Have you checked your Google Webmaster Tools account? Resubmitted a new and current sitemap?

You need to combine these sites into one authoritative domain. You've spread yourselves thin, not to mention are most likely in violation of Google's guidelines.

Forgetting about the latter for a moment, think about the split domain authorities between your two prominent sites. Wouldn't it be nice to have those combined? (Of course keep in mind 1+1 will not equal 2 here, but you get my point.)

If you look through Google's webmaster guidelines you will see the part about having multiple domains selling/promoting the same product or service. That is what you are doing. There's a good chance one or both of your sites gets banned from SERPs if Google finds out about this.

It is also just going to be so much easier to create content, market, and SEO for one singular domain. You can attack different verticals from it, you can redirect everything (via 301 unless you have penalties that will carry) back to it, and continue your strategy to gain new markets. But competing with yourself isn't doing you any favors. You're absolutely correct to question the logic here.

I've fought this battle before and it's not an easy one. CEOs are not easily convinced that starting multiple brands is a bad idea. They have a funny way of reasoning it. However, you need to assert your knowledge. That is what they hired you for.

Good luck!

I came here to vote for responsive design and you're already all over it. This means you will succeed in my book!

Have fun, I'm kinda jealous

Totally agree with Thomas here.

+1s and likes aren't gonna do that much for you and the negatives far outweigh the positives.

Honestly it shouldn't be that hard to start getting them on your own if you actually engage in a social community relevant to your field. They exist and if your site/page has something worthy then people will like it. Plain and simple. *(Also this will force you to create strong content which will help you succeed in the long and short run.)

To further stress EGOL's point, this is definitely a Penguin problem if related to unnatural link detection. But that's simple semantics which are definitely relevant when searching for information/help in this matter.

It honestly should be pretty easy to figure out what spammy links there are. For example, you sell dresses, so if your website has links all over underground hip hop forums then it's probably unnatural.

What paid link services have you used? Can you contact them for submission reports? Most will provide this upon request...

--just a couple thoughts

which one is your client?

when I google "office desks" i get

1.) office depot

2.) amazon

3.) office max

Try a de-personalized search, I think your cache is affecting your google results.

Check this link and tell me what you see: https://www.google.com/search?q=office+desks&pws=0

just glanced at your backlink profile... you've lost something like 10,000 links over the last week or so. if those were all poison links, that's fantastic for you!

NOW you need to start building quality links or you'll never regain your rankings.

so get out there and do some link building. That's my best advice to you. apart from a redesign and better optimized content.

img alt tags are a problem as Dennis suggested. a quick peek shows one alt tag that says "search" and another that reads "McAfee SECURE sites help keep you safe from identity theft, credit card fraud, spyware, spam, viruses and online scams"

These are both perfectly wrong examples and should be fixed.

Also, clean up that HTML it's gonna be difficult to manage in such a cluster like that. (my own personal gripe.. you may work differently than I)

It seems to me like you are suggesting that your PR can be spread out thin by too many followed links from your subdomain... I don't think this is true.

1.) Google does not follow nofollow links..

2.) iframes and javascript are concoctions of the devil himself.

3.) build links from high DA sites organically. Make sure they're relevant.

i think that because you said "http://lucid8.com/index.asp and http://www.lucid8.com are duplicates" your issue might actually be in the www and non-www canonicalization of your site.

Make sure that you pick one or the other (i recommend www) and in your IIS server settings redirect the non-www to the www. (or vice versa if you must)

This should solve your problem.

**update -- I just went to your site and yes this is happening. You have two sites going, http://lucid8.com and http://www.lucid8.com. The "index.asp" portion of it actually has nothing to do with this. But Google is currently seeing each version as two separate pages, resulting in duplicates of every page on that domain.

Definitely add the 301 redirect in your IIS settings to one or the other. A linkrel=canonical tag wouldn't hurt on each page either, but isn't necessary.

Good luck

yes. definitely. make a new page, title it the keyword, build the page for that keyword. done and done.

my apologies! early monday morning here and my blurry eyes didn't catch the irish engine.. oops

anyway, my guess would be that "office desks" simply has less competition as a keyword in google.ie... one page in from the linked page has a paragraph that reads as follows:

Desks

In the working environment, the desk is a key element. If you want happy workers then make sure they have the right office desks – ones that are comfortable to sit at all day and which are practical for the work performed at them. At Office 1 Web we have a huge range of office desks to suit your needs. Office desks range from the minimalist and modern to the executive and formal – check out the full range to see which ones are right for your office. There are a huge amount of office desks to choose from, so we have broken it down into handy categories to help you find the right office desk for you:

That page is clearly optimized for the word "Office Desks" and could very easily be pulling weight from the other referring page, especially seeing as how there are something like 947 internal links there..? I could be off on that. Sorry not spending a ton of time looking at it.

I'm not sure I'm being helpful. I'm going to go grab some more coffee and see if I can't get my eyes and mind to awaken.

Good luck!

uhhh... i'd delete the wordpress.

why not?

+1 to avoiding iframes altogether

check back Monday, it should be up by then.

I'm not sure I understand.. where are those pages linked from within your site and why?

You are doing exactly what you should be doing as far as dealing with the poison links. Continue contacting webmasters (as politely as possible..make it seem like doing this will help them as well as you) and document ALL of it. Check your GWT and make sure you haven't been issued a manual penalty. If you have, prepare the disavow tool and submit all of your documented efforts with the re-inclusion request you will file.

If you don't have a warning, continue building proper and relevant links. This is the best thing you can do. Make sure they are coming in organically. They should essentially be the results of killer content created by your team for your site. This will help more than anything and more immediately (again assuming you have no manual penalties.)

This is the best advice I can offer. Hope it helps.

They are saying the pages on your site have duplicate content. Those two pages you linked are a perfect example. The content is exactly the same minus two words, which is more than enough for Google to register it as duplicate..

What I don't understand is what's wrong with a simple canonical tag in this instance? Do you really need both of these indexed?

I don't understand..

The client wants a new site, new domain, and a re-branding.. why wouldn't they/you move their existing established name and brand entirely over to the new site/new brand with a site-wide 301? They want to keep both brands alive? I can't imagine a scenario where this is a good idea. a re-branding is a re-branding. Ask Moz!

Where is my confusing coming from here?

Well I got this message recently:

Search results clicks for http://www.---------- have increased significantly. 
This message is not indicative of any problem in your site. It is simply to inform you that the number of clicks that one of your pages receives has increased recently. If you have just added new content, this may indicate that it has become more popular on Google. The number of clicks that your site receives from Google can change from day to day for a variety of factors, including automatic algorithm updates.

I found it strange because everything looks about normal. Sure we had a bit better of a day than usual but just barely.. Nothing I'd even blink twice at.

It's strange because this is only the second time I've ever received a message in GWT. But hey, I'm not complaining about this one.

Probably unrelated to what you're describing but just thought I'd share.

Good luck!

You will not be penalized for not including titles and descriptions, but Google will auto-fill them for you.

Takeshi's advice is sound if all you want is to not have these pages displayed in site links (the links under your domain when you google your domain's name). However, it sounds like what you are asking is to not have the pages displayed at all in SERPs ever. I don't quite understand the reasoning behind this, I must say. For example, if you work for Comcast and somebody googles "Contact Comcast" you should want them to land on your contact page. Same with the registration page, I would think..

That said, if you truly do not want those pages indexed you can disallow them in your robots.txt or add this tag to the header: