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It is quite good if you have a tight content niche and make all your links no follow.  This will get rid of many of the spammers and can really help with long tail searches.  Avinash is a huge fan of this on his blog and he even keeps a metric on the ratio of the words written by him vs words written by engaged audience members. But, you need to be the one driving the conversation and setting the agenda, if you don't you will just get spammers and junk on there.  Best of luck and feel free to PM me the blog, I'll check it out.

Do you have any server logs? Those can give you the information you need. Google Webmaster Tools keep errors from a couple of year back. At least the ones not yet fixed. It might be that you are also lworking on the internal link structure, improving the crawling and you might have recently submitted a more up to date sitemap, which surfaced old errors. How do you currently track the errors?

Have just made some changes to the site now, removed the SEO box - do you think this is better? Yes. I understand you may use that method in many other sites. I would suggest to you it is a mistake and with each of those sites you run a large risk of incurring this same penalty. It was done in a clear attempt to manipulate search engine rankings. I am confident 10 out of 10 Google employees who look at the page would feel the same way, and that Google's algorithms either can or should be able to detect such manipulation. You seem like a savvy guy and I have to think you agree on some level. The change you made is a great adjustment. It keeps the content on the page but positions it in such a way that it is not hidden at all. With respect to the URL removal tool, 404s are a natural part of the internet. If you encounter that situation again, my recommendation is to ensure your 404 page is current and helpful. There should be a search box along with your site's navigation. I would also recommend 301'ing any pages where a similar page would exist on your site. The 404 pages would naturally fall out of SERPs within 30 days in most cases. I can't say which of these two issues with your site led to your current ranking drop. I can share that I would classify both as major mistakes and you have done everything possible to resolve these issues at this point. If the hidden text was the issue, which is more likely, then check your SERP each day for when the cache updates. Presently your cache is from Aug 17th. When it updates, that is a confirmation Google has crawled the page and hopefully your rankings should return. PS. Your HTML sitemap is helpful for your footer. The XML and TXT sitemaps are not helpful and are unnecessary. I would recommend removing those links as a best practice, but they are not in any way related to your ranking issue.

They both have massive numbers of backlinks and domains linking in. What do you think? Looking at the NY site, it has a total of 2300 links from 46 domains. That is not a lot at all. One site wide footer link can offer 10k+ links from a single site. The focus should be on the number of linking domains which is 46 in this case. When I review the links for this site in OSE, they seem quite natural. There are a couple legal directories but nothing unexpected. The anchor text varies nicely and the link profile is what I would expect to find. For OSE I usually apply the following filters: followed+301, only external, on this root domain, group by domain. Take a look for yourself and I think you will agree there doesn't seem to be anything unusual. This NY site is not setting up "mirror" sites, but landing pages. Mirror sites are basically identical sites set up under different domains. Landing pages are pages within a site designed to welcome visitors who locate your site through specific search terms or marketing ads. If this was my SEO client, I would advise them to increase the amount of unique content on their landing pages. I am not comfortable at all with these pages in their current form. With that said, Google apparently is comfortable with them and is indexing these pages. The site's DA is 31, and PA around 30 for these pages. These sites are very easily beatable with proper SEO work. If I were in your position I would be very pleased to compete with these sites. No matter what site you build, you are going to have competition in SERPs. What results are you concerned about? I presume you are searching for the exact phrases in their domain name? These types of sites usually do well in domain name match searches, but otherwise they don't fare well. If you offer a basic site with good content and solid SEO, you will solidly beat these types of sites every day.

In the following URL, "example.com" is the domain URL and the entire URL is the page's URL: http://example.com/category/page/ Consider the page an extension of the domain.Your page statistics are going to be better than the domain statistics If you have a page that is performing better than the rest of the website.

You are absolutely right, I got the index page to redirect to sort numerous homepage issue. I am complete stuck, if i redirect for the pages to display the correct homepage, my blog stops workings and my linking domain gets split. Help

Thank you for confirming my suspicions.

The ranking would depend on the overall content quality of the page. The text that is selected to be added on the page, describing the video should be original and relevant to the context you wish to optimize the page for. I believe adding the video on YouTube or saving it on the website won't make any difference. We have a website as a collection of YouTube videos ranking on top spot for a significant number of keywords we are working on. Yes, having the word video in the URL and title can help as a plus in ranking factors.

I am doing that now, but I was looking for a more user friendly interface.  Maybe I cant hire someone from freelancer or even maybe from here who is great with excel and make something nice for me that meets my needs.

You're welcome! I'm glad that you were able to find the broken links.

Good response Ryan thank you once again.

Ahhh! Okay thanks Looking forward to the updated page Personally I think that as SEOMoz is all about best practice, it would be super-cool just to pull that line out... it's confusing & misleading! 2 things I don't normally associate with the Moz team! I am currently using the free API, but am considering the paid version... just trying to crunch some numbers and make sure we would get the ROI needed first in terms of saving time with manual checks Cheers Casey Mike.

Thanks, I'll wait a day or two then talk to them. I'm positive they're missing links. Most are long standing and can still be verified.