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Agreed; it could an after effect and stems from inbound URLs to your site from other sites. That's what the majority of the 404s I see in GWT come from (vs being bad pages within my site).

Google probably isn't using the old sitemap if you gave them a new one. What could be happening is that it still needs to "reorganize" and reconcile your old URLs and new URLs. The indexed pages don't just disappear overnight or get replaced immediately because of a site map change. Things have to work their way out of its system.

If there's specific URLs you want to try to remedy immediately, look into the GWT Remove URL option under the optimization section.

If they can't track their current site, then you are right, they don't care enough. Good thing they can't get what they want, because if it were that easy to de-list a site without having any back end access to it,  then competitors would be doing it to each other non-stop.

If they refuse to make contact then they get to have everything working against them. If you can make contact, then the action items Matt suggested are the next steps.

Good luck with them as a client

And throw in Screaming Frog. Depending on the site, 500 URL crawl is free; any site with more pages is 99 pounds. It will crawl any site like a crawler and can sometimes give additional information outside of SEOMoz. (Moz crawls 10,000 pages at a time and I have more than 50,000.)

Check out Keywordspy - you can get some OK data under the free offering and SpyFu's free part of it's tool can also round out competitive information.

OK, that's different from what I was getting from your original post (which is why it never hurts to double check). I understood it as you wanted improve your internal linking and do anchor text to help your INTERNAL search results w/in your on-site search function/search engine.

Keep in mind that too perfect anchor text can actually hurt you, too: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2172839/Google-Penguin-Update-Impact-of-Anchor-Text-Diversity-Link-Relevancy

Creating dynamic product pages will compete with your regular product pages in rankings for those shared keywords unless you no index them (not the same thing as no follow). No index means that Google can follow the link but shouldn't index it but you want page rank to be passed along to links.

I'd consider reading up on the subject of no index to confirm your comfort level with how to do this - especially since I'm trying to interpret what you want and I may not be correct and don't want to possibly hinder your goals

http://www.seoboy.com/the-differences-between-noindex-nofollow-and-robotstxt-file/

http://eduardblacquiere.com/non-indexed-page-pass-pagerank/

I'd actually go a different route and do one site with separate pages for each location. It'dbe better for the overall issue of content/avoiding duplicate which can become a huge issue. Four sites is a lot more to manage and track and keep up and running.

But it depends on what the online strategy is, too. Google is constantly working to get localized results, too, so it's not as though there has to be four totally independent sites to get results targeted to a certain neighborhood.

I'm not saying this is the best site ever, but one hospital network that comes to mind, Beaumont, has theirs set up this way: http://www.beaumont.edu/

I should clarify: Screaming Frog is not a monthly fee, it's annual.

Have you done some troubleshooting? If there's that much of a % change, did you check your robots, tags, redirects, etc. to see if any of the technical side may be hindering indexing?

A few things - too many links on a page happens all the time. I know it's a message I get, but because of the way my site is built, it's the way it is. It looks like the way your menus and such are set up that it could be just part of what you have to accept about your design. It's not going to kill you - but unless you want to make deeper levels to your site so people have fewer links to click through at the main page, then that's how the "issue" will render itself. You are not alone in having this happen to you.

As for duplicate content, something to think about: your point of it being two different songs is how you as a person look at it and you need to look at it as a crawler. Most everything else on those two pages is the same, except for the song featured in the center and maybe some of the songs listed to the right. Even the page titles are similar. I'm taking a random stab, but that means only about 15% of the content between the two is different  - most noticeably the featured song. Again, this is part of the outcome of your site design; you aren't alone in having this problem. Either you need to redo your site design  or add more differentiated content (change the page titles, change what data feeds into the "more songs" section, etc.).

What access are you referring to - SEOMoz? (You didn't clarify, but I'll assume you mean SEOMoz; people post about all kinds of sites and programs here, so being specific can really help how fast you get a response.)

They don't have a multi-login feature, (yet - however it is something they are working on). Before I joined I used a colleagues login so I could access under her account, so - since that's the only current option, if you are comfortable you can do that.

If not, then as of March 2012, Moz still wasn't sure when a multi-login feature would be implemented.

