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Thanks for the response, that answer from Rand is definitely helpful. Do you (or anyone else!) have actual experience of this penalty and getting past it? I guess I'm looking for some positive assurance before I start on backlinking that could potentially not fix anything

There are no "best practices" established for the tags' usage at this point.  On the one hand, it could technically be used for every page, and on the other, should only be used when it's an article, blog post, or other individual person's writing.

Thanks for the reply Chris. UPDATE FROM GOOGLE REONSIDERATION REQUEST I got a response back from Google after submitting a reconsideration request (they got back to me in 4 days!). Basically there is no manual penalty in place, thus I'm assuming its the new algorithms from panda. But this still puzzles me as the clients website is outranked by even the most basic 4-5 page weak authority websites and subdomain 2.0 properties for its own 20+ word exact match content! Answering your questions: The website ranks no.1 for all of its domain searches The bounce rate is up and down, from 50>70%, really depends on the source of traffic a paid search brings in some high bouncing traffic (but at cheap costs). The avg  time on the website is around 1-2mins. There is no active social sharing activity at all on the website except youtube. (However I would say 60% of the ranking competition are in a similar boat) In terms of links, OSE doesnt indicate a big drop in links or anything. Steps I've taken to address the issues you mentioned and other considerations: Redesigned website from the ground up (SEO friendly IA) Conversion optimisation (UX design + usability) on every page Rejigged every single page with new content (rewriting from scratch) Strong focus on best practice keyword targeting in content/headings/internal linking Added 15+ new relevant, unique pages New XML Sitemap + created html sitemap So far no improvement has been seen but Google HAS indexed the new pages within 3-4 days. Should I expect significant changes when the next Panda update comes out? The next steps are to add social sharing and an activity plan for Facebook/Twitter, add a blog, continue to focus on good content with some potential viral programs. The only areas I am not 100% sure about are the more technical sides such as server hosting/index issue. If anyone would like to take a look at the site I can provide the url privately. Thankyou Hash