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I'd say you covered all the bases, Brad. I don't know what you could have done to protect yourself any more. Sean, I think your client is playing a dangerous game. My advice would be to first cull any of those additional sites that aren't highly relevant to their own. Write them off as a bad investment. One thought that occurs to me is that rather than setting a 302 from all the remaining sites to the client's site, maybe you could redirect them to a selected site from their recent acquisitions. Then redirect THAT site to the client's site. Using 302s is still safer, IMO, while you go through the process of requesting changes on link destinations. Relevance is obviously the key... stretching that is treading on thin ice. My approach to that is, if it needs any statement of justification.... it's not justifiable.

I'd agree that it's a bad idea, particularly at that scale. If relevance of the redirected domains is high, and it's just a couple of domains, I imagine it wouldn't be a problem. The fact that they're using a 302 will afford them some protection, but how long are they planning to leave that "temporary" redirect in place?

That's correct, Gina. Eliran, you need to set rel="publisher" on your home page and tie it to the company page on G+. Using rel="author" set to a company page won't work (it may check out as okay on the rich snippet testing tool, but it won't appear in the SERPs, and it won't tie the G+ page and the site together in the Knowledge Graph)

Takeshi is right, James- you gain nothing by adding nofollow to internal links. In addition, if you attract attention with a lot of it, you could even incur a penalty. Matt Cutts has stated more than once that nofollowing internal links isn't advisable, except perhaps in limited special circumstances, such as to a contact form or privacy policy. If you get carried away with internal nofollow, it could look like you're trying to sculpt pagerank, and that could cause you problems you don't want to have.

Gina is correct, Eliran. rel="author" is intended only for personal G+ profiles. You would need to set up your company's G+ page as the publisher and embed the rel="publisher" tag on your site, then use rel="author" for each individual author. You can review the procedure here: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1708844

Matt Cutts has said on a couple of occasions, that nofollow on internal links is generally not a good practice. In the same breath, though, he did say that adding a nofollow on internal navigational links to things like Contact us or Privacy Policy is probably nothing to worry about.

Ben, I'm hardly what could be called a code monkey, but I've never heard of a method of noindexing just a portion of a page. Certainly there are ways put certain content within a container and keep it from being indexed, but I'd have to wonder if it could be done without creating a risk of being seen as cloaking. Hopefully, someone with deeper coding knowledge than mine (which won't be difficult) can offer a solution, and we'll both learn something.

Great, Gina! There's nothing like that feeling of satisfaction when you recover a site's positions. I wasn't around when you had your issue, but I do know what you mean about the value of the community. There's a lot of talent here, and many of them dedicate a lot of time to helping people learn how to do things the right way. You can't put a price on that. Congratulations on your success... now pay it forward.

Absolutely, Jonny. This week, Google introduced a change to this (http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=189077) which allows a default setting. But I've been doing this for a couple of years, with just one or two pages of a foreign language, placing idiom-specific hreflang attributes on those pages, and none at all on the rest of the pages, which are all in English. It works just fine, so I really don't know exactly what the x-default is supposed to accomplish, other than perhaps avoid having the rest of the site bracketed with a foreign language page.

Godad, there is really no way to keep others from stealing your content via copy/paste. You can prevent right-click, but that is easily circumvented. Setting a canonical will, however, signal the SEs (Google, Bing and Yahoo all observe canonicals) that your version is the original. which affords some protection, at least in terms of attribution. Dealing with such copy theft is just an unfortunate issue we have to face. Google, at least, is pretty good about being able to determine the original version. As far as copied versions being able to outrank your original page, there can be many other factors in play, beyond the copy itself.

I think the OP is referring specifically to Penguin, Francisco. I have seen quite a lot of fluctuation yesterday and today, as well, particularly with my US clients. (AU seems quite stable). Given the amount of variance, it wouldn't surprise me if something was going on. Maybe we'll see some confirmation one way or the other tomorrow. Barry S and Danny S both usually put the question to the folks at the 'Plex.

I have to agree with Francisco... mentioning Android in your copy or even a title, is generally accepted practice (although technically, it must be followed by the symbol the first time it appears on the page). You can see more on this here: http://developer.android.com/distribute/googleplay/promote/brand.html

Are you referring to the hreflang attribute? If so, it will depend upon your site structure, but it would be a simple matter of adding the hreflang="de" to the page in the appropriate link rel on the German page.

I don't know how the mozbot analyzes that aspect of pages, so this may or may not be a factor in it declaring the two pages as duplicate. But the fact that all your metadata is nearly identical for the two pages can't be helping.

Sean- You don't say if the content on the mobile site is unique, but assuming it is, I think that I would first just set canonicals to the main site. Assuming the site hasn't just been put up, I find it odd that you're finding only a few pages indexed. Unless there are known issues that concern you, I think I'd probably submit an xml sitemap for the mobile site and wait to see it indexed. From what you've said at this point, I don't see any need to noindex the mobile version.

Dave, you might want to check out UN.CO.VER, from Textbroker: http://www.textbroker.com/uncover/

I use it a lot, and it's customizable to the level of checking you desire. Nice, because it'll give you a live link to the location where it's detected duplicate content. Free, by the way.

Thanks, Darryl-

Passwording the site seemed like a good option, although I wasn't aware that Matt had ever stated that. That being the case, it would certainly seem like the way to go. Thanks for the input!

I'd certainly agree with that, Dunamis. I don't ask for links, and I don't respond well when asked for one, unless I have a relationship with the person.

I have even been asked for one by someone I knew, and tried to explain nicely that an OBL from an SEO site to a real estate site didn't really make much sense for either of us.

My advice, Rhys, would be to focus first on establishing a relationship. If the resulting relationship is solid, and both sites are relevant, a simple mention of your need to acquire more natural links may well spawn an offer.

Thanks for the response, Matt. So you feel like that's a sure way? There seems to be some different opinions on whether or not all the SEs will respect that. I had always thought it was a solid way to do it,too. But some of the arguments I'm hearing have me in doubt, now.

The first thing that I would do on a revival project is a site survey, to identify your on-page situation. You'll also want to dive into your link profile, as you're bound to have a number of issues there, on an aged, unmaintained site.

I only glanced at the site, but it seems like you definitely have some meat on the bone there to work with. Looking at the meta data, I'd guess that it may have been optimized by someone that thought "if a little bit is good, then a lot is better."

There's definitely a lot that can be done with the on-page. Good luck on it! Should be a fun one.