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It sounds like you are mostly concerned about the Panda algorithm.  A site with lots of duplicate content and nothing else of value other than the duplicate content could definitely be affected by Panda.  While it is true that redirecting a Penguin hit site to another will pass on the algorithmic issues to the new site, redirecting a Panda hit site really should not.  With that being said, it doesn't make sense to do a redirect.  If the issue was that you had page after page of non-original content then noindexing that content should do the trick.  The next time Google refreshes Panda (which is usually monthly) then you should be in the good books as far as Panda is concerned.  Putting the same content on a new domain, and noindexing the duplication wouldn't really work any better IMO. However, you have to have good, useful content there in order to rank.  If all you've got is affiliate content that adds no unique value, then you're in trouble. There are things other than Panda that can affect rankings though too.  You may want to look at your analytics data and sort it by Google organic traffic to see if you can pinpoint the day of your decline.  Then, compare that to known Panda/Penguin dates. As mentioned by others, if you have been building links then you should look at the Penguin algorithm as well.

Carl, I have a few ideas and suggestions. I will respond to your original mentions: "Obviously, the affiliate store will not be unique content, it will be made using the datafeeds from cj.com et al, and so I don't want to get any duplicate content type penalties from Google for this store." I find this interesting that you automatically assume that you have to use the original datafeeds from CJ. I would encourage you to contact Commission Junction directly on this matter. Many services allow you to provide an alternative product description, etc. The faq section of feedwizards has an example which you can read about here: https://dashboard.feedwizards.com/faq/9 (look for: How do I avoid duplicate content on shopping engines & affiliates using my feeds) Matt Cutts as also spoken on this topic as well in the video I included. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z07IfCtYbLw Hope this helps watch?v=z07IfCtYbLw

What I do is work with the spreadsheets to get it down to one link per domain and then I make a spreadsheet out of that.

Woops! Keri's right - I read that response "Thanks for the reply, customer services." and thought that you meant you received an answer via email. I made an assumption there. Sorry! Anyways, can you please send us an email by going here and following the instructions under the search bars? http://moz.com/help/contact. It sounds like there's enough issues here that we should look into each one one-by-one. Again, I'm sorry for misreading your post earlier.

Just as Miriam points out, ranking in the local map pack will be tough outside your specific location, but local content pages can rank and bring leads. I'd consider using blog posts or a project showcase to create location specific content that is outside the main location you have.  If you title a blog post "Cityname Kitchen Remodel Project" and maybe include other niche keywords you can create great content for a prospect as well as search visibility in other specific areas. A solid post or project showcase page with a text overview of the project, bulleted list of products used, before and after photos, are all great content additions to the site.  Go a step further and create a video recap of the project that can be placed on the page as well as added to YouTube and optimized there can create an additional opportunity to land in the SERPs for a local search.

I'll probably go with a nicely designed iframe, with the full text and a link to the site's original post so interested readers can read more by accessing your site. Consider all possibilities, like the iframe size auto-adjusting to the available size, or giving the users the ability to choose from different sizes (like youtube does).

Thanks for the reply, Tom. The statement you make about the rankings not magically appearing is great to hear. Have been trying to explain this to the client for a while so always good to see someone else agreeing with me. For now will continue the strategy of trying to clear up the links as best we can and looking at keywords which were not being spammed to death before and trying to rank for those.

Hi Mister G, .htaccess files are the means used for creating redirects in a LAMP setup using an Apache server. To create redirects on a Windows box you need to use a quite different method. This quick reference chart for creating redirects should give you the information you need for most normal redirect situations. However, when working with .htaccess we would normally create a single rule that redirects all .html files to the .aspx file of the same name. Ours is a LAMP shop, so Windows is not our forte, but I believe you can do the same thing with the proviso that your server is set up for it. A little hard since I don't know exactly which Windows Server setup you are dealing with, but This link might help you out in doing that. Hope that helps, Sha

but remeber thats notyy a on-index tag, its a no-index,follow tag, you want the links followed, but the pages not indexed.

