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I have seen a lot of sites that tie in main keywords closer together not rank as well as ones that use them in a more natural fashion.

We have done our own tests with this, and while it can take a while to find the right combination, the payoff is well worth it. When you construct the title, make sure the content, description and keyword list are all consistent.

On of the formats we have found to be successful for titles is to use the main keyword as the leader, and then be more descriptive in the secondary part of the title.

Example: Cane Beds | Boogie Beds Shopping Online Store

Keep in mind this is only an example, and could be polished better than this. If possible, use subpages to rank for additional terms or keywords rather than packing them all into one page and hoping for the best.

This is to target a language specifically. A better explanation of how to utilize this feature is at the link at the bottom of this post. But first, a few snippets:

"your ads can appear for customers who use Google products and third-party websites in the languages that your campaign targets. This helps ensure that your ads will appear on sites that are written in the language of the customers you'd like to reach."

"Let's say you sell coffee beans online, and you want to target Spanish-speaking customers. You set up an AdWords campaign targeted to the Spanish language, with Spanish ads and keywords. As long as your customers' Google interface language settings are set to Spanish, your coffee ads can show when your Spanish language customers search for your keywords."

https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/1722078?hl=en

1. Make sure you have no internal links pointing to that page
2. Put a rule in place with a 410, meaning GONE before filing the reconsideration request.
3. Do not redirect the page with a 301 or any other method. Remember, you want the page to disappear, not redirect.

Also, what is the message you received stating that only that one URL was penalized? Very strange to hear that only one was affected. Run a link check to see what other sites or listings are pointing to that URL, and if possible, log in to the citation or platform and change the link to one you know is not affected.

Have all the pages on all the sites you control and have revised been resubmitted? If you leave it to Google to do this on their own, it will take a very long time, most likely years before they are all gone. Even tho its a very simple tool, try using the "fetch as Google" tool in Webmaster tools. This can be done on both an individual URL basis, or you can resubmit the entire page and all its connected links. Once you have submitted all the offending URL's that contain the revised information, refresh the sitemap, and resubmit the entire site(s).

For the Wiki pages that you dont own, it will take a long time for the indexed result to change, but as long as the information on the page that it links to doesnt contain the information you dont want, you are fine. Since Wiki is so large, it may take some time for them to revise that indexed data. On the other hand, since Wiki is so big and is most likely crawled daily by Google, you might see chnages quickly. How long has it been since you modified the info?

For the on site issues, if you are seeing a very slow reindex of the modified pages, you could also create entirely new pages, and have the old page 301 redirect to the new one that does not contain the sponser.

One more thing you could try is a press release stating that the alliance no longer exists. Word it in a positive light.

Just wanted to add:

Do both urls show up for a page? Meaning if you had a page about dog treats, can that page be accessed through both urls on the Web (manually or in serp results)? If so, you need to redirect the domain you don't want to use immediately to prevent duplications. Just parking one on top of the other usually will not take care of replacing the other url. You don't want to have both indexed at the same time.

Glad I could help. I really hope you get this all sorted out. Good news is, you found the problem and are working to fix it, which is much better than most people would have been able to do. Have high hopes!

"the two pages they've copied are really important sales pages (remortgage and first time buyer) so for us, it's a massive shame. "

There is still a way to promote those pages, just not using Google organic to do so. Modify some of the content, create a press release, promote that page using social networks, and drive interest to that page and your site the old fashioned way. PPC is always an option as well. Remember, there are many ways to get traffic, don't lose hope or the vision.

On a side note, is this your company? 
https://plus.google.com/u/0/+TurnkeymortgagesCoUk/posts

I can add you to my circles, so if you have any more issues or need additional help just let me know.

If it isn't too much work for your staff, I would consider branching off into individual actors interviews, instead of grouping them into one long page. This will allow for better optimization on each page, and better usability for traffic, since they dont have to scroll through a huge page with many interviews. At the bottom of each, have a link that allows users to access the next interview easily. This way, you are focusing on a wider scope of keywords, have multiple opportunities for rankings, and can set up a top-level menu item based around the event with links to the internal pages.

Something like:

DOMAIN.com/inside-tick-tick-boom -- landing page

DOMAIN.com/inside-tick-tick-boom/interviews

DOMAIN.com/inside-tick-tick-boom/interviews/actors_names

By using this method you also will have multiple opportunities for social sharing, since you have an increased number of pages each with their own share links.

Hope this helps!

"the key phrase "silverleaf resorts" is placed right at the beginning of the URL, which in my opinion influences the position in search results."

This is exactly what I was thinking. The way they have it set up makes perfect sense, since consumers will often type in the name of the business first, then "reviews" or "complaints" second.

Seems like they have their URL structure set up to the closest it can be to the company name without being sued lol.

Nothing he can do? Lmao what a terrible answer. On the old site, you should still have Ftp setup. In that account, go into your htaccess file and add the rule that redirects all traffic  to your existing domain, or the one you want to get indexed. Also add a robots rule denying any access to the old domain ftp.

Option 2 is to delete any and all old site files in the domain Ftp you want to get rid of, have the site urls return a 404 error, and do a url removal request in webmaster tools. Option 1 would be safer imo, but doing option 2 will get rid of the old domain for good.

I'm not so sure I would rush into anything without doing some research first.

Run a backlink profile in Open Site Explorer, and look at the domain authority. If the linking domain has a very high authority, and the content is not an exact duplicate, then I would leave them in place. People should use the disavow tool with care, as it can potentially do more harm then good if you are not careful.

