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Hi Chris, thank you very much for your help and suggestions, it is much appreciated.  I'll de-noindex a handful of my biggest artist pages and see if they attract much interest from users. As for the /venues/ pages, these have been fairly neglected to date, so perhaps I need to really focus my attention on them, as you say, and bring in some cross referencing. I have also wondered whether allowing companies to create pages dedicated to their events would be a good route to take - it could be done with ease, so perhaps I should investigate further. Again, thanks very much, and hopefully I can report back with good news at some point. Best wishes Mike

" Domain Authority measures the predictive ranking strength of entire domains or subdomains, Page Authority measures the strength of individual page. " According tot he data moz has on your web site they think your homepage has better chance of ranking as opposed to other pages on the domain. I would not be too worried about it, you can mitigate it by building quality links to some of your other top internal pages http://moz.com/learn/seo/page-authority http://moz.com/learn/seo/domain-authority

Hey Mike, if you'd like to see how important rich content, and content above-the-fold is, turn on the SERP overlay and do a Google search for "best time of year to go to Tahiti".  Have a look at the backlinks data for the #1 result (that's me), and compare that to the ones below (TripAdvisor, Frommers, USA Today, etc.).  Now, look at my page, and then look at the TripAdvisor page, paying attention to what non-template, non-navigation, non-clickable content is above the fold.  And look at the size of the images I trust you're convinced now so let's move on to your next question. Google has spent a lot of time analyzing what users respond well to, and I'd say if their data shows that it's big images and more text, they're probably right.  Keep in mind, you'll have a very low bounce rate if users do NOT find what they want on that page, but think they might by clicking the button next to one of the hotels.  If they bail out after that, it still won't look like a bounce in the stats. You could also consider changing up the layout a bit so that the search hotels form is off to the right (maybe 1000 pixel mark or so), pull in the first sentence or so from the hotel description, and use the larger image of the hotel there. You also have a lot of vertical whitespace in there.  While your style is very Web 2.0 and clean, an open style with a lot of whitespace unfortunately does push most of the content a fair bit down the page.

Hi, just a further update to my earlier post.  My site actually recovered in September, following the 90% drop in organic traffic.  It recovered to normal-ish levels after about a week.  Following Hummingbird I didn't experience any dip in traffic at all, but then late on October 11th, my site experienced the 90% drop once again!  I've got my fingers crossed that it's another temporary drop, but it does worry me since the drop is so drastic.  Does anyone have any suggestions why my site appears to be so temperamental in the organic listings at the minute?  Many of my pages that have dropped from page 1 to page 3+ have got great, unique review content, and in analytics, they show a low bounce rate.  Users who find these pages seem to enjoy using them, they have a good conversion rate, but Google just don't seem to like them at present.  I've not yet been able to find any online chatter about others experiencing similar drops on these dates, which confuses me even more.  My site has never had any manual penalties - at least, they have not been flagged up in GWTs.  Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated, Many thanks Mike

Hi Mike It's quite difficult to say, but I would offer this bit of solace: When I've seen sites that have been hit with a Panda penalty in the past, it has happened a day or 2 after receiving a similar warning to the one you have reported. And similarly, although not the same penalty, people have reported that they have received an unnatural link warning and then 2 or 3 days later have seen the big drop in rankings and traffic. Both of these instances indicate that the notification of a possibly penalty comes before the penalty itself.  If (and it is an 'if') this is the case with your site, then the big drop in traffic can be attributed to the penalty that you thought was coming, rather than the action you took yourself. It does sound like the crawl and the warning would result in potential duplicate content issues or low quality content issues, aka a Panda penalty.  I'd take out due diligence and make sure that you have not blocked any key landing pages via robots.txt file or by any other method - always a good idea to double check.  However, if that's not the case, I would say that the drop is because of the penalty that was likely coming, rather than what you've done. The next step would be to wait until the algorithm refreshes - Panda updates rollout at least twice a month now so hopefully your efforts should be rewarded soon enough and the traffic will return. However, it is worth considering that just because the Penguin algorithm updates on a given day, does not mean its impacted is limited to the day or the days that follow.  What I think we've seen with Penguin 2.0 is the impact of the algorithm updating has been spread out over refreshes, so we can't completely rule out this as Penguin action as well.  SERP volatility checkers like Mozcast seem to suggest that this probably isn't the case, all was quiet on August 13th on that algorithm, but it's worth bearing in mind. I hope this helps - do take my advice with a pinch of salt as it's an educated guess from my experience rather than any definitive evidence.

Go to majestic SEO, type your url in.  If your keywords you got penalized for are over 10% diversity you are being penalized generally, however there are a few exceptions, but not many.  I analyzed 440 sites and found that the highest was 2.47 for a site that didn't have keywords in the url. Also, I suggest you read this http://dailyseotip.com/what-other-marketing-firms-want-you-to-believe-that-isnt-true/3356/  I see that you are really focused on Onpage SEO.  I think this will help you understand more. The next thing you may want to do is start contacting admins and deleting low quality links if you have them.  Use OSE and figure out low quality links.  There are only a handful of directories I recommend out their.  I have a message from Google telling one of my clients to get rid of their directory links, it was and example link coming from a directory site to be exact.  Never use a keyword at a directory site, always use Brand name or your URL. Make sure your Disavow is your last resort and I highly suggest you get someone to do it that has experience in it.  Many have messed this up and really hurt their website. Have a great day.

Re: Sitemap - standard length of time is 30 days, or until you notice search engines have de-indexed the old URLs.

Based on similar scenarios that I've observed, I wouldn't be worried about a terribly negative Google reaction to a select box.  Obviously if your rankings take a dive within 60 days of rolling this out, I'd consider backpedaling this feature.  But select box navigations aren't uncommon and it seems that Google understands them well enough at this point. My issue would be more related to quantity; usually "normal" links on a page are best kept much lower than this, although, I also wouldn't be so sure whether Google will understand the JavaScript like a link or not.  That is, Google does crawl your JavaScript these days (source: Matt Cutts), but, sometimes Google seems to understand it, sometimes they don't (source: much first hand experience).  Also, from a UX standpoint, a select box with 450 items is really tedious.   Users hate having to do more things to get to other things (ie. scanning through a small box of 450 items that only displays 4 items at a time, not fun).  If you think that they already know the name of the concert venue, a suitable replacement could be a text box with autocomplete (if you search for prototype.js and autocomplete.js, you'll find a slick pre-written code to help with this). If people don't already know about the concert venue they want, or if you wanted to accompany this, I'd think about some other ways to present the data.  There are lots of cool ways this could be done, some might even score you many more organic links / social mentions.  A Google Maps plotter comes to mind.  As does some creative categorization by niche (ie. blues bars vs. hipster hangout).  One more possible factor to help people talk about your site ...  "Omg I can't believe X calls Y a hipster hangout!". As with all things web and marketing, test the crap out of whatever you do to validate, regardless of what route you decide.

Totally agree. Add a class to those <a>s and style that.</a>

Hi there, Digging up an old question I was asked to respond to. In short - if you're writing unique descriptions on the indexed pages, then those are fine. The non-indexed pages don't matter in regards to duplicate content, though I'm unclear why you would need page 2 or 3 for a single hotel.