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Thank you all for your assistance on this. I was never looking for a guarantee of placement, more for a guarantee of a growth in organic traffic that could be traced to something they did. I realize that placement these days varies by user so a promise of #1 ranking really is suspicious.

Thank you for the suggestions. It looks like we may have taken a hit from Panda 21 at the beginning of November but we were moving the site to a new server so the days right before the update don't have any analytics data. The last couple of days saw a spike last year because Advent started this weekend instead of next weekend this year so that's why some of the numbers for this weekend look off. Overall though, it looks like we hit a peak for most keywords in January and then saw a major decline in February when we received our manual penalty and even though the penalty has been officially revoked, we've never recovered fully. Thanks for the panguin suggestion. We use chartelligence which actually overlays within GA on any chart which is very nice. I guess I'll go back and manually disavow those bad links even though I've already submitted them and see what happens.

Is there documentation somewhere that says that alerts work differently when you also use webmaster tools?

Hi Ian, From a quick glance I can see that your internal linking structure is extreme: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/smarter-internal-linking-whiteboard-friday Watch this video it should help you get some ideas. Also read this: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/internal-linking-strategies-for-2012-and-beyond

Excellent to hear its making a comeback. Can you kindly close out the ticket by marking an answer "Good Answer" . Thanks

For the first site, it took 2 weeks and was successful on the first try.  I know exactly which links were suspect and detailed the removal of the ones under my control and my requests for removal of the others (only about 50% of which were deleted).  I think they considered that I reformed my spamming ways, and so lifted the penalty. The second site took three separate RRs over a period of about 2 months, each time more links were removed to satisfy them.   The site went from 600 root linking domains to about 150.

I am so glad that it helped!

We are seeing some of the same stuff. Often if you compare rates of what you can see you can have a good idea of what keywords the majority of those visits came through... never the less a pain.

Hi Ian, It's great to hear that Q&A is working for you. I have to confess that a large share of the "warm fuzzies" in my life emanate from this forum. Seeing so many people sharing and working together here every day always puts a smile on my face. Thank you too for posting this - as EGOL mentioned, it's great to know what has worked and what the outcome was for your site. Feedback like this is as valuable for the rest of us as the answers were to you. I would most definitely agree - Q&A alone can make the subscription cost worthwhile Sha

How long does the actual data usually take to catch up with what WMT says is current? I have not experienced any delay before. There should only be one sitemap record for your site at any time. That record could be composed of multiple files, but it is one collection of records. When Google identifies crawl errors, those errors should be generated from the sitemap on file at the time of the error. There is a view sitemap option in Google WMT you can use to see the sitemap they have on file. This step would be next. If you can confirm the bad URL does not appear in the sitemap, I would then wait to see if the issue re-appears after today, October 11th. I know this is frustrating but the system is very straight forward. I cannot explain why a URL not included in your sitemap would appear on your sitemap crawl errors tab. The only two possibilities I can come with is either you have made an error when sharing some information, or there is an unusual glitch on Google's end. With all the above noted, working with sitemaps is not a good investment of your time. If your site navigation is properly designed, your sitemap offers no benefit whatsoever.

Hi Ian... for this kind of question I suggest you to use the feedback option (identical to the one you can see here on left with the heart icon). The help desk will promptly reply to your question. Ciao

I know there are many opinions on how to handle paginated pages. My opinion is to just use a noindex, follow meta tag on all the paginated pages. The thinking is that these pages don't have any intrinsic value of being in the index themselves, but you still want the engines to be able to crawl to all your products from your internal links. I would only use the next and previous tags on paginated articles or galleries. The canonical tag is meant for duplicate pages and doesn't really make sense to use for paginated pages.

It must have been a glitch in Google. They processed our sitemap again last night and there aren't any error messages now.

I nofollowed all of these pages a few days ago. The intention wasn't to create a link farm but I realize after giving it thought that it could be perceived as one.

So, no one has an opinion?

Can Google deal with "search engine safe" parameters? I added our sort stuff to Webmaster tools but I'm not sure Google knows what to do and can't find any info on this.

I must be missing the meaning of "special price".

The official answer I provide is to check the SEOmoz resource directory. Based on a bit of feedback I have received it seems many are not happy with that direction. I understand as basically it is a listing of thousands of SEO companies without any particular endorsement. In an effort to not ruffle any feathers I have been offering the recommendations in e-mail but I will go ahead and make one attempt at offering these publicly. In no particular order: 1. Distilled SEOmoz partners with Distilled for SEO consulting. 2. Keyphraseology Lindsay used to lead the SEOmoz consulting team. 3. Alan Bleiweiss Alan was doing SEO before Al Gore invented the internet. He often shares his knowledge and experience here at SEOmoz or speaking at various SEO conferences and his blog. As for me, yes I am presently booked up. I expect to have limited availability beginning in September.