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Hi Ade, Just thought I would chip in here. Our website took a huge hit during the Penguin update for this (to the point where we now are moving the domain to a different one). The reason for this was that every website we made had footer text going to our website and they were all hosted on the same server, with the same blocks. We removed nearly all of them and it seemed that the initial damage was too much to recover from. All of our websites were spam free and we only linked via branded keywords, so I think the IP issue is really important here. We have made it standard practice from now on to set up all new sites on dedicated IP addresses. Hope this is of some use. Matt.

Thanks Jaspal, works perfectly. Yes we did meet at LinkLove and hopefully will do again at the next one as I now owe you a beer! Much appreciated. Ade.

Thanks Matt, Minor panic over! Cheers. Ade.

Hi Cyrus, The GWT account belongs to the client, I just checked with them and they say that they are 'Not Sure' if they deleted the message or not which suggests that they possibly may have. Overnight there has been no upwards movement in rankings. Back to the original plan I think, we will finish all of the tabled tasks before submitting a reconsideration request. The link profile still looks a bit suspect to us and I am sure that Google aren't going to be any less critical. Thanks for your reply. Ade.

You might find something useful in this post... http://www.seomoz.org/blog/unnatural-link-warnings-blog-networks-advice Good luck.

If you search for "Search Engine Optimization", you get SEO highlighted in SERP. But it doesnt seem to work the other way around ... And yes! It is easier to rank high on a keyword that is in your domain-name. I cant imagine anywhere better to find information in my language on Paris than on www.paris.dk.

Yep I have actually done this (kinda! as a test). EMD after 3 months of ranking 3rd, redirected it to a non-EMD. They swapped places for about 2 weeks... then it dropped 10+ pages deep. I cant help but think, if I had increased link building effort over the 2 weeks it might have stayed up.

Thanks Ade Lewis for your answer.

Hi Robert, Thanks for your reply. Website budget and SEO budget are both an issue and so the sub directories route is definitely the way that we will be going with a .org domain. Thanks again. Ade.

Hi. Thanks for both of your replies, I really appreciate the help. You were 100% right Aran, I just checked through the .htaccess file and there is already a rewrite rule which converts the nice SEO friendly one in to the not so nice and friendly one. This seemed like madness to me but when I looked deeper it appears that the developer has included this rewrite rule so that the query string attached to the URL can be used for pulling stuff from a databse on various pages. Not the best for SEO but the whole site seems to rely on this. I have added some coding in to the site that uses the same query string to create a rel canonical tag. Thanks again for the help, I wouldn't have got there without the guidance. Ade.

If it is an HTML 5 page that should be just fine as it is the HTML 5 doctype tag. Check out the info here: http://www.w3schools.com/html5/tag_doctype.asp It might cause trouble with really old browsers, but if they have that going I would hope they have already thought about the reasons for and against using it EDIT: even better link: http://www.w3.org/TR/html5-diff/#doctype

Thanks again for your input Sha. I got there in the end!