It could be a whole slew of things, as you know, and if you'd share actual domains, it could help uncover reasons. Better on page optimization? Fewer 404 errors or technical hiccups? They may have fewer inbound links but do they have more .edu or .gov which have more credibility? Do they freshen their content more?

Less words in the title tag is a moot point - do they have better keywords? You say "lower inbound links to that page" when if, as a whole, they have a better domain rank (vs just page rank), that can influence.

There's a lot of ways that this can be sliced.

It's not going to get them deindexed and it's unlikely it could be the root cause why they wouldn't rank high.

There's honestly not much content on each page, nor it is easy to tell what keywords you are targeting since they kind of cannibalize each other, and that makes it harder to rank well.

And, keep in mind - if you use a tool to find out (about) how many backlinks your competition - or, the the top 3 sites for whatever keywords you are targeting - has, you just need more than that. Even better if you can get .gov/.edu links to help give you heft.

Videos are absolutely content - and hot content at that. Videos have grown in popularity among Web users. If you mean ads above the fold on a Google search results page, no, that has nothing at all to do with search rankings. If you mean you have ads on your website that are above the fold, I wouldn't recommend that. Unless your goal is to just make money through ads.

Text should go with videos, for numerous reasons. I'd suggest reading up on the overall topic so you can build a strong video SEO strategy: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/video-seo-basics-whiteboard-friday-11080.

I'm bandwagon jumping - the title Google is using is a bit better. The one you have could be keyword stuffing-ish.

I had had this happen several times. It's not normal. Contact support - they are very helpful. For my situation, they had to have a developer/engineer step in to get things back on track.

I agree about the "just make great content and people will find you" mentality. Really, it's that easy? No, it's not. Because people have to find you and links can help.

That said, there's a lot of different ways to get links. Good directories are fine enough. But I also think that's just a small piece of the pie. There's media coverage from online outlets, as another example. A lot of people I know don't just post to directories and call it a day, they actively go out and approach other sites and ask for links. That could be how your competitor(s) are doing it.

Fact is, whether you want to call it link building or whatnot, you have to market your site so people know it's there and can find it. Then if you have good content, and built it well, people can find it.

Do you use Webmaster Tools? That tool can help indicate if it's registering with Google to help diagnose what's up.

Welcome! My two cents (and the great thing about this site is that you'll get plenty of opinions) is that I like one campaign per domain. For me,  it's really about seeing what's happening within mysite - and, using your example, www.kibin.com/essay-editing is a page within your kibin.com domain.

Focusing on just a subfolder, like your essay-editing section, just limits your overall visibility into what's going on within your site. Personally, I look at the big picture then whittle down into the subfolders and whatnot.

Why do I have that preference? The pages have to live within the overall domain - I look at the relation between them, how they each rank, where I may cannibalize one vs the other, what page ranks well, what doesn't. This is what Moz campaigns are great for.

Moz will tell you which pages rank for which terms. You could learn that, again using your example,  a different page is ranking for "'essay editing" than the one you seem to want, www.kibin.com/essay-editing.

(Although, having just looked at your main domain and your essay-editing page, they look exactly alike so there's duplicate content and possible cannibalization going on - or something isn't functioning properly and the page won't load; I didn't dig into it.)

Now, since you can set up multiple campaigns, there's nothing to stop you for doing both, either. You can always try it that way and see what data you see and then tweak as you'd like.

For whatever reason, the URL you posted isn't formatting correctly for me to be able to see it all (it gets cut off), so I apologize if I can't speak directly to your example.

I will tell you from my personal experience that the way our place uses tracking codes has indeed created duplicate content.

Example: www.domain.com?cid=102is the same content as www.domain.com - so unless you prevent it before these URLs get indexed, you can have a mess to clean up. It comes up in Moz, Screaming Frog, etc.

Don't let it kill you - there's too many factors that influence ranking above-and-beyond just content. They're doing something right if they are ranking well so they are making it happen without, in your opinion, making it all about content. Which is also why I also find it questionable when anyone tries to make it just about content. Their domain rank may be high, they may have a better inbound link portfolio, older domain age, etc.