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If the new website is really new I suggest testing to see what happens when you redirect from the older site. If the older site pages dont have rankings and or any authority, I wouldnt bother either way.

I have filled many recons once for a domain without losing the button. If your manual penalty check shows no manual actions, I wouldnt be worried. I havent heard of them doing that, and I have dealt with a lot of penalties.

Like I said - keep checking. If they WERE annoyed with your multiple submissions, give it 2 weeks - the normal timeframe that they ask you to wait before resubmitting a reinclusion request.

Have you manually verified drop in rankings where visibility is shown down in AWR?

Frankly i wouldnt worry about it. Unless your journal entries are really poor and not unique in any way, I would just carry on. If you ARE really concerned, you can noindex / follow them or better still, move your journal to an external blogging platform if it doesnt fit the theme of the site, something like Tumblr might work well for you by the sounds of it.

Tags are basically lists of posts with a common theme - some sites automatically create tags, but commonly bloggers would add these into the CMS.

Ideally, tags are kind of an extension of "categories" and often are similar to these in the way they are presented, but while posts appear on one or two categories, tagged posts can appear on many tag pages. As such tag pages could result in a lot of duplicate content on a blog, and for many years now I and others have been advocating noindexing tag pages (good SEO plugins would do this for you) and to no follow links to tags - which sounds like the type of implementation you have.

Unless you are 100% sure that your tagged pages dont create too much duplicate content, I would leave them nofollowed, as I have seen them do more harm than good.

I have seen this ONCE only. and at that time their penalty was revoked without a message. Keep an eye on the traffic and see if it increases, and periodically check the manual actions checker.

Have you broken down your analytics by the same regions?

Do you have GWMT set up? If you do, then you can also check GWMT impressions by region to see if there is a real dip.

There are other tools in the market that may look at your visibility better, but without looking at the site, there could be a host of situations.

www.example.com/key2=value2&key=value1
www.example.com/key=value1& key2=value2

As long as the URLs can be reached with a status 200 on either permutation, then it would be seen as a distinct URL.

From an SEO standpoint, depends on the semantic set up and content variation.

Any chance you can screenshot and redact the domain - I am not sure that this is being read right...

Disallow in robots would work - especially if the JS is actually rendering a pop up PAGE not a snippet existing on the page. If possible, I would prefer the use of Rel Canonical on those pop up pages - Google is funny sometimes and indexes URLs if you dissallow them in robots.

Sorry - I had to giggle when I first read your question

1. Google has made changes to algo that is finding a number of these sites , especially ones with dupe content

2. They are in the process of downgrading the value of exact match domains.

My advice? If you are adamant n getting these sites back up, take one - customise the template, make sure its not linked to or or linking to any of your others - rewrite the content and make it unique, and then send in a reinclusion request to google, outlining what you did and WHY you did it...

If you are looking specifically for link analysis tools then a pretty good alternative is http://linkrisk.com/

I have managed to get many penalties overturned based solely on using them as an analysis tool.

If you decide to go down the route of creating a fictitious address, you may find hard to get a real one approved if you get caught out. They are getting stricter. In the past you could use a mailbox if you didnt have a real place

www.example.com/key2=value2&key=value1
www.example.com/key=value1& key2=value2

As long as the URLs can be reached with a status 200 on either permutation, then it would be seen as a distinct URL.

From an SEO standpoint, depends on the semantic set up and content variation.

Tags are basically lists of posts with a common theme - some sites automatically create tags, but commonly bloggers would add these into the CMS.

Ideally, tags are kind of an extension of "categories" and often are similar to these in the way they are presented, but while posts appear on one or two categories, tagged posts can appear on many tag pages. As such tag pages could result in a lot of duplicate content on a blog, and for many years now I and others have been advocating noindexing tag pages (good SEO plugins would do this for you) and to no follow links to tags - which sounds like the type of implementation you have.

Unless you are 100% sure that your tagged pages dont create too much duplicate content, I would leave them nofollowed, as I have seen them do more harm than good.

I came in to add link to my post http://explicitly.me/manipulating-google-suggest-results-–-an-alternative-theory but seems coule of people have already done that Thanks guys!

The best guide out there IMHO is by Yoast http://yoast.com/video-seo/

So my question is, should we redirect all the old product categories that we are shutting down to the new website on another TLD where we are opening them again and the same for the products (e.g. superstar.dk/garmin -> xxx.com/garmin)? Or would it be better to keep the redirects within the same website/TLD (e.g. superstar.dk/garmin -> superstar.dk)?

Historically my answer would have been straightforward. Redirect to the new site. However with the changing rules in search engines I would advise caution. Does your new website have stable rankings? Is it worth the risk of 301's from another site?

My opinion is use of 301s for ranking cross domains may be a tactic that borders on the grey area and could lead to a penalty in the future.

I dont think that they will specifically turn anything "up". however the things to look out for in terms of increasing signal to ranking factrs are the building of "Brand Perception" and Social Signals...

To start with if the forum ISNT indexed, get the URLS changed, and try and get all the titles customosed so they arent generic across every thread.

I suggest a subdomain for forums, as you point out, it is seen as a separate site. you can always flow strenght from the forum into the main TLD by cross linking, which I think is much better to do, however some may disagree with this.

If I were in your position, I would prefer to release section by section - a massive blast of content would be more of a flag then a slow release - this is my personal opinion.

Re threads - I would follow/noindex all threads tht arent on the first page of the post -  that way, the juice follows and gets crawled. Adding relcanon to those may also help preserve the strength...