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I have a similar issue. For whatever reason, Google has decided our CEO (Glen Kelman) is the 'author' of some of our site pages. There is no author markup on the page anywhere. In fact, our CEO's name isn't anywhere on the page. Yet, in SERPs, he is the 'author' of our Seattle market page (you can likely see it by searching for 'seattle real estate' and looking for Redfin in the results). Glen is a prolific blogger who not only posts to the Redfin blog, but also guest blogs on high profile sites around the web so it stands to reason that Google is very 'familiar' with him as an author. Moreover, he lives in Seattle so maybe Google is thinking, "Glen is from Seattle...he's the CEO of Redfin...he's a prolific author...Glen + