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Check their analytics, see how far they've fallen. Monitor the rankings first and study it. If you see dancing URL's (changing urls, dropping to 50-200 then to the original ranking) etc then that's an obvious penalty. You might want to start with cleaning out and ironing out the existing links, try to improve those. Get new strong links, all the while analysing and creating a spreadsheet for the bad links to submit. Since this is local, it might just be because of the local changes, the business listings ,etc that hurt their visibility. You might want to optimise their local seo process + links first and see if they improve. If they do, then that makes things easier.

Danny Dover at Moz did a whiteboard Friday that goes through the basics and is a good resource: http://moz.com/blog/the-basics-of-local-seo-whiteboard-friday There are also several good blog posts on the topic that will help, including this one: http://moz.com/blog/40-important-local-search-questions-answered And David Mihm, now at moz put together a list of ranking factors that you should be aware of: http://www.davidmihm.com/local-search-ranking-factors.shtml

I feel that there should be some form of redirect that can be conducted without passing on link juice value. From my perspective, it's not gaming the system or trying to game Google. My client doesn't want any link juice passing on, but wants to keep the old domain for people accessing the domain directly. It's a shame really. Google holds a massive grudge, even though these guys trusted a big name in the SEO industry.

Hi Jason, you've received a number of excellent responses. Did any of them help?

You need to show them how many abandoned shopping cart views are being generated.  Then i would take your average sales value and multiply it with the amount of abandoned carts to get a figure to show them. (take out some for normal abandon carts for industry )

As of April 15th in Australia using UK search the top 3 contenders for this search phrase are: www.inuvate.co.uk/web-design-mansfield/ www.purposemedia.co.uk/ dijitul.com/web-design-mansfield/ Here are some contributing factors that, when combined are likely to be causing this site to outrank all the others for the search phrase 'web design mansfield'. 1. TITLE The title of the site has the exact phrase at the very beginning where as www.purposemedia.co.uk/ and quite a few of the others in the top 10 do not. 2. LINKS External: VS other sites that have that exact phrase in their title, inuvate.co.uk has either a higher number of root domain links than others in the top 10 OR has a higher ratio of RD links vs total links. They have used their links wisely and have not spammed the interwebs. Internal: Inuvate uses internal content linking where as other top contenders are not using the exact match phrase. It is also completely optimised for just this one phrase... Using the exact match phrase all the time is not always a good thing however it appears that the density isn't too high in this case. 3. SPEED inuvate is not as optimised for speed as purposemedia.co.uk however has a shorter load time inuvate has a lower ping time than the other top contenders It's more than half the total page size in MB than dijitul 4. CONTENT www.inuvate.co.uk/web-design-mansfield/ has a word count of 648 vs the other having <600 The content on the inuvate page flows nicely and unlke dijitul doesn't spam the exact match phrase at the very start of the first sentence in the first paragraph AND the H1 AND the H2. That is just pure SPAM. Purposemedia doesn't contain the exact phrase anywhere except the title... if they did, they may be able to own this search term. inuvate also has much more meaningful content that you can actually read without feeling like you're reading something written by a school kid. The above are just a few factors (i'm sure there are many more) but these combined along with others do make a BIG difference. Big love from GEEKSEO!

Actually, I believe that Google doesn't do local results for the query of web design.

I meant the full report. The one that uses one of 50 credits. SEOmoz replied with something similar. Thanks!

Is there a reason you can't use one page for "Internal Decorating" and have users end up on that page no matter whether they arrive via Residential or Commercial?

Yeah I agree, I don't see any ethics issues here at all. If this were my directory, I would look at it like this: there are two main potential benefits to this directory 1) relevant traffic 2) a relevant link. There's nothing wrong if you wanted to charge clients for premium placement once you get enough businesses in there.

also, Google will sometimes replace a homepage title that is full of keywords with the brand name. This is usually fixed when you put your brand name back into the homepage title