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I think it is very difficult to judge your own site objectively.  I tend to snap at my wife when she is critical of something on my website (although I am more tolerable with other people weirdly).  It sounds like you need fresh eyes on the situation.  I am no expert at SEO although I know enough to know when something is not right.  I am pretty new to SEOmoz so I am not sure what the rules area about sharing sites etc but if I have your web address I would be happy to give you feedback on your campaign at no charge (if this is allowed) and whether there are any obvious steps that could improve it.  I am not looking for SEO business so this is in no way going to lead to me selling you anything.  From what you are saying though it sounds like you need to divert some of your time from content creation and syndication to developing relationships with authoritative sites so that they link to you although without looking at your site etc it is hard to make any solid recommendations. It sounds like you are in a situation where you could really benefit from a professional SEO but do not have the resources to fund one and I really feel for you with this.  If your assumptions are correct it is very easy to see how in as little as two months getting the right SEO expertise to add value to your efforts could really pay for itself many times over as if $1000 or $2000 a month makes you an extra $200 plus a day it very quickly pays for itself.

Greg Thanks so much for helping out! If you don't mind I'm just going to correct a few finer details so people don't confuse anything "Essentially the tags display the exact content as the original URL so the pages are identical but the URL is different." Its totally true that this happens, but this is not what causes the duplicate content error in the crawl report. The errors are usually from sub-pages of any given tag archive having the same title tag. "Remove the tags" By this I'm sure you just mean noindex tags. You don't need to remove them from the site altogether, just remove them from the index. "If you want the Tags and Categories for user experience, Install Yoast SEO plugin which allows you to insert a canonical URL on the duplicate category pages." You should leave categories indexed and noindex tags. Yoast does canonicals no matter what, you don't need to think about them and they are not what handles duplicate category pages. Everything else stated is more or less ok but I just don't people to be confused. Thanks again! -Dan

Google test things from time to time and this something causes a fluctuation on few of the key terms and websites that are ranking for those key terms...I think you should be too much possessive about rankings and should not really check tit on regular basis... I think you should stop thinking about this for few days and then you will notice the rankings stabled at one point... normally fluctuations are the market of the process so don’t take this too seriously.

You are indeed an optimist. Thanks