's keyword tool to find other relevant keywords people are searching for? I've found the tool very helpful for gauging how relevant a keyword is a determining how much effort I should put into ranking for that keyword. (You can see how many people search for that keyword per month) <cite>https://adwords.google.com/o/KeywordTool</cite> I also read a good post that details a 6 month link-building campaign, which will help raise you domain name in the search results. Check it out: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-6-month-link-building-plan-for-an-established-website

This is nothing new .. this is like playing Russian roulette .. they are taking the risk and they are enjoying the benefits while the sun shines. I do not think we can do anything to change this situation.. hope Google is listening and will come up with something and believe me this tool will not make any difference - https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport?hl=en I have tried this many times and of course no result so far.

Derek, Thanks for sharing this site. It looks very useful. I Hope i dont have the need to use it in the near future. Regards,

Thanks Simon. Yeah I saw that blog.

Fiorst are they good links, are they relevant, are they spammy, this is more important. Linkbuilding is very risky these days. Forcing links that will not be detected as such is very hard to do. i would be very carfull what links you get. Better to get one good link then 1,000 spammy links. at best spammy links will not add value at worst they will get you penalized if not now in teh future.

Thanks for tips.. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to get backlinks relevant to my industry?

Yeah I agree, I don't see any ethics issues here at all. If this were my directory, I would look at it like this: there are two main potential benefits to this directory 1) relevant traffic 2) a relevant link. There's nothing wrong if you wanted to charge clients for premium placement once you get enough businesses in there.

I've never seen anything like that.  I don't think they punish or think its some kind of black hat shenanigans. More likely, loss of traffic may have to do with 301 redirect ?

If it was only 2 days, quickly fix the sitemap and re submit it. I do not think Google will punish your sites rankings that quickly. I would also perform a indepth search of links to the new site and see if maybe the site had some bad links and were going to get hit with a penalty for that. You can also view this post for the 301 redirect http://www.seomoz.org/q/can-penalties-be-passed-via-301-redirects