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Hi Jason, Would it be this: http://www.localsearchforum.com/local-search-news/39251-huge-ranking-algorithm-change-jan-10-2016-a.html Or is that too early?

Hi Chris, I guess it stands to reason! Thanks for the feedback.

This is going to sound preachy, but I would be very slow to point fingers.  Perhaps there were multiple SEO companies involved.  If Branded3 was indeed their most recent SEO it doesn't mean that they were involved with the most gregarious spam.  (I'm not saying that they weren't - just saying that we don't know.) Also, I think you will find that the vast majority of effective SEO companies out there are using techniques, that, if reported, would not satisfy the Google guidelines.  I challenge you to rank a flower shop number one using ONLY white hat techniques.  At this point in time, with the level of effective spam that is out there, it would be very hard to do. In my opinion, whether or not we point fingers depends on what was discussed between the SEO company and Interflora.  It's possible that the agreement they had was that the company was to do all they can even if it meant bending some rules.  I've had some people come and ask me to rank their sites using only completely white hat methods and I've had others come and say, "I don't care what it takes - just get it done and we'll deal with the consequences if they come."  Sometimes the short term gains are worth it.  Plus, until recently, most websites were not aware that you could get deindexed for pushing boundaries too much.

Hi Irving - thanks for your thoughts. No URL paths are used in the links, just page names.The aim is simply to get the new pages indexed, but this isn't happening with the current way that they are linked to and from what I've read I think it will be better to just ask their developers to change the links to standard HTML.

Well at least doing it with WMT the way I and Rob explained you got the piece of mind your doing it the right way, the way other SEO's would do it. I don't think implementing the above will be like flicking a switch on the SERP's but only time will tell. Don't forget to setup separate xml sitemaps for each subdomain and put them into the relevant subdomains WMT's account. I'm guessing if your doing subdomains the company has physical address in the locations, if so maybe worth applying for Google places for each one.

More "been there - still doing that", but you are welcome

Hi Jasarrow, Agree, this is a tough one. You mention that there was a duplicate listing way back when. Are you sure there was only one. Go to Google Maps and do a search for the business name, any variants on the business name that ever existed, a search for any addresses associated with the business in the past 10 years and any phone numbers associated with the business in the past 10 years. See if anything odd turns up, such as duplicates of which you weren't previously aware. Martin has given you some very good suggestions, too! Let us know how it goes. Miriam

Hi Ben, Thanks for taking the time to reply, The site was on or around the first page for at least 18 months (longer I think) prior to March. Additionally, there were a few other sites moved around a lot around the same time (although we can figure out why these have lost rankings, which makes it more frustrating). I think you may be correct when you say that it's a change in the way that Google renders the SERP's for that keyword. Thanks again, Jason

subdomain or different domain it's still an identical site. it would be better to have it on a co.uk domain, i would convince the client to do that - why do they want it on a subdomain? Anyway, subdomain, main domain in a directory, or different domain. Google will be fine with it as long as one site is geo targeted for the US and the other site is geo targeted for the UK. Duplicate content is filtered not penalized, so it is getting properly filtered this way. One site showing in the US and one showing in the UK.