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Just worth a follow up, there are now multiple tools and services that help with this. I wont link to them because I own one of them, but just search google for either bad link removal tool or bad link removal services to find a bevy of companies assisting in the process.

You can do it either way you like, just be consistent. You also might want to specify in Google Webmaster Tools your preferred domain.

Take a look at the SEOMoz recommended list, that is always a good place to start!

http://www.seomoz.org/article/recommended

Having the exact date would be useful. You can then compare it to http://www.seomoz.org/google-algorithm-change

Did you get any unnatural link notices in GWT? You can PM me if you want me to take a look.

My company, Virante, studied this question about a year and a half ago. It appears that string distance measurements like Levenshtein Distance or Jaro Winkler Distance correlate well with rankings - this means that it might be nice to have ikeyword.com or ekeyword.com, but not keyword1keyword2.com. You quickly start to lose value at that point.

My vote for them would be to build a brand in this case, unless they can get a true EMD.

Don't feel dumb - link building is one of the hardest things in our industry. Here is a good start: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-noob-guide-to-link-building

Google announced several changes the day before this, but that does not mean they necessarily rolled them out that day. My guess is that you received some sort of penalty, but we would have to know the site. You can private message me if you are interested in me taking a look.

1. McAfee is blocking some included content on your page as being unsafe. Not sure that works into things, but potentially a problem.

2. Your page lay out pushes the content all the way to the bottom with a giant iframe in the middle, you could have been dinged by one of Google's layout algos --- did you recently acquire your rankings, some things Google only checks once you get substantial impressions.

However, given the modest link profile for your site, you can expect to see wild fluctuations. If you lose just a couple of links or competitors gain them you can expect substantial rankings changes. Work on building up your link authority with some good link bait.

My guess is they spider the way Googlebot spiders - finding links on your home page, following those links, and finding more links on the subsequent pages, so on and so forth. I doubt they look at the sitemap, since it rarely reflects the true importance of pages on your site, which tend to be linked to more often.

We have been seeing issues with nearly every ranking check software out there - only our home-brewed solutions seem to be working at the moment.

When did you lose your rankings? You may have lost your rankings in the myriad algo updates, panda releases, etc. in the last month or so.

All of the changes you mentioned above should not have  had a negative impact.

A lot of "semantic" search technology is multi-lingual as it looks at factors like word proximity and collocation which still matter regardless of language. Moreover, I am fairly certain Google has teams of developers dedicated to search in multiple languages. While you can expect that they wont be quite as sophisticated in a non-english language search engine, whatever gains you might find in that Google isn't as "smart" simply means that more people can effectively compete against you.

Absolutely. There is no reason to believe that sites that were hit by Panda can no longer pass link juice.

SEMPO would be a good start. Add into that things like Google Adwords, Google Analytics and Bing AdCenter certifications

You should direct this question to api@seomoz.org or put in a support ticket.

However, there are strict rate limits on the API, so there is the potential that you are making requests too quickly.

Not really. There are some ways to get at those numbers but none of them are going to be exact. If you had fairly steady rankings for that term over the last 2 years, you could extrapolate search volumes by looking at your analytics and estimating CTR. If you run Adwords you can use impression numbers.

You are going to see very little benefit from optimized anchor text on internal links. Use the anchor text that will most encourage your users to keep clicking through. This doesn't mean necessarily "read more", though. Think about calls to action in anchor text that are more compelling.

A gradual loss in rankings normally means that your competitors are slowly but surely beating you and/or Google is slowly but surely devaluing your links. I would have to look at your analytics to be certain, but the following lends some credence to that theory:

1. Your anchor text is over optimized for the keyword "hard drive recovery", approximately 58% of all of your links have this anchor text.
2. Your anchor text is over optimized for the keyword "data recovery", approximately 56% of your inbound MozRank comes from links with this anchor text.
3. You have a lot of questionable links - likely paid or rented - that Google is either devaluing or penalizing you for.

In addition, your site definitely needs a design refresh if it is going to compete with much more attractively designed sites like http://www.krollontrack.co.uk/

I really see no problem with this within reason. Your best bet is to start by separating layout code into external CSS and Javascript files, so the majority of the code on your page is just simple HTML elements and text. This is 90% of the battle. Reorganizing the content so that your unique, valuable textual content occurs towards the top of the code is the remaining 10%. However, there haven't been any formal studies to prove that this matters much at all. My guess is that unless this is a change you are making on hundreds if not thousands of pages, you will probably see almost no improvement.

PC. Sorry, but while there are plenty of tools that are online, every now and then you need something that runs client side and, inevitably, it will probably only run on Windows.