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This is a tough situation and one I've seen many many times. Basically your boss wiped out all of his backlinks. Depending on how long everything has been down, he might have a chance of recovering them by reverting everything back to the way it was. Generally, it's best to leave a domain as is and work on building the new brand alongside the old pages. Redirect relevant pages from the old site to the new site, and put up a banner or countdown from the old site's index to the new one. The new domain is PR0 and new so it has to get built up. The fastest way to do that is to leverage the old domain to boost the new one, then make the full redirect once the new one has picked up some steam.

you can use a sitemap validator to check:

http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/index.php?op=validate-xml-sitemap&go=1&sitemapurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.local-sex-search.com%2Fsitemap.xml&submit=Validate

Or just submit into webmaster tools and see if it bounces back any errors.

That's definitely frustrating. I've been in the same boat a number of times and had decent success with a few tactics. Before you start looking at Negative SEO techniques or responding with underhanded tactics, first look at your brand.

Do you feel your brand is stronger and more solid than the copying brand?
Do you have something that's unique that they are unable to copy?

If the answer is yes to both of those questions, then first focus on improving your service and look to make your brand stand out a bit more from the copy. As your brand grows stronger, their brand will get pushed back naturally. Start pushing on social media and engaging your followers to post, comment, and share your posts. This engagement will boost your SEO and the positive comments from your audience will start to show that you offer a better product.

That's the long term solution. In the short term, look and see what they're copying. If they're copying your posts word for word, then you can report that to Google. Google has a Report Copyright page for this:

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/dmca-notice?pli=1&

Google gets to these in time and will eventually drop their pages. You can also DMCA their hosting company if they're clearly copying your articles.

To combat any false negative articles they're writing about you, I would start leveraging social media. If you can get your clientele to start engaging your page, post good comments, and like posts, users who search for your brand will see that you offer a legitimate service. Follow up by writing press releases that link to your social media pages, articles, guest posts, and get the word out that you have fans who've left great feedback.

If you can successfully show that you're better without getting your hands dirty, your brand will be much stronger than the copy. They will eventually fall behind and be unable to keep up. The down side is it takes a bit more effort. However, I've taken the low road before and the problem is you end up just bickering at the same level. Neither company moves ahead because all they do is fight rather than improve their products.

Just like the 2 suggestions, it's really best to keep both sites. Move forward with the new site and re-brand your company but don't scrap the original website. Add a banner, write up, some news explaining the re-brand and point the original site to the new site. You'll create a backlink and if the person is genuinely interested in what you have to offer, they'll follow to the new website.

301 any page that are relevant from the original site to the new site. If both sites have a products page then you can point it over. Google will naturally figure out what you did and start passing any relevant benefits to the new site.

Sounds like something built in early 2000s. Tables won't hurt your SEO directly but it will have a negative impact on pagespeed/load and content optimization. Tables use a lot of extra code that makes it sluggish. I generally always recommend a re-program into DIV/CSS. It's faster, optimized, you will see an SEO benefit.

If your client really doesn't want to do the recode, what I would do is setup all the tags, clean the menu, add any rich snippets that apply, then let them know that's the farthest they'll be able to go without upgrading into DIV/CSS.

I like http://sproutsocial.com. They've been pretty good with support and they have a good setup for multiple managers.

Just like the response from the Google Webmaster Central post, I'd say the drop is more from Google's recent algo updates then poor traffic. Chances are, the traffic is mostly bots or blind click traffic and from what people are saying - from Russia and China. I wouldn't worry too much about that. Just make sure they're not linking spammy links to you and if they are, request a removal or disavow if necessary.

You're getting off just putting your entire business into a single domain. Unless you have the time to test an experiment running 10 different domains it's better just to build one big quality website. With 10 domans you need to build backlinks to 10 different sites. It's hard enough building one up.

To rank geographically, I would continue optimizing the front page for straight "widgets", let Google pick up whatever they wanted, and develop backlinks to your sub widget pages.

Quick question. Are you using the same widget product in multiple locations. For instance:

widgets.com/houston/car-app-widget/widgets.com/dallas/car-app-widget/ (where this is the same widget)

Each directory should have unique widgets. Using the same content will get you in trouble (duplicate content).

