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Yeah, that's certainly painting the picture that this probably was Penguin and not just a coincidence. Best we know so far (and that's very speculative), Penguin 2.0 didn't introduce much in the way of new ranking factors. That is to say - it's not look at different things, it's just looking deeper in sites and probably being a bit less forgiving. So, the same rules for recovery probably apply to Penguin 2.0 that did to the original Penguin. Unfortunately, that often means deep cuts to any questionable links and really focusing on quality. If you can't remove the links, that's going to mean disavowing, and even once you've disavowed, you may need to wait for a Penguin data update. Recovery stories have been hard to interpret, even for some very high-end SEOs I know who have been through the process. The one consistent story we've heard is that, if it is Penguin, you can't just remove a few links disavow, and keep hoping for the best. It may take pretty drastic measures, and you have to weigh those measures against the loss you took. In other words, you have to figure out if the cure is worse than the disease. Sorry to paint a bleak picture, but Penguin is pretty harsh.

This happens far more frequently than you probably assumed. I do however find it amusing that one search will return my page with the correct title and then a similar search will return my page with an altered title. Seems almost silly that a synonym can completely change how my site's information appears in the SERPs... but it happens. On a positive side though, sometimes that may actually help to make you more relevant to a search you didn't think of while not hurting your positions for the terms you're trying to rank for.

Kent - Just guessing here...  IF you had to change your settings, did you clear your cache? Might be worth a try to see if that solves it.  Good luck.

Make sure to set the X-Robots directive to NOINDEX|FOLLOW, or you'll completely defeat the purpose of the sitemap.

Hello, This is what Google Webmaster tools says in my account. HTML Improvements Last updated May 16, 2013 We didn't detect any content issues with your site. As we crawl your site, we check it to detect any potential issues with content on your pages, including duplicate, missing, or problematic title tags or meta descriptions. These issues won't prevent your site from appearing in Google search results, but paying attention to them can provide Google with more information and even help drive traffic to your site. For example, title and meta description text can appear in search results, and useful, descriptive text is more likely to be clicked on by users So as far as i understand they didnt detect any issue with duplicate or missing meta tags, what can it be them?? Thanks

Hi Kent, It sounds like your sitemap's link is included in another sitemap file or linked from a page. According to my research,you can add a X-Robots-Tag header to your .htaccess file. This is an old discussion, but I believe still relevant: http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3971249.htm Thanks, Christine DeGraff

If the "Subscribe" box is for RSS notifications, why not just have an RSS icon leading them to the feedburner page where they can subscribe? Personally I think that would be better than having a generic subscribe box just about the flashy newsletter signup. I'd figure a lot of people wouldn't understand what the difference was when first looking at your page and either mistakenly subscribe when they meant to get the Newsletter or overlook the subscribe box completely.

I'd recommend making at least some of your posts sticky to the homepage on the topic you are trying to rank as without some consistency you will be constantly changing the picture Google has of your website content wise. Other options would be to add an additional section below the top slider with text, in my profile you will see how we have stuck our front post to the homepage as we previously had blog snippets from new posts and it was making our rankings far more volatile.

For easy niches? Yeah you could do it and it could get you to rank. For harder niches, I'd go with new content and stick with the big PR sites only. The free PR sites usually just scrape it off them anyways. Either that or they are just article directories dress up as "press release" sites. BTW, Prlog ranks pretty well on it's own, it'll probably beat prweb in terms of referral traffic to you.

I'd think about the visitor experience. Are they finding what they're looking for via your existing search results for step by step recipes or would they be better served landing on a category page. Do you get a lot of search referrals using that keyword? If you do decide to create a category page, add some unique content at the category level and build some links to it. I guess my only reservation with that method would be that you say the enitre site is about step by step recipes. In that case, shouldn't you be targeting the homepage for that keyword?