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Today,the mozrank turn to 1.16,now I realize that the reason is no backlinks. Thanks David!

Thanks David, Monica and Lewis for your responses - I appreciate your thoughts - and I love how you all so consistently started your responses with "stop worrying" - you're right of course! I have communicated my discovery to the client and my intended course of action was pretty much as David suggests - run fast and bury those links in a sea of press releases and other high quality organic link-building. Still scratching my head as to where the links came from - but I need to stop worry about that don't I? Thanks again!

Many large retailers will have ecommerce sites with products and pages of content in completely unrelated niches so your extra pages of loosely related should be fine. They may not rank highly for the terms related to the main theme though.

Hey Mike I have a site, it lost about 80% of traffic on the 7th of February. I have seen that there was some talk of results changing in the UK on the 7th but this one site has been hammered. It's annoying really as the major competitor is almost a perfect case for how to cheat. The business provides several services all from one site as does the one I manage. But, they also have the URLs for each of these services  and use them as single pages designed to throw the user to the main site (duh - doorway pages) but... the thing is, it works for them, has worked for years and years and on this last update, it seems to be getting better. Really annoying and likewise, I have not had any good feedback as to what the problem may be from other SEO folks I know. So, good folks of SEOMoz - any ideas on this one? It may help me figure out what has gone wrong with my fathers site as well which is http://www.vinyltodigital.co.uk Marcus

anyone else?

Hi Jan, I'm following up on old questions. Did Theo's answer solve your problem for you?

Yes... it is a bit like trying to rely less on finger in the air and a deep understanding of SEO so that I can explain it to clients in way that they can understand it. I agree with Dejan SEO that we should look to maximise the number of linking domains, but I was hoping someone had a way of explaining to clients that sometimes it might be worth investing a little extra on content + placement to get that extra special link from a high PR/MR site.

Hi Todd, I'm following up on some of the older unanswered questions in Q&A. Is the penalty still in place for you, or did you get it figured out? Are there any lessons learned that you can share with us, or any questions you still have? Thanks!

Hi Brian, Did your site get crawled again and is everything good now? Keri [SEOmoz associate]

There are many things one can do to help Google recognize your business as a store. First, if your business has a centralized location, be sure to create an optimized listing for your company at Google Places for Business. As well, be sure to use selling related terms when optimizing your pages for keywords, e.g. instead of simply listing “hard drives”, use “hard drive retailer” or “hard drives for sale” along with your company name. Ensure your URL and landing page reflect your business wares as well by having a short, clear URL and using reflective keywords within the first 100 words of text on your site. It will always be a struggle to compete in Google against major corporate retailers, but by following these steps, you should begin to see a change in your results.

As far as I know underscores are not seen as separators so that means two words with an underscore between will be tagged as one word. My personal suggestion is to avoid underscores as much as possible. All separators are good beside underscores. We work a lot with hyphens and the results are good. Hope it helps !