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In my opinion this should be far more focussed on what a visitors wants to see here instead of what a search robot should encounter.

Make sure your main navigation is search engine friendly (no images, flash, javascript etc) so that all your main pages are linked there. You could choose to link to some of your latest or best articles (to show your visitors that your website is up-to-date), include some testimonials (to show you're credible). Perhaps in your footer you could include some partners (keep it natural), your privacy policy and terms of use?

Try asking your usability testers what they think should be on the main page and work from there.

Matt Cutts states that the number of subfolders 'it is not a major factor': http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_A1iRY6XTM

Furthermore, a blog I wrote about removing suffixes: http://www.finishjoomla.com/blog/5/does-adding-a-suffix-to-my-urls-affect-my-seo/

Another Matt Cutts regarding your seperate question about the keyword order: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRzMhlFZz9I

Having some structure (in the form of a single subfolder) would greatly add to the usability of your website in my opinion. If you can manage to use the correct redirects (301) from your old pages to your new ones, I wouldn't see a clear SEO related reason not to switch.

Not necessarily entirely 'their issue', because if Jeremy is linking with a 302 redirect without wanting to do so, this issue might occur on more places across his website.

To expand on the question by Alan: is this (1) an internal link between two pages on your website, (2) an external link from your website to another website or (3) a link from another website to your website?

The (in)famous Google Panda update (thousands of posts on Google about this) struck international websites on the 24th of February, right in the same month where you reported the problems started. Perhaps the drop is traffic is a result of this update and not of the backlinks?

Regarding those links: I think a single website that links to you (be it with millions of links) probably won't be the cause of this drop. Unless, these backlinks were put in place close to (before) the date where the traffic started dropping. Have you tried contacting the website that has those links up and request them to remove your site from their system?

I think the link from randomsite.com (PR6 homepage) is more valuable than a link from evenmorerandom.com.

Because there toolbar PageRanks are updated at an almost random basis, it is quite possible that randomsite.com inner pages actually have a decent PageRank internally at Google, that is simply not showing up in the toolbar yet. While the same holds true for evenmorerandom.com, there is a slim chance that this page has gone from PR/ to PR6.

Comparing the MozRank of these inner pages (which is updated far more frequently) would be far more useful in this situation.

Thanks a lot for the responses so far people! What I would like to use this data for is to back up the argument 'that good meta descriptions boost organic CTR' during a presentation. While I'm almost certain I'll find evidence that this is the case for ppc, I can't just generalize that data to organic seo. As kdaly100 suggested I'd think this is actually testable in a lab study. Present people with manipulated SERPS varying just one element at a time (meta description, title, url, etc.) and see what result gets the highest CTR. Strangely enough there doesn't seem to be any (public) studies that investigated this?

After having answered quite a lot of questions here, I figured it was about time to ask one of my own.

Can anybody point me to decent (experimental) research articles or blogs that actually show variations in meta descriptions influence the Click Through Rate (CTR) of searchers?

On dozens of websites on the internet it is stated that 'meta descriptions affect CTR', but (good scientific) sources for those statements are nowhere to be found. The only research I can find that comes closest to providing any evidence is a translated study by dynamical.biz, which states that searchers LOOK a lot at the meta description, but this study (atleast in the translation) mentions nothing of searchers actually CLICKING it.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

To me this sounds like a clear-cut case of a need for the canonical tag.

5 links in the breadcrumbs will by definition mean this page is 5 clicks away from the main page right?

Google doesn't have to look at the actual breadcrumbs for that, they can 'simply' count the hops they have to make from the main page to the page being discussed here.

I don't really see how you can utilize testimonials to consistently build good content? Testimonials are often short, will only be available on an irregular basis, and will rarely (if ever) get linked to by outside parties. Could you eloborate on your idea a little further?

I think the canonical tag would do quite well in this case, though you want want to consider a 301 redirect first. Both would require you to decide which URL is the 'main' one though, and either add a canonical tag with that URL to the other pages, or have the other pages 301 to the main one.

I agree with Aran, as long as you use the display:none in a legitimate way, Google is unlikely to penaltize you for it. Even if they got as far as manually reviewing your website, they would see you've intended no foul with the display:none.

"99.9% of the time, if a subfolder will work, it's the best choice for all parties." (http://www.seomoz.org/blog/subdomains-subfolders-and-toplevel-domains).

Even though this is a post made in 2006, I don't know of any relevant changes that would alter this advice.

As long as these links are acquired in a natural and valid way, I wouldn't worry too much about them.

If you had acquired a couple hundred links in a short time, when your website had only ten before, that looks unnatural, which isn't good. If you already have thousands of valid backlinks, a couple hundred extra won't hurt you as this fits the natural pattern. Besides, PageRank isn't a great metric to base any decision on these days anyway as it seems (http://www.finishjoomla.com/blog/33/why-pagerank-lost-its-value-for-seo/).

In regards to the rankings: I personally think these are either natural swings or there is more at play than just a handful of new and naturally acquired backlinks.

I guess they will just have a harder time ranking well than. Of course they can still build links through their partnerships, referals, directories, clients etc.

It's not really a matter of 'making content' for the sole sake of getting links; it's also about educating potential customers, getting your knowledge out to people facing similar problems, being seen as an authority in your market, receiving business opportunities because people are landing on your website with long tail search phrases etc.

I've written a blog about SOC last week in which I'm explaining that the value of it has most likely decreased greatly over the last years. Even though it isn't based on hard evidence, you might consider it in your decision of whether SOC should be an absolute requirement for your the blog in your website:

http://www.finishjoomla.com/blog/41/does-source-code-ordering-still-matter-for-seo/

Short answer: no.

Longer answer: read the following article (http://www.submitawebsite.com/blog/2010/03/does-buying-google-adwords-improve.html) on the relationship between SEO and PPC.

"99.9% of the time, if a subfolder will work, it's the best choice for all parties." (http://www.seomoz.org/blog/subdomains-subfolders-and-toplevel-domains).

Even though this is a post made in 2006, I don't know of any relevant changes that would alter this advice.

I personally wouldn't rely on the advice of just one company that 'your domain is toxic' (whatever that might mean). In order to make such a drastic move, I'd first get a second opinion on this, or run the site through some tools.

Perhaps the company doing the SEO just isn't capable enough to get your higher rankings? What arguments are they presenting that might be causing the 'toxicity' for your domain?

Perhaps HTML5 tags are used as one of the signals in determining which piece of source code is what. Seeing how easily one could manipulate these tags, I don't think it'll be a strong signal though. Of course it can be a good guidance for future web developers to identify pieces of source code!

Google is able to read CSS files (for example to determine if a link is hidden), but I don't think it will parse these files and apply them to the webpage to determine the visual layout of it. I think it would require a great amount of processing power (and time) to actually render a webpage, rather than sort out the pieces based on the source code like I described in my answer above.

Glad I could help!