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Thanks for all the resources and help Thomas. Cheers!

I'd look at what is posted on those sites. Are they posting quality information? Is the information relevant to your topic? Do their guidelines mention any quality control process?

I certainly think that gradually adding pages and focusing on quality will help. The problem is that the devil really is in the details. The size of your current site, the type of pages you currently index, your link profile, the type of niche/industry you're in... all of these things matter, to some degree. So, what works for one site might be a problem for another. Easing into it is definitely going to mitigate your risks, and I think focusing on the most high-impact pages while leaving the other filters/sorts/etc. out of the index is a good idea. Whether this strategy is going to provide real value over the time is the bigger question. Ultimately, I think internal search pages have been devalued a lot, even on reputable sites. I've been through this with a former client - they have a perfectly legitimate business model and provide good value to users, but Google sees them as a directory and much of their index is necessarily search results. Over time, even though they've never been penalized, they've just seen a steady decline, because it takes more than that to rank now.

Magento is great and has a plugin perfect for this so you can add that in. http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/product-video-with-swatch.html

Yes, i did notice the missing "descriptive" title and description tag on the pages with incorrect grammar. I already send a note to the developer that he should change that. It seams that there is to little text to work with for Google.

This was years ago (before my agency built its own crawler to do this), but I used changedetection.com on a client site where they could not be trusted not to arbitrarily change title tags without asking us first. It was a competitive niche and we had more than one failsafe in action to detect changes quickly, including (of course) manual checking. I like the idea of using a tool like this to monitor title tags or pages where the competitor's new content might be listed. Having not used the tool for this purpose I am not sure how effective it will be, but I see no reason why it wouldn't work. The trick would be finding pages on their site where this new content is acknowledged, whether that be a sitemap or index page, table of contents, etc. If anyone has other tools that might do the same thing in a more direct manner, that would be great!

Thank you Spencer, each tag is indeed showing the same author so I think we'll be okay. But as you say it isn't ideal so we would look to get this corrected in the future. If the Fancier Author Box plugin had an option to disable rel=author tags, well that would be ideal. I'll try asking the plugin provider about this. Thank you again.

Hi Kyle, I would probably only include the URLs that have been translated in the hreflang sitemap, unless the English content that hasn't been translated can be assigned to one territory / language, e.g. en_us or en_gb, etc. If the pages that haven't been translated are otherwise linked-to throughout the site and are present in a regular sitemap, they will be found. I am not 100% sure that leaving them out of the hreflang sitemap is the way to go, so I will leave this question open for other people to reply as well. However, I'd say that if you wanted English language content to serve internationally because it has not been translated, it would be a mistake to target it to one English-language speaking area via hreflang.

There's no direct evidence that over-doing your internal commercial linking (i.e. linking with your primary keyword internally in a site) causes problems, but it certainly doesn't look professional to continually link to your car insurance page with the anchor text "car insurance". There has been some speculation that internal linking like this can cause issues, but I haven't seen it tested or proven yet in the way that having too many inbound links like this has been tested / confirmed. I would certainly not overdo this sort of linking despite there being no solid evidence that I am aware of, partially because of the unprofessional vibe it gives a page (related to everything David has mentioned above) and partially because I am sure it sends sub-optimal signals to Google regardless of whether it is considered a ranking factor.

Thanks for all that. Really valuable information. I have gone to Parameter handing and there were 54 parameters listed. In total, generating over 20 million unnecessary URLs. I nearly died when I saw it. We have 6,000 genuine pages and 20 million shitty ones that don't need to be indexed. Thankfully, I'm upgrading next week and I have turned the feature off on the current site, the new one won't have that feature. Phew. I have changed the settings for these parameters that were already listed in Webmaster tools, and now I wait for the biggest re-index in history LOL! I have submitted a sitemap now and as I rewrite page titles & meta descriptions, I'm using the Fetch as Google tool to ask for resubmission. It's been a really valuable lesson, and I'm just thankful that I wasn't hit worse than I was. Now, it's a waiting game. Of my 6,000 URLs' on the site map submitted a couple of days ago, around 1/3 of them have been indexed. When I first uploaded it, only 126 of them were.

Hi Sarah, Provided that these are physical locations that are staffed during normal business hours and not shared by another business, then, yes, it's typically a best practice to link from each Google+ Local page to its respective landing page on the website. I realize this isn't your question, but as it came up in this thread, I thought I'd address it first. Do you see a benefit for your customers in doing this? If so, go ahead. If not, what would be your goal in doing this? It can't hurt, but may not give you a visible boost in any way. Recommend you study the great new Moz Local Learning Center. Tons of good info there: http://moz.com/learn/local Hope this helps!

You're very welcome. If I were you I'd apply for reconsideration again with something like this: "Dear Webspam Team, Thank you for taking the time to reconsider my site.  I do admit that at one time I offered guest posts from my blog.  However, I have now removed all links from those posts.  I have no intention of ever offering guest posts again.  I have removed the "write for us" section of my site and will now concentrate solely on writing my own posts for the site. I enjoy writing these articles and participating in the Adsense program. Thank you once again, [your name]"

Thanks for sharing the links. I will be checking out a few of these myself.

Linking internally with optimised anchor text should be fine, but be careful not to overdo this in the same manner that you would not overdo inbound links with optimised anchors. In the last day, I've read a couple of theories about over-done internal anchor text being a common factor in sites that have recently lost rankings, but do NOT take that as gospel or even particularly important yet, as this was acknowledged by the person who said it as a very preliminary theory that they had not run proper analysis on yet. Just something to keep an eye on - I am sure the person will publish this theory if they establish that it has more merit! The image re-usage should be fine, although it's best to use entirely unique content in both text and imagery.

Thanks for the responses, I really appreciate how quickly everyone helps out on the forum.

What's your bounce rate like? Is it high? If so, maybe you do need to make some changes. How about time on page/site? I'm believing more and more that google uses user engagement metrics to help rank sites. I don't know if this is part of Panda or not though. As others have said, I wouldn't change anything until the dust has settled. Implementing a few tables here and there is not a difficult task (I wouldn't have thought) and maybe is just what you need to make the content you have more readable. I would have thought a table is just the tool to display bank holidays! Though, of course, now that the second May bank holiday has passed us, there aren't many left (BOOOOO). Good luck, and make sure you wait for the dust to settle before you do anything. Amelia

I took a look at your site and your wording is slightly deceiving. You're not using alt img text. Your're using text inside of an <a>tag (aka a link) and then using css to overlay your logo. To use alt img text the image would have to be coded with an tag into your html, which it looks like it is but is currently commented out and not showing.</a> <a>Either way you look at it, at least in my opinion, your h1 should never be the same on every single page. There should be one on each page and it should be unique to that page. The h1 is supposed to be the main heading/title of the page and essentially you're telling google that the main title of every single page on your website is your brand name, which is incorrect. I'm not saying that leaving the brand name tied to your logo is wrong, but I don't think that it should be in a sitewide h1 tag.</a>

There's really no "right" answer for this since I don't recall any official statement about it. I would just move, make sure all my redirects/content are done. Then start applying the redesign. Normally I would wait for it to be crawled but nowadays, I just jump right into the redesign after moving all the content/301's. I've never really seen big problems, normally, just small dips but it usually goes back to normal.