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Depends on your site. In isolation it's probably nothing to be worried about.

If all of your links are coming from sitewide's then I'd be concerned.

But if it's a none spammy site with a legitimate reason for linking to you then I wouldn't lose any sleep over it at all.

In fact I'd say it's a big win.

So is example.com ranking for terms that example2.com used rank for? If you check your analytics you should be able to see if those keywords are driving traffic.

I would doubt that it's solely the domain name causing this.

How far have the rankings slipped for exmaple2.com? Have all rankings dropped the same amount? Are head terms affected more than longtail terms? Does it still rank for it's brand name?

Generally speaking most of the data SEOMoz has about your campaigns is stuff that a determined competitor could find out anyway (and probably for cheaper than bribing Rand).

Plus if Matt Cutts wanted to get data on you he wouldn't have to go through a 3rd party - he'd just send around a streetview car

I'm with Mr Weiss on this one. It's dodgy.

Hi Larry,

To get a report of all of your competitors backlinks you'll need to use Open Site Explorer (opensiteexplorer.org). Just input the domain that you want links for and you can access all of the data you need.

If you want to compare your links with their links I recommend going to the "Linking Domains" tab, selecting "Show domains with links to all pages on this root domain" and then downloading that report. Do the same for your domain and then compare the two reports in Excel.

SEOMoz is full of advice on how to get more backlinks. Two places I'd recommend are today's blog post (http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-noob-guide-to-link-building) and the beginner's guide (http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo).

I've got a couple of recommendations.

First off you can demote a site link in Google Webmaster Tools. You can find the option in configuration/sitelinks. Although Google is obviously assuming that the pages with current site links are important somehow so it might be a good time to recheck your site architecture.

Secondly you should probably remove the no-follow attribute from internal links on your homepage. They won't be having a beneficial effect and could negatively impact how search engines view certain pages on your site.

Hope that helps.

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If the URLs are friendly then you could try and rebuild everything but keep the important URLs static.

Failing that you can migrate the pages onto new URLs by using 301 redirects. Doing this shouldn't have too much of an adverse affect on your rankings (not in the long term anyway) and also means you can swap to nice looking URLs.

Alternatively if you want to swap over to a new domain then you can use 301 redirects and the change domain option in Google webmaster tools.

If you're changing the site architecture - say for example because you're editing the main navigation - you will want to make sure that you prioritize your important pages but that's really just SEO 101 and probably similar to what you have in place anyway.

Hope that helps but feel free to ask if you want clarity on something.

Then real benefit of contributing to an industry forum is that it allows you to build authority within that industry and to connect with other webmasters. You can then leverage the relationships with those other webmasters at a later date.

The actual benefit of having a signature link is negligible.

It's counting ALL the links.

Reducing the number of links on the page is best practice but I don't think there's a penalty for having too many links.

If you're struggling to rank the issue is probably elsewhere.

If you export to .CSV and put it into Excel  the referring page (referrer) for the 404 error can be seen in column AM.

That should be enough to fix it although if it's a dynamic site it can end up being more complex than that.

I agree with Ryan.

No. It's not going to hurt you.

In a word?

No.

Or at least so little that the answer is basically no.

#1 for everything is always a start.

Increasing long tail traffic is always an option (assuming you don't already have plenty of longtail traffic).

Depending on the industry it might be an option to increase traffic from referring sites or social media not to mention affiliate marketing.

Write unique content for your top 100 pages. Wait a month to see the results and then decided whether it will take too much time to write all those pages.

Regarding pagination - urls look fine and you should use rel=prev/rel=next instead of the no-index tag.

Regarding sorting - Google have a handy little sheet about this which you may or may not have seen that covers this kind of issue

Is it going to take longer to clean the site up than to start a new one?

If so, I'd bite the bullet and start a new one.

You'd be hard pressed to find any automated directory submission that's white hat. In fact auto directory submissions are pretty much the definition of crap hat SEO.

This soon after Panda you'd have to be particularly brave to try en-masse directory submission. I'm not saying that it won't work or that it will have a negative impact on your site but I certainly wouldn't try it.

As part of a balanced campaign I don't see a problem with getting links from dog blogs.

In your shoes I'd make sure I had other more relevant links as well but if the dog blogs are easy enough to get and you just want a few links then go for it.

I'd go for a separate page for CityA and CityB.

You'll probably want to promote the CityB page on other sites that are relevant to CityB - local directories etc.