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Yes, I was about to mention the honeymoon period as well. I had exactly the same issue. I can reassure you that yes, a few quality links would do wonders for your site. That's all there really is to it.

Sort by domain name. Export to Text. Find replace / with tab character. Put back into Excel. Do a count of domain names. Compress at totals. You'll have a list of unique domains.

Thank you very muc for all your advice. It does seem to be a difficult one to address, so I'll get cracking and take your advice and get in touch ith your recommendations. Thanks again Alastair

Thank you both for your help.  We'll look into these!

I notice similar behavior in my campaigns. Comparing LRD here to the list at Google WMT, I find dozens of LRSs (even from domains I'm not familiar with) that don't show in my SEOmoz campaign reports or Open Site Explorer. I second the question and have even posted one of my own here: http://www.seomoz.org/q/linking-domain-dropped-followed-by-significant-decrease-in-domain-authority.

Hi Evgin, Sorry for the slight delay in response, I was writing a blog post. I would recommend the following: Product name: Audi A6 Rear Lamp Set Seems fine but not keyword focused on what people are searching for. Short Description: A Short & Sweet Description I am presuming this is a CMS field that will be displayed in the category page of your ecommerce site, before someone clicks to find out more on this particular product. So yes something short and sweet. Long Description: A Long Boring Description -  The long description, shouldn’t be boring but yes it can be boring to write. I would expect this to appear on your product page providing confidence and specific details about the product. Meta Title:  Same as product name Yes this should be the same as the product name, maybe include some additional variants on the most popular keyword. For example "Popular keyword - Second most popular keyword". Meta Keywords: What more can be said about an A6 Rear Lamp Set??? Meta keywords are ignored by almost all search engines these days, so I wouldn’t worry about these and possibly remove them. Unless they are used within your websites internal search facility. Meta Description: Same as long and boring description Meta Description should be no longer than 156 Characters (Including Spaces). So maybe the short description could be placed here with any discount, sales or delivery pricing message your site may have. It seems to me that you need more support that these Q&A's can provide, this is one problem but you will find many more, it's hard to get it all correct. By going through this Q&A process it will take you a long time to find all the answers you need. Just a friendly bit of advice to try and save you time which ultimately costs money. If you make the wrong choices, you may find that you miss opportunities which could drive more traffic to your site.

Hmm, now this is why I don't put too much effort into measuring the numbers of incoming links. The ones that are counted in some places, aren't counted in others, and the numbers skew the value as people think in terms of quantity rather than quality... then there's the fact that they jump up and down like Madonna's pants anyway. I tried a whole bunch of different ways before concluding we don't yet seem to be of an age where we can track them, at least not to any level of reliability or significance for taking actions on them.

While you can get all pages indexed via a sitemap, the general rule of thumb is that if Google has to use your sitemap to find the page, it will probably never rank for anything. Good internal link architecture will be your best friend here. What we generally recommend is to "link early, link often". On every product page, plan on linking to several other products before you get to the footer of the page. Some common methods of this are... Top Products Related Products Recently Added Products People who bought this also bought... Recently Sold Products Featured Products Recently Visited Products etc... Any excuse to get more links to more pages. For example, let's say you sell 10,000 products and your goal is to have no product page be more than 3 clicks away from the homepage... Click 1: The homepage links to 50 product pages (Top 20 Products, 10 Latest Added, 10 Featured, 10 Recent Purchases) Click 2: These product pages each link to another 30 (10 Latest Added,  10 Also Bought, 10 Recent Purchases) (remember, Google will spider the site asynchronously so when it comes back the latest, featured and recent should have changed) Click 3: These product pages also link to another 30 (10 Latest Added,  10 Also Bought, 10 Recent Purchases). If this were perfectly random, you could potentially have links to 45,000 products. However, assuming there is some crossover (ie: google visits a products page and you havent added any new ones since the last page they visited), it is reasonable to believe that Google will find at least 1 link to all 10,000. Note: use the "featured" listing to get things indexed. Feature products that havent been spidered yet by google.

Some definitely are misspellings, others are just variants.  The vast majority come from public forums where spelling is often an issue (or morons typing shorthand like they do on their mobile devices).  Since google clearly recognizes the properly spelled keyword and then also relates the misspelled variants, I wondered if it was worth the time to write code to fix these if google already recognized them as being the same as the properly spelled version.

Sorry, god only knows how I missed that. Well in that case I think you are doing what is recomended, I generally think of the canonical tag as similar to a 301 redirect. You are telling the search engines that the two pages should be treated as one and then specifying the page that is to be the front-man of the two. I think the normal proceedure is to have robot.txt for private/personal information, nofollow and noindex for duplicate content however the canonical tag is an easy solution to duplicate content as it is simply one line in the header.

I've got to agree - use WordPress!

I've a follow on question to this: I have a client that's setting up a section of his site in a different language, and we're planning to geo-target those pages to that country. I have suggested a sub-folder solution as it's the most cost effective solution, and it will allow domain authority to flow into those pages. His developer is indicating that they can only set this up as a sub-domain, for technical reasons, but they're suggesting they can rewrite the url's to appear as sub folder pages. I'm wondering how this will work in terms of geo-targeting in Google Webmaster Tools. Do I geo-target the sub domain or the sub folder i.e. does Google only see urls or does it physically see those pages on the sub-domain? It seems like it might be a messy solution. Would it be a better idea just to forget about the rewrites and live with the site being a sub domain? Thanks,

Was a bit sarcastic with my answer but yeah the site is added to WMT and nothing funky to discover that explains the penalty.

Hi Aaron, I was searching for same stuff on Google. I just search for local listing websites + seomoz and land on this post. Then, I tried another query to get it done and found such a great insightful list which may be help to you. 50 Local Business Directories I hope:: It will help you.

Or... just don't bother! Make your original site mobile-friendly and dump the idea for a whole separate site. There really is no need, .mobi or otherwise. Plus, then you'll have to sites you have to get links for, when you could combine all those links into one site and get more bang for your buck.

There are several variables that go into this depending on how you call the interstitial, etc. It'd probably be best to use javascript or some other user based trigger as that would be ignored by a spider.  I.e. try to do it for people, but keep it out of the way of the search engines.

Are you absolutely sure?  There was a wave of Panda that hit non-US sites on the week of April 11th (or thereabouts).  Does that coincide with your drop?

I've seen this as still effective in the B2B space, and other sectors that historically release company announcements via press releases instead of a blog.  If you're trying to optimize around B2C and it's not really a news worthy press release it probably won't have much pull.  Google has gotten better and better at correlating search spikes that merit news results and identifying the press releases that merit addition to their search results.  I'd look at press releases and use them in these areas: 1. Regular (Q, H, monthly, what not) Announcement / Core Value Statement 2. New product release 3. Corporate comments on business recognition: awards, analyst review, etc.