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Thanks for the feedback, we've just been finding them by doing Google searches. We will start to work through the points you have raised.

As far as the dropdown menus are crawl-able and Google can see what content is available in those menus I don’t think there is an issue. The only reason why I will go for first option is because, it will work great on mobile and other devices. With old style menu, there will be UX issue on mobile specially. Just a thought!

Have you got switchboard tags implemented? That should solve the issue.

It would affect all your mobile / tablet rankings and wouldn't affect your desktop rankings as much. Like I said it could be your competitors have improved theirs, rather than yours getting worse, if you can work out when roughly the decline started to happen - ask your devs what they rolled.

I would also check Search Console to see if Google is reporting a lot of 404s. Maybe your site has been down some.  Also check your robots.txt and also your site for any noindex or rouge canonical links. The basic approach here is to look first at any technical items.  Is your web server or code is acting in such a way that Google cannot crawl your site or giving a signal that your pages are faulty or giving a directive to deindex them.  You do this as it is the simplest thing to check and the easiest thing to fix.  Did you have a major site change, etc. After that, you check your rankings data and your organic traffic data to look for any patterns.  Is this to the whole site, is it to specific pages.  This may give clues of what is going on.  Did it only change from Google and not from another source. You then look at external factors.  Did you lose good links?  Did you gain bad links?  Did a competitor or two come in and outrank you?  Do these traffic changes correspond with a known Google update? Good luck!

I have a few thoughts. The Moz Pro Software suggestions are a good place to start, but will not constitute a thorough technical audit. Here's a good list, also from Moz to work on: https://moz.com/blog/technical-site-audit-for-2015 "put strong emphasis on our blog, writing daily about the latest news and events in our industry" Be careful with this. If done poorly, it has the potential to do more harm than good. In the past, many SEO's would advise that we should blog every day..the more content the better. But, the mentality has shifted now. Quality is much more important than quantity. If you are blogging about news stories in your industry you have to be adding SIGNIFICANT value in order to convince Google that your content is worthy of rankings well. For example, let's say I am searching for a particular news story. I could read the original story on the site that broke the news, or I could read the story on a recognized news authority such as the BBC or the NYT, or I could read your version of the story. IMO it is very hard to rewrite news and convince Google that readers should land on your site. It's not enough to add a couple of extra photos, organize things differently, or have unique words. If you're doing this, you have to be a source that makes people say, "Wow. I got so much more helpful information on this site than anywhere else. I want to keep seeing this site when I search for news in this industry." If you can't do that, and you are simply rewriting the news then you are running the risk of Panda viewing your site as low quality. This is even more true if you are doing so on a daily basis. The ultimate goal when trying to decide what content to produce is to determine what you can produce that would be the absolute best of its kind on the internet. That's tough to do. One thing that you can do is ask your readers for help. Ask them what they wish you were writing about. Ask them what they feel you could do that would make them want to come to your site rather than any other. Links are still important too. I'm not saying to go out and build links, but brainstorming on ways to legitimately attract links can be helpful. You can also review the backlink profile of your competitors, but be careful not to mindlessly try to reproduce their links. Not every link is helpful, but if, for example, you see them listed on the resource page of an authoritative site, think, "OK, what can we produce so that we can approach this site and have them add us to their list?"

They send tons of links from other domains that have been hacked to the waldorf domain. If you check open site explorer you see that there are 100nds of links to a page type /style.asp  - all with anchor text replica watches, probably the previous target. I guess they did the same thing for the soccer site - but that these links do not yet show up in open site explorer. Seem to be the only plausible explanation why this site would rank for another sites brandname. Apparently Google' algorithm is unable to catch these quite obvious tricks (cloaking, spammy links, duplicate content,...). rgds, Dirk

They'll be easily visible to a crawler. They'll be extracted based on their HTML/CSS elements, which are additional signals of importance and of website structure. Don't worry about it. If the HTML of the page includes the raw text, a crawler will understand it.