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We have been dealing with this ranking drop since 2/27/2012 when Panda came out with their update. All of the top 10 sites that used to rank on "hcg" have completely dropped out, while 10 completely new ones have popped up.

I agree with all the social media ideas. Thanks for the response.

Do Google+ pages gain authority with age? Does it matter very much if I wait a few months to make a Google+ page as opposed to establishing it now, even if I won't be doing much work on it for a while?

Our title tag is "<title>HCG</span> Diet - HCG Drops - Example Weight Loss - HCG Diet Weight Loss</title>"

But in google it is only displaying "HCG diet"

Reasons? What can I do to fix this? I'm trying to get this fixed asap, as it is our homepage that is being effected by it.

I know that making a user register will drop the the conversion rate. However, there are a lot of sites that still stand by making users register before you can purchase. I was wondering if they know something that I don't that would outweigh the loss of those conversions.

What exactly are the Pro's & Con's of making your customers register before being able to purchase an item?

We own hgcdiet.com and are in the process of having the platform built in Megento and should be ready to launch Wednesday of this week. We currently have amazing rankings for all the major terms in the industry such as "HCG" #1 "HCG diet" #1 and I am super worried about losing ground. I want to identify the road blocks for the transition and figure out what I need to do as far as SEO. If you have done this transition before and have some red flags I would love to hear about them. I am stressed to the max about moving this site.

Great advice Ryan.

I'll make sure to keep an eye on that redirecting and keep it from going into a never ending loop. I can see how that could easily happen. I'll look into a developer, sounds like the safest bet.

We are moving our site from one platform to another. Currently on our site we have two homepages. "www.homepage.com" and "www.homepage.com/Index" Both pages have some high quality links pointing in on them.

The problem:

We are going to be doing a 301 redirect from "www.homepage.com/Index"  page to "www.homepage.com" as we are moving platforms at this time we weren't going to create a  "www.homepage.com/Index" page all. This leaves this page as an empty URL. With this webpage disappearing all together will we lose traction as we are redirecting an empty URL? Or is it better to recreate this "www.homepage.com/Index" on our new platform redirect it  and wait for google to deIndex this page for us?

As well is there a tutorial for how to implement 301 redirects or is this something worth looking for a developer and pay someone to do?

I know in the past footers have been seen as a bad idea. I need to get up to date. Does having footer links that point to your own site with anchor texts keywords create problems? or is it safe to have?

Will it do anything to our google rankings? Is it going to penalize us? As well, how many is acceptable, do I want all 77 links or have 15 with sub-categories?

Lets say I want to branch out from the normal ".com" genre,  can you Rank a ".ly" in google search results?

Great, Thanks.  it says that it's automated, but has anyone found a way to have a link stand out to google saying, "use me to be a sitelink"?