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Thanks Martijn - have done all I can to block Google indexing now - Web developer was under the impression he had done what was needed but SEO mindset always makes me delve deeper! Glad I did!

I might use caution with that list. According to their disclaimers, people do pay to be a part of that list. http://www.topseos.cn/disclosure. So just something to be aware of.

Having disappeared, the homepage appeared immediately when I resubmitted it, then fell back in SERPs a little and is now achieving better SERPs than when it disappeared. I can't see any probs with the code / sitemap or anything. All in all rather confusing but (thankfully) resolved in a couple of minutes. Thanks for your brilliant feedback Thomas and for your help as well Marcus. Thanks to you, I'm well prepared should this problem hit one of my clients again

Thanks Chris for the useful feedback - much appreciated

Thanks guys, much appreciated and very useful. I just found Rand's whiteboard on domains and found it quite useful too - see 3: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-choose-the-right-domain-name and this on hyphenated domains: http://www.highposition.com/blog/hyphenated-domains-google/ - but it's hard to know. Might set up some of my own tests.

I meant merging yes, sorry! Thanks for those useful links there Amber - they look brilliant L

You should always protect the brand.  But the question is, are their any SEO implications for the work that you are going to do?   The answer is not much.  If you do an awesome job on you client site, you should be fine.

Thanks Tom - thanks for nudging me in the right direction and Somerset is just brilliant. Haven't actually been there before but... wow. Drinking a nice glass of organic Somerset Cider as I type (slurp!).

Hi Luke, You raise some interesting points. I imagine the main problem here is that the web is meant to be open and shared. In almost all circumstances you should only be linking out where somebody else's website provides good value to your users. Nofollow then becomes useful when you're linking out in things like comments, where you as the site's editor can't actually endorse the quality of the linked site. By swapping that paradigm around it's assumed that every site is "bad until proven worthy" - but because the web is already built up of billions of links that don't have nofollow it's kind of too late for that mentality to work. Google does take and act on spam reports which you can do so at https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport?hl=en if you believe sites are designed to spam. Andrew

Thanks for your useful response. Yes, I'm thinking it's a numbers game. If a company goes very aggressively after ad links or directory links (and even less obvious types of  link - too much blogger outreach, for example) I guess they're asking for trouble. To be honest, I don't even tell people what back-linking anchor text I want either, from journalists or bloggers for example. I just let everything flow naturally. I feel far more comfortable that way.

Hi Luke, If the website is targeting to a specific country then having a ccTLD is an additional signal of relevance for it (unless the US, where typically the domain used de-facto is .com). Nonetheless, if the Website is targeting to a worldwide audience (let's say a Website in English targeting to any user who speaks that language, for which the country doesn't matter) then it would be more relevant to have a generic domain (like the .com), since the Website is not country targeted. Thanks, Aleyda

I'm happy that helped you Luke

Hi Christy - I will check OSE and see...

Oh without a doubt delete them. If you nofollow them you're safe from a linking perspective, but it's still throwing away that page juice, just not passing it to the site. If it's a sponsored theme you're using there is a possibility that it's an encrypted footer that will break the template if you try to edit or remove the link and you might need to do a little detective work on how to work around that, if that is the case.

Hi Cyrus - that's really helpful, and interesting - thanks so much. I think you're dead right RE: sticking to newsworthy releases! Look forward to your blog post on the subject Best wishes, Luke

_Seems like the website is just another listing site. I do not think sites like of these types are going to add any value to your website. So, if you feel that links coming from this site is affecting the visibility of your website in one way or the other, you can ask the webmaster to add no follow attribute against the links or remove it completely. But before you decide to remove the links, you need to check the analytics account to see if you are getting any referral traffic from the website. So, adding no follow attribute would be a safe bet. _

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I've investigated a huge list of newswires. I really like the look of a couple of heavily business oriented wires - very regulated and unspammy, so for business stories I will be using those. I found one newswire which is very aware of the SEO implications of too much syndication to awful sites - they appear only to syndicate to a handful of reasonable quality sites. Others do much heavier syndication. I will stick with the 3 that appear to be safest for now...

Getting directory links is great if the category is relevant, and the site has a natural link profile. Getting "any" directory link is not helpful: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/web-directory-submission-danger Directory links are also known as a citation which is going to help your "Google Places" results rank better...