Will have a look thanks. I wonder if the control panel on the server also makes a difference. I guess I need to weigh up fast indexing against not being hosted in the country where my customers live.

Great analogy!!

You might want to elaborate on why you have pages of duplicate content. I'm not sure I understand that point. Normally I'd say let your list be indexed and canonical the products. In fact, I'm not sure if a canonical on a list would help all that much. Nofollow links don't pass PR. They are still spidered and ranked. A robots would work best to exclude an entire section of your website. And, yes, Webmaster tools will complain because you've cordoned off a large section of your site. I seriously hope you have some unique content on your site somewhere because it sounds like you just de-indexed all your pages!

You can get site links for subdomains as well as subfolders. This is not a problem. Look at this example https://www.google.com.au/webhp?hl=en#hl=en&output=search&sclient=psy-ab&q=iboats&oq=iboats&aq=f&aqi=g4&aql=&gs_l=hp.3..0l4.1161l2474l0l2774l6l6l0l0l0l0l581l2005l3-4j0j1l5l0.&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.r_qf.,cf.osb&fp=1a7137b3da639030&biw=1280&bih=881

Hi MisterG, I created another test blog, around 2-3 days back, normally I get them to index within around 1-8 hours, but the blog still hasnt indexed yet. very odd.

Hi EGOL Thanks for the reply, your idea about 'uniquifying' (I feel I may have made a word up there hehe) the product pages is certainly one I have been considering. It does raise a couple of issues however. Firstly, I would need to get a considerable amount of data on the products to see which ones are selling. This would need to be long enough to remove any seasonal variations in the stats. The second issue is that the affiliate products pull from merchant data feeds so any changes I make to the content will get overwritten. The idea of uniquifying (if I use it enough it might become a 'proper' word!!!) certain pages is one I am open to doing on my smaller sites but for the larger sites it could pose some issues. An example site can be found at www ukchic co uk  - have taken out the dots incase people thought I was posting the url for a cheeky backlink

Did you 301-redirect or canonical from the old site that was optimized previously for this term? You could be seeing an indirect impact of back-links to that old site (which wouldn't show as links to the current site, depending on how you redirected them).

yes, we have resorted to this. We have a canonical tag to the blocked .com version of the site so hopefully that gets rid of the page. The client want's it removed 'yesterday' but only so much I can do when I don't control Google personally! Thanks again for the advice

Thanks for replies. I have decided to take the financial hit and drop the dutch server in favour of a UK one. Hopefully the ranking increase and the extra traffic covers this loss Thanks, Carl

I think if the data is already there (your already showing product sizes) then adding rich snippet tags will not make any difference except notify Google that they are there and can be used in SERPS. We have just applied this to a few of our websites which are eCommerce, message me if you want to look at how we have used the tags.

I have a new domain and I am beating pages with much higher page ranks / DA etc Typically in the niche I am targeting if I use the Keyword Difficulty tool i get an average of about 50% - I think this tool mainly uses DA / PA to work out the difficulty %. After I will do a Google search and look on the pages for mentions of the keyword's I am going to target with my pages / posts. Often I find there are few mentions or 1 exact match mention in the content with the page title being something different / not exact match. I will then build a page which is targeted specifically for the keyword and optimise for it, I don't over do the optimisation - if the other pages only have 2 mentions of the keyword in the content I would normally build a post with say 3 - 5 mentions. I have noticed when going over 5 keyword (aprox) pages tend to rank poorly or rank badly then crawl back up the SERP's slower - this could be due to the domain on the site being 1 month old. I also only build quality content that is relevant to the search term, this should prevent the pages dropping from the SERP's (I hope!). Obviously if your niche has highly optimised pages and a bunch of links pointing at each page then this method is not going to work. Hope that helps.