Welcome to the Q&A Forum

We had 301s for about 6 months, and the old URLs did not disappear from google. Thats why we decided to change them to 404s, with the thinking that Google might remove them quicker. But the number of links from sub-domains just keeps on growing. I am worried that by having these problem urls listed in the robots.txt actually prevents google from following them and seeing that it should be removed and that it returns a 404

At least part of the answer lies in your competitive landscape.  If you properly optimize just a couple variations as primary phrases, add in other variations as secondary phrases to include within the content, get inbound links spread across both the primary and secondary, you should show up for several if not all of the variations you've listed. Where the competitive landscape factor comes in is this. If you choose options 1 & 2 as your primary, then 3, 4 and 5 as your secondary, and any competitor targets 3 & 4 as their primary and does full on optimization, they'll likely rank higher for those.  But that's only if all other factors are equal. The best way to deal with this and not end up in a vicious cycle, is to leverage PPC ads on the full spread while you focus SEO as I've suggested. If the organic competition is weak, you won't have as much of a battle. Oh - I forgot to mention that I know this because I've worked on U.S. based rental sites - one of the largest regional rental sites, and one of the top two national sites.

Ahmad, With Google now taking into account where page elements are located (they can identify header, footer nav segments etc) it is now much more worthwhile getting a link in the editorial content of a website rather than just a simple sitewide footer link. The search engines are now beginning to look at sidewides as a potential spammy signal and therefore I would say if you can get links within an editorial piece (which will likely reside on only 1 or 2 pages max on a site) then this will pass the most link juice / value ultimately. Having said that I don't think sitewide's are dead exactly as they can help bolster the foundations of a link profile, I just wouldn't build an entire link strategy from these types of links, or at least this is where your partners are coming from.

Oh. I see that my solution below was already suggested! Whoops!

I'll be honest in saying I had a couple of sites affected by the panda/farmer update but saw no changes in image search so I really don't think this has anything to do with these updates.  Additionally many have said that if your query drops were not on these update days then you should be looking elsewhere. Have you seen anything that indicates any loss around the dates shown in my original attachment?  I have a few other similar niche sites which both more and less content than the above described one which saw no changes which additionally says to me that this has nothing to do with the farmer updates. If anyone else has noticed losses in image search I'd be very interested in sharing data.  And the same for anyone who's simply seen a loss of "image search" queries at anytime.  This is a first for me and I'd love to find someone who has been in the same boat (the image boat).

The site does not have any duplicate content and does not have overly excessive inbound links.  Anchor tags on the inlinks are reasonable distributed.  As to what took place before acquisitions I don't really know but the entire site is in the index and now I'm working hard to improve relevancy for valuable search queries and to increase conversions.

Hey, you have pretty much answered this question yourself - "we suddenly dropped to a PR1 but our traffic wasn't seriously affected". If this is the case, then, I would not worry about the toolbar page rank. Also, you have a raft of other problems, but you seem to have a handle on those. I would spend your time constructively focusing on getting your new site up and running and resolving all these duplication issues and not spend another minute worrying about your loss of page rank.

If it's just this one link on one website then don't worry at all! Getting too many of these links will be a problem, but the odd one will not be a problem. How many sites are linked to from the individual page that you have your link on? You dont want to appear in amongst a lot of spammy links.

Done, done, and done. I hope to work together again soon.

Hi Steve, Of the 122 listings that I submitted, 85 were rejected. They were rejected in chunks, but those chunks don't necessarily share similar elements. Each agent has their own location, email and phone number. The website is the only shared contact information. If this is because I submitted them all in one sitting, should I spread them out over the course of a week or two? Can I resubmit a listing on Yahoo! after it's been rejected? Thank you so much for your help! Caitlin