You could inadvertently block /brand/ altogether. Just because you use a // doesn't mean Google follows the same rules when crawling.

Generally domain.com/blog is the best option. Using that structure will help you build the value of domain.com.

I prefer Rackspace Cloud. Their system is highly customizable and their Admin panel is easy to use to get yourself up and running. Support is always there when I need it, never had to wait more than a few hours for non-emergencies and they hit me back with live help when it's urgent. Pricing will depend on what you need. Dedicated or non-dedicated is really the big question here.

Yup like Highland mentioned, using your robots.txt for this isn't a good idea. The robots.txt file isn't guaranteed to work anyway. The only sure fire way to get it working is to move all the URLs from the old structure to the new one, then 301 all the old URLs into the new URLs. The 301 minimizes loss to your SEO.

Ditching your domain is a little drastic. The question is really how bad are these links linking to you. You don't have you answer this but did you buy links at some point? If you did, start by checking those.

"I'm going down the route of initially trying to manually remove links and then follow on with disavow." - that's the right path. Keep at it and submit yourself for reconsideration requests if you received anything in Webmaster Tools.

To get back on the path to growth try checking into Broken Link Building. It's an easy way to get a few links and considered a White Hat technique. You'll be able to increase your links a bit here to help boost your organic growth and get back on track.

From clicking around I feel like the site needs to put a bit more effort into building trust. Here's a good article with some suggestions and ideas that you can build off (not my website)

http://yoast.com/7-ways-to-increase-sales-by-creating-trust/

Something they don't include in here is an "About Us". There are so many websites out there offering the same product at similar prices now. I generally go to the website with the most grounded message.

Another idea would be to try and make the website feel more local. Local SEO and marketing is big right now, and people like thinking they're buying locally.

No you don't need to submit a reconsideration request if you haven't received anything. Chances are you got hit by a combination of Penguin and Panda. They may have just refreshed one of the updates on the 8th. Looks like no one really knows exactly what it is. Because you're changing your link structure around, check your Webmaster Tools 404 errors to make sure something is buggy.

If you added /rental-type/ to setup the keywords and the pages both pages for regular rentals, condo rentals, townhouse rentals, for Baltimore are unique then don't bother changing your structure around. You're better off optimizing the pages further if they need it, then checking the pages linking to you to see if something has happened to them. If you have links from someone caught selling links, you wouldn't have seen a penalty but their links wouldn't pass as much SEO juice.

Yes the URLs like this

domain.com/rental/123456-123-Street-City-State-Zip

are better than

domain.com/rental/123456

I'd make that change right away if you're just using an ID to reference properties.

It's really best not to change your URL structure around. If you really need to, then definitely make sure you have 301 directs all pointed from the old links to the new ones.

The permalink keywords in the middle don't really apply as much weight as they used to. Using /home-rentals/ and /rentals/ won't immediately relate the pages to those keywords anymore. So with that, set your structure based on the different sections of your site so they don't conflict rather than inserting keywords. So example: "domain.com/search/california/" doesn't conflict with "domain.com/category/california/"

I need to see your pages to give you a better response on the last question. With permalinks, it's always good to match your page title with the page's main keyword. So if the title is 123 Street Ave then the link should be /slug/123-street-ave/. The slug is whatever descriptive keyword for that type of post is. It would be /search/, /category/, or no slug at all.

That doesn't answer your question for the SEO decline though. Chances are you've been affected by the recent Penguin 2.0 update. I'd start by checking my links and seeing if any of those sites got hit. Also check your webmaster tools and see if any notices have popped up.

Sounds like you're seeing the affects of Penguin 2.0 which just came out. I'd start by investigating your links and seeing what happened to those.

Besides that the URL would be handy.

ThompsonPaul has a good suggestion which is test your pages with "Fetch as Googlebot" to see what they see.

Short answer to your question is no. Google will not pay attention the Facebook Like Box pictures because the codes comes up as javascript (raw code). Whether Google sees it or not is really dependent on how the source is written. For the Facebook Like/Group box, Google won't count them as individual links on a page and see it as one javascript widget.

Hello,

We know that buying links is bad and can get you in a lot of trouble. What about paying to have RSS feeds syndicated by sites like this:

http://feedfury.com/submit

Thanks,

Alex