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I would +1 Wiliam's answer here. 301 redirects in addition to Bing's site moving function should do the trick. Particularly if the links that point to the old domain, which will be redirected via the 301, contain your brand name - I've seen this carry the branded search rankings over regularly. Moz has chosen to keep their home page title reading "SEOmoz is now Moz" for several months now - I don't know first-hand, but I'd imagine they've done this in part as insurance to ensure they rank for their old brand name. Might be worth considering the same.

I don't believe that's possible.  You'd have to create a special ad group like you suggested just for those keywords to get the capitalization in that word to behave that way.  Google's capitalization guide is here for DKI.

Fantatic - thank you David & Frederico!

Thanks Everyone for your input! To further clarify, the 2 Chinese sites in question have essentially slurped our pages and in their automated process, have created non-existent links that have never existed on our website and that have no pattern similarities in URL structure. Based on this, I am inclined to disavow the PR1 site, but work to 301 links from the PR5 site via .htaccess. Thoughts?

Thank you Carla - I too noticed moz.com appears in most seo-related topic searches, so thought it was odd that tools showed they have a PR2. And thanks for the link - great info to know for the future if there is a project we have that involves domain changes

Thanks Mike - yes, I believe this only happens on results pages on their site. Good point on the cloaking - good thing to think about as well. Sounds like disallowing in robots.txt is the 1st thing they should do, then they can remove the pages resulting in 404s which they can then manage through GWM.

Personally I don't think the NoIndex, NoFollow solution is the best because they'll be harming or killing any link equity that was going to the site through that page instead of consolidating it. The best solution would be to come up with the means of adding that 301 as soon as you can so they stop hurting themselves needlessly. Could they possibly leave the page up and just add some form of "Product Discontinued" type of message on the page to direct people to the most pertinent category page and other listing/product as needed? That way they don't shoot themselves in the foot while they wait on the ability to easily 301 and then once they can they just need to 301 the pages with the "Discontinued" message to one of the relevant pages listed.

Thank you all. At a high level based on your input, it makes sense to do nothing at all as traffic rankings for our site have been on the rise and this site has linked to us for at least 3 years with no associated affect. The only bummer is that it does appear to be scraped and some human intervention as many links are broken, but thankfully hit our 404 error page. We have contacted them 3 times over the past month, to no avail - most likely due to either language/translation barriers, or simply due to the fact that they have so many broken links that it's not worth their time to fix them. To answer some of Doug's questions, traffic from their site is minimal but appear as quality visits: 94 visits per month, 8.53 pages per visit, 8:40 minutes on site, 10.64% bounce rate. Their link neighborhood doesn't look exceptional, however the website relationships all appear to be about the same topic - plastics. The links are not in the footer, but instead a link from a specific plastic like Lexan 101 to our Lexan 101 page - pretty relevant, their site is a PR5 and is a legitimate business. They simply appear to be referencing our site for more technical information on the plastics they sell. Just threw a red flag at me because of the excessive number of links from one domain and we work very hard to protect our reputation. Any other comments are most welcome - again thank you all!

There are many factor which influences a site's ranking in one region or another. Google is heading toward personalized results based on user location, but that's no panda or penguin issue. Some things to consider are: the location of your hosting server the tld of your site the location and tld of your linking sites the location you set up in your gwtools or in your buiness page the content of your site, if it's english it may be more british focused or american and other ranking factors which only google knows

Extremely helpful insight Marie - I will be contacting you directly soon. It appears that the duplicate content you've found (and other dupe content we've found) is actually our content that other sites have repurposed. Seems like Google has determined our site as the culprit, so this would be an issue we need to address - the only thought that comes to mind right away is adding an 'Author' tag, then start working on what appears to be a hefty cleanup project, something that looks like you are an expert on and will most likely be working directly with you in the near future! The 2nd level pages that have little content and lots of links are 'noindex,follow' but I'm nervous about the number of these tags throughout our site which could be seen as spammy to a search engine. Of note, the 2nd level page section you have found ranks quite well since it is a subdomain which is interesting. Our suspicion is that since we made the 404 (200 success) error that Google detected on Dec. 9, 2011, we have been on some sort of Google 'watch-list' and any little thing we do incorrectly that they find, we immediately are penalized. The homepage description of our company is reused on industry directories that we are listed on, so perhaps we must consider re-writing our description to be unique, and adding more content to the homepage would be a good thing and is certainly easily doable.

