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As you know, many reasons could lead to the drop. I would focus on: 1.) Link Profile: Examine your link profile and try to eliminate any spammy inbound links (email the webmaster/disavow) 2.) Does the landing page closely match on the previous site? If the 301's do work, but content is dramatically different, it will likely cause a drop in organics for that kw. Good luck!

My understanding is this: If its a duplicate, as in a copy and paste article, then Google will eventually de-index the duplication and keep the original article. In your clients case though, they are providing the source links, so google doesnt label it as duplicate content, but sees it as syndicated content. Look at news sources for example. The same article syndicated on multiple sites are all indexed and stay indexed. (this is the case for your clients site) What i would tell your client is that fresh and unique content on their site is key for SEO. By syndicating articles, it doesn't provide any benefits for SEO in terms of unique and fresh content, so the operation is pointless unless its for user experience only. Give them an example, say its the same as giving away articles to other websites, and then reusing them on their site as "second hand" articles. Just because its word press doesn't mean its any different to any other website out there. Good luck! Greg

At first I was leaning to disagree. But couldn't find anything to back it up. I know some seo tools have ip address checkers to make sure your in a good ip neighborhood and block. I thought this would fall in the same line as what was originally asked. "A clean IP address. You might think your site is squeaky clean, but did you know your IP address has a dirty secret? That’s right. Unbeknownst to you, your neighbor is into some very shady things. Check to see if you’re in a bad IP neighborhood by running an IP checker like MXToolbox.com." The entire post can be found here: http://www.bruceclay.com/blog/2011/04/the-seo-bucket-list-3-things-to-do-before-your-site-dies/ So because of these tools checking your ip block I was always under assumption that a shady site on a server could in fact have some impact on your rankings. However I am hard pressed to find any evidence to support this. Heres another post from above reference: "About 3% of all web sites "own" a private ip number, with the remainder being on virtual, or name-based, servers. Although only 3% are dedicated ip's, we have seen that in many instances well over 90% of the top-50 results in the search engines are sites having dedicated ip numbers. This was so strange that we have repeatedly validated these findings, and have found that switching a site from a virtual ip to a dedicated ip number alone has caused significant ranking increases. Of course, the web is so dynamic that this could be coincidence, but we do not think so. Likewise, we have found that there are "dirty" ip c-blocks, ranges of ip numbers that have been tarnished by spammers and left to be reassigned to unsuspecting sites. If your site is in the range of the spammers ip, then you are equally penalized. We have likewise found instances where simply moving a site has caused the ranking to improve." Im glad I came across this post. Learn something new everyday. Did I misunderstand the statement on the above mentioned article or is this perhaps an outdated theory? Thanks in any event for teaching an old dog something new.

Its a no questions asked answer- SUBFOLDERS-  by creating subdomains it's like saying your a separate entity and by doing that you will not be sharing all the value from the main domain and all the domains combined ie. pagerank, pages indexed, links, etc.