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Hi Neil, What I mean by category URLs is that a product sits on a URL like http://www.trophycentral.com/5x7blacmarpl.html, rather than http://www.trophycentral.com/plaques/insertplaques/5x7blacmarpl.html but as I said, the flat structure you are using can work as well. Putting products in structures like that can get confusing if products exist in multiple categories and make way for duplicate content (i.e. a product is found under multiple different URLs). Just worth mentioning though because it's not common to see such a flat structure nowadays with the ecommerce platforms a lot of folks are using, like Magento, etc. I wouldn't worry too much about tabs. If the content behind tabs is a) not incredibly long, b) relevant to the page, and c) available in the source code on page load (i.e. it doesn't require the execution of a JavaScript function to pull the content into the tab / onto the page), Google can see this content and should treat it much the same as if the content wasn't tabbed. Cheers, Jane

Got it - thanks!  i am optimistic that the duplicate pages I fixed will make a big difference and I will be able to tell, but well see! ... Neil

Hi Matthew, thanks very much for your reply.  I wish I knew where some of the bad backlinks came from - I have hired a couple of seo companies over the past 10 years but thought they were highly reputable.  In terms of the dropped links over the last year, this was done after the problems with Google started.  We had hundreds of links coming from two sources - our search provider who was saving search pages with our header, etc. and our hosting site where we store our engraving files, etc.  I was actually pretty sure these were causing the problem, because there were over a thousand links from these two locations.  I thought they might have viewed them as spam even though they were not, but removing them didn't seem to do anything. Out of curiosilty, how were you able to see the change in links - is there a sw program that you recommend? In terms of the new backlinks to the site, I "panicked" and started adding more (at the recommendation of someone on this site!) and hired network solutions to add us to more directories.  I stopped the service last month.  I also have been writing a bunch of articles and press releases. Is there something that can help tell me which backlinks are "bad"? Thanks again!

Kate, this is Very Helpful - thank you for your thoughtful ideas!! I will get right on it!

Thanks, Donnie - I will keep checking.  As long as it balances out towards the top, I'll be happy (-:

Hi, thanks for your comments.  Yes, I posted many questions on the google forum and got some good suggestions, but so far no luck.  I'll take a look at the keywords... Thanks.

Thanks!

Thanks - I just looked up our site (www.trophycentral.com) on Google and see many of the missing likes.  My guess is that it is mostly a timing issue.  SEOMOZE is helpful because I can see the ratings and overall estimate, so I guess over time I will look at a few sites.

Got it - thanks.  I will be making the changes over the next few days.  Unfortunately, I published the site last night and it will take about 18 hours so I can't access it for a while.

Thanks.  I was afraid this might be the best way to do it   Unfortunately, I have quite a few categories like this - trophies, medals, etc. that are the same, except for size and / or color.

Joshua, thanks for taking so much time to respond.  To answer your questions: 1. yes, I am  using google webmaster tools.  I also confirmed there were no manual actions agianst us. 2. noticed the drop in March.  Most of our site is fine, but the drop was about 25-30% of our traffic that we were getting from a couple of keywords that disappeared completely.  That's why I am pretty sure it is Penquin related - both the timing and the fact that the words didn't move down, but rather disappeared.  However, I have had several people look and they can't find anything that looked "fishy". Thanks for all of the suggestions.  I will take another look at the title tags - I thought I had most between 35 and 70 characters now.  I know we have an issue with the thin descriptions - we have many products that are very similar (ex. 500 award certificates that are all the same except for the title and image and it is hard to write flowery content that is different for all 500!  Same for our trophies!). I will also look at adding the branding to the titles. Penguin is really killing us and I am just hoping something works!  Thanks again!

Thanks, Alan, I understand now...

Thank you, Francisco!!!  I wish I thought of that (-:  Have a great day... Neil.

That's is fabulous!  I have to check it out.  Thanks again!!

Thanks for your response.  To answer your question - I did file a reconsideration request and was told there was no manual penalty. So I assume it was Panda / Penuin because my home page, which ranked in the top 1-7  positions for trophies and for trophies and awards disappeared (meaning it could not be found in the top few hundred listings).  Even our brand, trophycentral, disappeared for a couple of weeks.  TrophyCentral came back after a few weeks, but nothing else on the home page came back.  Other pages are fine.  So we are getting some sort of algorithmic penalty and we have no idea why.  It has been a couple of months now.   Thanks for your thoughts.

Thanks, Malcolm, I will give it a try...