Thanks! Do you use SEOMoz for rankings check?

Thank you Dr. Pete - exactly what I needed to know!

I think that article alone just scared me away from using Disavow Thanks Mike!

Both great answers - thank you Sean and Brighton College. This just confirms my suspicion that it's not a good idea. You know that sickening feeling you get in your stomach when something doesn't feel right? That's the feeling I got when approached from our customer about doing this. I think that gut instinct as Sean alludes to has a lot of truth in SEO. I agree with both of you on "it's better to have a few good outbound links" and "the more inbound quality links vs outbound, the better." Thank you!

Maybe the robots problem fixes everything for you. I hope it does. I always use the same kind of robots.txt -> as short as possible and as clear as possible. Archives and everything are allowed and so far (knocking on a piece of natural wood) never has something like this occurred. Again hope this helps your site kind regards Jarno

Thank you for the article link- just what I was looking for!

Nathan please see my response to this question in the Private Q&A section. In short, I don't think this has to do with Google's goof-up a couple weeks ago, or with some of the other shifts, but I do think you are in violation of some of their guidelines on a pretty massive scale, although unintentionally and with good reason. I'll go ahead and paste my answer below, but the Private version includes links and other information that could identify the site. Hello Nathan, There were some pretty major shifts on the 16th, 19th and 24th-26th so the time-frame raises a red flag. However, with the little information I have (basically your indexation count) I think you may have a problem that isn't related to any of the recent algorithm shifts. Assuming you are talking about ####.com, I show 462,000 indexed URLs from that domain. Nearly half a million URLs is quite a bit to index and you can imagine that Google might want to thin that out a bit and focus only on the ones that are important and original. If you have 460k + pages, but most of them are duplicate content or significantly duplicate content, and most of them have no external links, this would put you in danger of being affected by several different algorithms/filters/penalties put in place by Google to keep such pages from bloating their index and outranking what they think to be "better" content. That can be a hard pill to swallow because you know your content is good and people like what they find there. But let's look at this from the perspective of an impartial machine... The following EXACT phrase appears, word-for-word, on about 22,800 different pages, most of them from within your site: "PHRASED REMOVED FOR PUBLIC VIEWING" The following is typical of the "Related Terminology" section of your pages, which could be interpreted by Google as being keyword spam: "You may have searched any one of these terms to find this product: Keyword1, keyword2, keyword3, keyword4, keyword5, keyword6, keyword7, keyword8, so forth and so-on for a few dozen keywords". A lot of these pages, possibly most of them, have very little unique/exclusive content. Instead, they list out features and uses from a database. Because of this you have many thousands of pages all with the same potential pool of words, each choosing to show more or less the same words in various orders and combinations. Furthermore, it is obvious that the pages are generated by a machine. Looking at this example, a "better" page would be one that has an introduction telling the visitor what "Polybenzimidazole (PBI) is and what it's used for in paragraph form, in addition to the list of features and uses: http://www.###.com/###/ . I'm sure most of your users will know what PBI is for if they search the site for it, but remember we're dealing with machine algorithms designed to detect spamming attempts, such as article spinning, which uses pretty much the same technique of switching around the order of words to generate hundreds or thousands of "articles" from a single original. I wouldn't venture to provide specific advice on how to fix these issues without knowing more about your business. My suggestion is to look for a reputable outside SEO agency who can help you overcome these issues, which may involve removing a lot of pages from the index, allowing more content to be seen on each datasheet, or some other measures. Good luck!

Nice - thanks Kane. Cool Chrome tool too, thanks for the suggestion. I'm in GWT every morning to check things out since our site is fairly large - about 220,000 pages. The sitemap checker is a really cool new feature in GWT too!