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Hi Robert, Thanks for the answer, that was pretty much my take on the matter. The sites in question are all sites build by the previous SEO company, so there seems to be a small link network. Their Auth and PR has dropped dramatically. Thanks Rob

Good point Alan. I now have access to WMT and while I wouldn't want any of my sites to have links from the sites they are getting links from, there are no warnings or messages from Google. There on-site SEO seems alright, shouldn't have been anything there that caused them an issue.

Ideally, you'd fix the crawl path, but that may be tricky (unless they've patched the CMS). You could add the canonical to just the "page=1" version, but admittedly that's a bit code-intensive. An alternate idea - that is fairly Google-friendly. You could add a "View All" version and then point the canonical on all search pages to that version. Especially since all is only 2 pages, that could work well in your case and you wouldn't have to worry about all the variants or search results not getting crawled.

And if you need  a technical explanation on this, Rob, including some proof, here it is: http://rob-hammond.co.uk/how-google-handles-alt-text-in-h1-tags (look at the bottom what they have to say about other SEs besides google.) also look at this, a similar question asked earlier in SEOmoz Q&A: http://www.seomoz.org/q/do-images-work-as-a-h1 warm regards to all!

Thanks for catching that Ryan! Having a bad copy/paste day