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Well, right off the bat it could be a number of things.

For starters, yes, it could very well be the Panda update as Google has been making tweaks to the Panda update for some time now.

How about your inbound link situation?  Have you lost any significant backlinks in the last little while?  Have you been spamming your site across multiple websites, ie. comments, boards, articles, etc?  Perhaps Google has caught on to some not-so-friendly SEO tactics.

I don't have all my tools in front of me right now, so I can't go overly in-depth at this time.

And I don't know the first thing about your niche to really pass comment on the content of the site.  However, it doesn't appear to be stuffed or lack any legible reading by an end-user.

"Would Google just ignore these"

The canonical tag is merely a reference for Google, and any other crawlers that respect this tag, and in no way does Google have to honour it.  I'm quite certain if your canonical tag reference was different than the actual URL in question over a large chunk of your site, Google might start to think something is up.

The canonical tag works like a 301 header redirect.  So, it will pass some juice, but not 100% of the PR juice.

I could go on more, but there are several answers below that have already pointed out some great points.

But how do you individually optimize hundreds, or even thousands, of additional pages?  It MUST be template-driven with subtle changes such as "My Products - Page X", which may be even too subtle for Google to render a non-duplicate content page, no?

I completely understand your point, but I have been struggling with this for a while now.  I hate the thought of my paged pages competing with the top page (page 1).

What more could you possibly do to optimize H1, Title, etc., tags than to simply add the current page # (while keeping things automated over thousands of pages)?

Any additional thoughts, anybody?

Hello there!  This is my first post here on SEOmoz.

I'll get right into it then...

My website is housingblock.com, and the homepage runs entirely off of geo-targeting the user's IP address to display the most relevant results immediately to them.  Can potentially save them a search or three.

That works great.  However, when crawlers frequent the site, they are obviously being geo-targeted for their IP address, too.  Google has come to the site via several different IP addresses, resulting in several different locations being displayed for it on the homepage (Mountain View, CA or Clearwater, MI are a couple).

Now, this poses an issue because I'm worried that crawlers will not be able to properly index the homepage because the location, and ultimately all the content, keeps changing.  And/or, we will be indexed for a specific location when we are in fact a national website (I do not want to have my homepage indexed/ranked under Mountain View, CA, or even worse, Clearwater, MI [no offence to any Clearwaterians out there]).

Of course, my initial instinct is to create a separate landing page for the crawlers, but for obvious reasons, I am not going to do that (I did at one point, but quickly reverted back because I figured that was definitely not the route to go, long-term).

Any ideas on the best way to approach this, while maintaining the geo-targeted approach for my users?  I mean, isn't that what we're supposed to do?  Give our users the most relevant content in the least amount of time?  Seems that in doing so, I am improperly ranking my website in the eyes of the search engines.

Thanks everybody!

• Marc