You can also do a check for blacklisting on the linking domain, to ensure that it has a good track record.

Contact the sites responsible for showing the rich snippet. If you do not want to have it displayed, then they should be able to turn that snippet off for you. Same with the reservation system. Depending upon what platform you are using, there is probably a reservation system available within the code, or through a plugin.

I 'm not sure if setting up a strickly internal booking system only on the hotel's website makes sense tho. Depending upon what site people find the hotel listed on, they are going to want to book it right then and there, and not have to link to another site to do so. Be careful to not make it more complicated then it needs to be.

I've never seen a site that was "unfixable" just some that took a lot longer than others to recover.

What steps have you taken so far, and also what methods are you using to track the changes?

www.site.com/category-page/product-page

I would prefer this method, because that is what a user would expect, although it can go either way.

Using the bolded method above is better for navigation, as a user and search engine can see how the product relates to the category it placed in. Generally, URL structures like this also include breadcrumbs, allowing for a user to quickly go back to the main category page and begin a new search, if desired. Having simple navagation can increase onsite time, since it's easy to view content and products.

I can also vouch for the other method for a few reasons. Using a shortened URL is more direct, and IMO better for seo. This allows you to set up the top level or category page with anchor text links directed at the subpages or products. When one of those is clicked, the page the user lands on will be the shorter, more direct version, with a clean URL. I think Google likes this method better, as the end URL is more directly related to the product being referenced, without any pollution. (unless you are using markup for breadcrumbs).

Definitely agree with Rand. When you submit your requests, send Google a note saying that the person is trying to get you to pay to have the links removed, possibly even including the email/text that stated he wanted you to pay. I doubt it will take them long to respond. I would NOT pay the person a dime. Submitting the request via the clients webmaster account should take care of the damage.

"That still leaves the issue of returning keyword rankings back to 'normal'. I'm still wondering what effect physically removing the links (and coughing up the cash) would have versus submitting a disavow file for all low quality directories in the client's profile."

Google's disavow tool is made for this. Otherwise, a competitor could submit your site to as many bad places as they wanted, and there wouldn't be anything you could do about it. As long as you submit a complete report of all the links in question, you should be fine.

"We can pay this ninja $800+ to have him/her remove the links from his directory network, and hope it does the trick."

Ninja? More like a clown, lol.

I have tried both options before, and tend to see the CSV document be the more reliable of the two. I have seen the same thing as you, where the PDF seems like it leaves out information. Unfortunately, a manual check would be required to make sure that all are included.

I always have the team download them first, double check for errors, them email them from our company email address. Makes it a bit more personal that way, rather then it being emailed directly from analytics.

I would use either Joomla or WordPress in a subfolder of your main site. Easyblog for Joomla is great, some work has to be done to get rid of ugly URLs. WordPress would proably be your best bet if you are looking to use it for blogging only.

I also noticed you were still using Joomla 1.5. I would think about upgrading that platform, due to security and it being unsupported by most modern plugins. If you like Joomla, and want to stick with it, upgrade to 3.2 and install easyblog. Their site has a ton of info on setting the URL structure to "simple" mode, which gets rid of the stuff you typically see in poorly planned out sites (/component/easyblog/YOURBLOGHERE/post/etc)

We have used both in the past, it really depends what you are familiar with and what platform you like the best.

Domain 1 had domain age, and the authority of the citation sites linking to it. Most likely Google had already crawled them, knew they existed, and will now have to recrawl and assign a new ranking. Be ready to wait a while.

This was very common at an SEO firm I used to work at, where they would create location or keyword-based domains in addition to the main branded domain in an effort to gain additional rank. They were frequently pummeled by the larger branded sites in rankings. Google targets these types of sites which have thin content, short term domain registrations, lack of citations/backlinks, etc etc.

If the site is hosted on the same ip address, in the same webmaster/analytics account AND has similar wording, I'm willing to bet Google will see them as similar and smack them both, or index the newer domain due to being seen as "fresher" content. Unless the time has been spent in giving both domains some love regarding citations and content I do not see this doing well in the SERP.

Followerwonk is a great resource for this. Also, I remember an old MOZ post about guest blogging, definitely worth a read. Full article here: http://moz.com/blog/five-steps-to-finding-the-right-guest-blogging-opportunities. Might open up a few new paths for you, or at least spark an idea. Hope this helps!

The text replacement for using cufon is done by Javascript. The bots don't run scripts on a page so they will see the original text and not the Cufon modified version. So, Cufon should not affect SEO.

The text is still the text, no matter what it looks like to the end user. Great question tho!

If you would like to see an example where someone tested this, please check out this article:
http://www.aerodigital.co.uk/blog/negative-seo-effects-of-cufon/

Take a look at the pages that are indexed. Chances are that since it is a cart or CMS-based site, you just need to use robots.txt to block out some areas you don't want indexed. You also need to look at your indexed pages, to see if any of them are duplicates, meaning you have 2 or more url's that display the same content.

"It's an ecommerce site but i can't see any issues with duplicate content - they employ a very good canonical tag strategy. Could it be that Google has decided to ignore the canonical tag? "

Could be that your cms or cart is not forwarding all the pages to the canonical version. Again, check to see if you can access multiple versions of the same page. Ecom and CMS sites always have these types of errors if you dont keep a close eye on the URL's since they are database driven, vs static HTML. Look for www or non-www versions of pages, url's with and without index.php, etc.

Once you target what the offending url's are, use redirects to forward them to the proper and search engine friendly version.