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Marcus is dead on.

** If you put the exact same version of your penalised site on a new domain (with no redirects), would Google recognise it and penalise it again, or would that give it a completely fresh start?**

That would be a fresh start.

The preferred method of resolving the manipulative link issue is to run a campaign and remove the bad links. Such a campaign is time consuming and costly, but yields the best results.

If you cannot afford such a campaign, you can run away from the problem by changing domains in the manner you described. If you do such, it would be best if you can try to identify your good links and work with the publishing site to update the link to the new site.

Thanks for sharing Dana!

Is VPS Hosting worth the extra expense for a local Real Estate Website?

In short, absolutely. Longer answer below.

Shared hosting typically involves hundreds of websites on a single server. Shared hosting is the lowest form of hosting offered. It is very common to have all types of bad sites (porn sites, mail spammers, etc) on the same server as your real estate site. Server outages are common along with numerous other issues such as having your mail server flagged for spam.

A VPS typically divides a server's resources like a pizza into 8 - 12 "slices". You have dedicated resources assigned to your site along with over a 90% reduction in the user population. If you care at all about SEO, which you apparently do based on your presence at SEOmoz, you should consider using VPS at a minimum for site hosting.

I have worked with clients in the past who have tried shared hosting with quality hosts. I worked with the hosts to move the sites to other shared servers which they deemed as more mature / stable. The sites still experienced monthly outages. Typical site owners are not even aware of these outages. As part of a solid SEO plan, you should use a monitoring service to notify you of any site outages. I use Alertra but there are many similar services available.

I was also wondering what is your opinion on Rankings impact from changing Host providers?

If done correctly, there is no negative impact at all. The primary issue is during the switch over itself.

The issues of duplicate content and split links should not be a factor. Those issues can potentially occur when URLs change. That does not happen if you are simply changing hosts. The same applies to the www vs non-www and index.html issue. If these issues are not presently occurring, and you properly move all files associated with your site, and your new server is properly configured, the items you mentioned will not be considerations.

If Google is viewing the search result pages as soft 404s, then yes, adding the noindex tag should resolve the problem.

SEOmoz used to use Google Search for the site. I am confident Google has a solid method for keeping their own results clean.

It appears SEOmoz recently changed their search widget. If you examine the URL you shared, notice none of the search results actually appear in the HTML of the page. For example, load the view-source URL and perform a find (CTRL+F) for "testing" which is the subject of the search. There are no results. Since the results are not in the page's HTML, they would not get indexed.

None of these sites are linked at all, and all 28 of the sites are under the same hosting account (all are subdomains of root domain of hosting account).  Question, should I link these sites together at all and if so how?

What you are asking about is creating a link network which violates search engine guidelines, and therefore is not advised.

A link is supposed to be an "independent vote" and unbiased in nature. You are simply taking a bunch of sites you own and linking them together. If you sincerely feel it is a benefit to link the sites, use the "nofollow" attribute to avoid a penalty.

Steven, the first response shared remains the answer to your inquiry. You offered further clarification, and EGOL responded very nicely. The only thing we can do at this point is to continue to repeat ourselves.

With respect to practicing different areas of law, you have a very unique perspective that is not in alignment with the best user experiences or search engine practices.

Take any store...let's use Walmart....they have groceries, clothes, furniture, and tv's and so forth. They also offer a single website, walmart.com.

The law firm is a single business entity. It likely should have a single site.

At this point my impression is you clearly know and understand the advise which has been offered, but you fear the ranking loss. That is understandable. It will take a significant amount of SEO skill and investment to merge the sites without losing rankings.

You are trying to manage SEO as you would a PPC campaign. SEO does not work in this manner.

How old is this web page? New web pages naturally bounce around in SERPs as Google tests the performance.

What kind of "guest blogging" did you do? It is highly likely any links you created to your site via a guest blog was either nofollow, in which case it does not directly benefit your SERP results, or is viewed as a manipulative link in which case the link is more likely to harm your site rather then help it.

Google rankings are not static. They are influenced by your location, which Google site you are using, your browsing history, and much more. You may see yourself in #5 where another person might not see you at all for the same term. I am not suggesting you completely ignore rankings, but neither should you use them as the holy grail. Examine your traffic.

With the above noted, I see your results in Google.co.uk as follows:

uk bank holidays 2013  #5

uk bank holiday #9

uk bank holidays #7

bank holiday 2013 #6

bank holidays 2013 - not in top 50

** Why does Bing find 1 page and Google find 30 **

Bing is much more selective then Google when it comes to indexing a site. Additionally, Bing takes longer as well. That has always been my experience but if others feel differently feel free to share.

Bing does has a way for you to manually submit all 10 pages. From the Bing Dashboard choose CONFIGURE > Submit URL, then enter each URL. By submitting the URL in this manner you can be certain Bing sees all your site's pages.

To be clear, Bing may crawl the page and choose not to index it. Bing also many index a page then later choose to drop it from their index. Bing has high quality standards related to content and various trust factors.

Why does Google find these hidden elements - Whats the best way to sort this - controllnig the htaccess or robots.txt OR have the programmer look into how Joomla works more to stop this happening.

Who built your site? Did you have a "random" developer build it? Or a professional Joomla developer who focuses only on building Joomla sites? How much experience does your developer have with the particular version of Joomla being used (likely 2.5 or 3.0)? Since you did not share your URL, the best I can offer is general advice. Try going using the HTML code validator from W3C. If you see dozens of errors then the site was not cleanly coded and you may have various issues.

I generally do not advice using robots.txt to block elements as they may still be crawled. I would need to view the site to offer more targeted advice.

Any Joomla experts out there had the same experience with "hidden" pages showing when you type site:www.domain.com into Google.

It can easily happen and typically occurs when a developer's focus is delivering the site rather then SEO. A developer's focus is typically satisfying you, their client, which is not unreasonable. Your requests likely focused on the appearance of the site and it's main functionality. It takes a lot more time and effort to developer an SEO optimized site when compared to a "regular" site.

There are tens of millions of active websites will ???trillions / quadrillions or some other number which is beyond the boundaries of human concept of web pages. Each company, including Google, sets their servers to crawl the web each month. Even large companies cannot provide enough web servers to crawl every page every month, not to mention every day.

Accordingly, each offers a piece of the puzzle. Google's WMT report shows approximately 50% of the backlinks for your site. The other reports each fill in part of the remaining data.

If you earn a link from high quality sites like the New York Times, it is likely all the tools will show the link. When you are dealing with web spam, a lot of it comes from low quality sites which are not frequently crawled. OSE is a fantastic tool but you cannot depend on it to show all the links to your site.