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absolutely agree.

I would also be very careful of this:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/a-reminder-about-selling-links.html

Just ensure you update robots.txt with the new address.  Re-submit the new sitemap to the search engines. Should be as simple as that.  Your URLs have not changed.

Your sitemap does not determine the indexing of all URLs but gives the search engines a good idea what to crawl, on top of being able to crawl from URL to URL on the site.  It mainly is to help you see what has been indexed in comparison to what you have submitted.  Unfortunately Webmaster Tools is not fully to speed anyway so may not show the same results as site:some-domain.com.

For broken link opportunities for link building you can't go wrong with:

http://moz.com/blog/the-broken-link-building-bible

http://moz.com/blog/broken-link-building-bible-new-testament

There is a list of recommended businesses via a link at the foot of the page.  Most SEO guys are now very experienced in dealing with penalty issues as it has become so common.

I agree with Don.  Google ultimately wants to see that not only are you an authority in your field, you go out of your way to give your visitor as much information as you can by means of linking to further resources.  Although personally I would avoid just dumping in Wikipedia links as they can be viewed as thinly veiled lazy links.

"sponsored" = paid for.  Therefore if you don't want to break G's webmaster terms any links must be no-follow.  But taking look at the first one you wouldn't tell straight away it's sponsored.  But now you have posted here and told Google

Google will catch up with them, you can be sure of that.

Without knowing the domain or any information in GWT nobody is going to be able to really help.

The only think I can think of is possibly .htaccess blocking Google.

thanks. You've confirmed my thoughts on doing a thorough spring clean.

Looks like you have been injected with spam links.  Used MajesticSEO to show the attached (sample).

I'd be assertive in getting into GWT asap.  I guess those URLs don't exist but it is still a big no.

http://i.imgur.com/XFNY1ZG.gif

If you go with the client disavow that domain for sure.

No it isn't.  As I said -

RewriteCond %{HTTPS} off
RewriteRule (.*) https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301]

This is saying that the condition is off - so non HTTPS URL calls then have the rewrite rule to switch to HTTPS.

As soon as you change URL structure you are creating new URLs.  So effectively you are giving Google a new site to work with.  The 301's and current link profile will help to pull those new URLs into shape for Google and to have a drop is expected.

I would be focusing on getting some more quality links coming in and create new content to help the recovery process and move into a stronger position.

This post last year gives a good answer throughout.  In summary yes it does but the edge gets taken off the link 'power', just as a 301 doesn't pass 100%

http://moz.com/community/q/noindex-follow-is-a-waste-of-link-juice

I'd look at your link profile.  You have a strong connection to weddings which is not your niche, along with suspect directory listings.

If the page ia a 404 not found it will sometime soon disappear from the index.  You can force this immediately by going into Webmaster Tools >> Google Index >> Remove URLs >> enter URL >> select 'Remove page....'

It's highly unlikely that a technical issue would drop rankings within a day or so, maybe drop from URLs from the index though.  Check .htaccess, robots.txt and meta robots etc.

Firstly I would double check what is indexed and what header responses you are getting.  Depending on the size of the site I would use http://intavant.com/tools/google-indexed-pages-extractor/.  Compare with what you believe to be indexed and run the list through Screaming Frog to check the header responses for each URL.

Otherwise I would look at exactly what keywords have been hit, check GWT for any messages and do a thorough investigation of onsite content - Panda; and link profile - Penguin.

Any URL that you want to remove from a particular TLD needs to be done in the specific TLD Webmaster Tools property.

rel=canonical needs to either go within the tags or the HTTP header.

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/5-common-mistakes-with-relcanonical.html

not yet, not a sniff.