Add this to your htaccess file (remove the .txt extension from the file in order to use it)

Remove index.php or index.htm/html from URL requests

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /(([^/]+/)*)index.(php|html?)\ HTTP/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/administrator
RewriteRule ^([^/]+/)*index.(html?|php)$ http://your_site_URL/$1 [R=301,L]

Obviously change the your_site_url to the your domain in   http://your_site_URL/$1

Also remove the # before RewriteEngine On to make these changes work.

Thanks for your response.

So in your opinion i am best to delete the G+ page and keep the local page?

I have seem to have a problem (well think its a problem!)

We have a google+ page for our website/ brand (which is verified) and also seem to have a separate google places G+ page (the one with just two tabs at the top.. Photos and About).

When you google our brand, google has added a google+ page link but this links to the places one and not our social g+ page.

Is it possible to merge these two pages into one?

ps i have added rel="publisher" directing to the main google+ page (not local) on the home page and the local G+ page is not verified.

Ben

Tom Thank you so much for taking the time to look into this for me.. I have had a look at the penguin tool and it does look as though the first penguin update had a large effect.  Having said that it is difficult to be 100% sure as it took effect at about the same time that we saw a natural down turn in business due to bad weather.

I foolishly outsourced some link building at about the same time as well. and this is the cause of many of the spammy forum profiles etc..

I will keep looking into the link profile in more detail, is linkdetox worth the $?

Ben

Thanks for your comments.. I agree comntent does need beefing up bit.. on the case with the duplicate titles.. they are being created by my eccommerce platform, as is the script.

How should I put the script in an external file.

Hi .. yep it does look abit that way..

We did not / have not had any link warning emails.

What do you think could be done to recify this?

Ben

Hi

We saw a small drop arround 17/06/2012 (from pos 4 to 10)

Then around 5/08/2012 went from 10 to 28

Then around 16/09/2012 went from 28 to 50

many thanks for your input.

Ben

Great words of wisdom from Martin!

There are one hell of a lot of designers and programmers/ developers out there that are great at what they do but have no idea about other aspects such as SEO (infact especially SEO).

If your on a budget then there will be a lot of work that you can do yourself to fix the issues, it will just take time and effort on your behalf to find them and learn how to fix the issues.  There is one hell of a lot of information and know how out there on the web .. use SEOmoz reports to identify the problems and then do the research on how to fix the issue.

I started my web business up in exactly the same way as you, and now I too am having to do the same work.. so far all done in house but soon i will have to outsource for the real fine detail.