Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Same with me. The index page disappeared but internal pages started ranking, but not as high. It might not be penguin. Google sent out all those email's pre-penguin scaring the life out of webmasters. If you think about it, 700,000 emails sent out by Google. If only half of them took pages down, we are talking 350,000 pages missing. If the other 350,000 cancelled or deleted lots of incoming links to their sites/pages too and you had a links across a few to 1000 of these, you are going/have lost a load of link power. Have a look on LinkDetective.com. I think its quite accurate. After Penguin I lost nearly 13% of links (dead links) and I never deleted or asked for any links to be cancelled or terminated. Makes you wonder if there really was a Penguin update or if google just scared the webmaster community into deleting dodgy or paid links or getting rid of pages or sites with dodgy links. I visited loads of forums, watched post-penguin videos etc and the general consensus is to carry on link building but try to get it more natural. Get your links pointing to you with your domain as the anchor. However, you may be lucky, and when you get crawled again with no server error, things may return to normal. It is possible to do a 'fetch' through your webmaster account on the pages that had the error, but I think you are limited to about 100 fetches. See if any navigational pages can be fetched. They could get crawled quicker and help get the errors sorted. Good luck with everything.

Lonnie Above are good points but I think on their own wont put him up the SERPS for the keyword combination alone as it has 40-60K searches per month by some pretty established UK players. He should do them but there is a lot of additional work (aka slog) along with Aran's points above for a start

I have read articles where people were using blackhat seo tactics through javascript thinking that google does not analyze it and were caught. Apparently they do analyze javascript. This analysis is actually not difficult to achieve. All you need is a javascript interpreter, like spider monkey. Im sure google can write something themselves without even using a third party product. This is computatively intensive however. So google might spider the page and then run an analysis several weeks later off the live internet with one of their background computers. So whatever is in javascript may not be picked immediately but will probably be picked eventually.

We use caching and have seen no ill effects. I seriously doubt spidering robots will be hitting your site's pages every 15 minutes. One thing you might want to look into is the "If Modified Since" header, which could help notify Google that your content has changed http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-interview-googles-matt-cutts-on-redirects-trust-more

The answer is right in your question - "runs a number of whitelabel sites". As mentioned, it is largely due to the original publisher publishing the content first and getting indexed - from there, anytime the google bot stumbles across the same content - it will figure out that it has seen the content before, and attribute the ranking to the original. Something that google themselves covered last year here (although more specifically for news at the time). Duplicate content unfortunately isn't just "not shown" by the search engines (imagine how "clean" the SERPS would be if that were the case!) it's just ranked lower than the original publisher that google is aware of. Occasionally you will get the odd page that will rank from a different domain - but that is usually due to being fresh content, I have seen this myself with my own content being aggregated by a large news site - they might outrank me on occasion for a day on one or two pieces - but my original url comes out on top in the end.

edit(i forgot to answer your question of where my sites are): I have used this strategy with several sites, dittoeffect.com which currently is over a year old and gets about 1million+ hits a year as well as another site which I will not share the name of which is only a month old competing with some 10 year old credit card sites for some decent terms in the top 10 (3000 a month search volume terms). Sometimes it may seem that way however the way I see it is that sometimes a tumblr blog is not very popular or does not have a lot of links and page rank going to it so it won't be crawled for quite some time (even up to 60 days sometimes). Because of this you can see a fairly regular stream of links coming in. Also I doubt you would be as obsessed with it as I was as I was building close to 700 likes a day (700 or more links a day) so I could focus my attention on this over a short period of time. Being really good with searching on google and through other means I also used this to get links from high page rank sites including 400-800 over PR4-6 page links included in those. The higher page rank pages do get crawled faster though so sometimes it may be wise to avoid getting more than one from a domain. Also since these links are virtually endless, limited by the time and effort put into it, you can just get like 20 a day in a couple minutes and then just forget about it to keep it looking really natural. Make sure to look at the rules for tumblr as self promotion is not something they support. A good thing to do though which I don't even really see as self promotion is to search in google: inurl:tumblr.com "your keywords" in my opinion by liking relevant pages to your site you are then avoiding self promotion as you would obviously have interest in these pages as well as the added bonus of being able to add 1000s of relevant links. Another important note is that your blog can be something like ditto-effect.tumblr.com and the links you get show up as ditto-effect. google sees these as links with the anchor text "ditto effect" without the hyphen so thats great too. Only fall back is that these can only link to your main page and only one tumblr account can be pointed to a domain. Its hard to say the value of some of these links because its not in content though at the very least this is a great way to get page rank to go up as well as get your site crawled like crazy. If you have any more questions don't hesitate to ask

Ah ok, sorry I got the wrong end of that. They will be using rich snippets, a markup such as shema.org - http://schema.org/Review or http://schema.org/AggregateRating should achieve the result

The best way to go is to continue building quality links. These links you've 'kindly' acquired from a competitor have clearly made your link profile look worse than it should be. The fact you've got nearly 450k links coming from less than 100 domains will look a tad suspicious to G. If you continue to build quality links, google will see that you're not getting your links from spammy sources and the other links you've been given could easily turn from having a negative effect to having a positive effect. As it's a new site, this is the time when your link profile is watched carefully, so although it's unfortunate to have got these links, it's not the end of the world by any means. Try and get some links from sites with a high MozRank using white hat tactics.

That's quite a tough question to answer as it depends on a huge variety of factors. Some of the new websites sit on aged domains and are more powerful than brand new domains subsequently they rank quicker. Some of the new websites are blogs and are updated with fresh content rather than static 'brochure' websites (which struggle to rank for anything).

You need to show Google why the homepage is most important for that term. I haven't looked in depth, but here are a couple of things... Has Google added your brand name to the title tag here on the SERPs? "Store info : Football Shirts, Kits & Maglia - Calcio Italia Shop_" - _www.calcioitaliashop.com/store_info.htm I notice it's not the same within your coded title tag. If you've recently removed the brand from your About Us page that could help. See here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-solve-keyword-cannibalization I haven't checked your link profile but is it possible there are more links (or more powerful links) to your About Us page, rather than your home page? If so, getting this reversed will help, or as it's a new site, perhaps this hasn't happened yet. Setting up profiles with social networks and adding the link to your homepage will help show Google that that is the most important page. You could also create a Google Places profile with a link to the homepage, if you haven't already. Bolding "Calcio Italia Shop" on your About Us makes it look like that page is important for that term. You could remove that bolding or change it to "Calcio Italia Store" (there seems to be some confusion over what your brand name is?) and add "Calcio Italia Shop" to a H1 tag on your homepage. These little things will help send the right signals, but I don't think it's something you need to worry about long-term - I think Google will eventually figure out the homepage is best to rank for the brand name as that should naturally build up more page authority. Also, I'd make it readable and put your brand name in the meta description of your homepage. The meta description isn't there to stuff keywords into, it's there to encourage people to click through from the SERPs. It should be around 155 characters max, the search engines chop more off.

Does anyone have any further feedback on this?  We are at a complete lost as to why the penalty may have occured.