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Hi Rand Many thanks for taking the time to check by on this one. I appreciate you giving your valuable input. Peter

Try contacting the webmasters of the spammy sites to takes the links down before disavowing (see Matt Cutts video on the subject).

The whole site is wrapped in a form, styled with tables (probably just coded straight from PSD slices), has tons of inline javascript, lack analytics code, no images have alt tags, the footer text is printed after the closing html tag... pretty much everything haha.

This video provides a good answer to your question: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UpK1VGJN4XY watch?v=UpK1VGJN4XY

Yes. definitely have to agree with that. If you're doing it for SEO, don't bother. You'll be found for your business name anyway.

Hi CFSSEO, I would suggest reading the following: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/wrong-page-ranking-in-the-results-6-common-causes-5-solutions Might help you fix your problem. Regards

Well, they are dealership sites and the content is vehicle inventory.  So not real unique great content there.   Building links fast would be anything faster than doing it by hand!

ha ha... thanks for the story.  Great! When they call me, I just tell them don't call back.

Gotcha thx for the help

What is the goal of the sitemap.  And I'm assuming you are talking about a html sitemap, not a XML sitemap. If it is for users, guide them to the best category pages. If it is for SEO, don't have one.  Focus on building organized XML Sitemaps.

What about turning them into regional sites?  A has inventory located in this state, B inventory only in that state, etc.  So they are not exact clones.

Yes they can, I would add rel= previous and rel=next to them http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com.au/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html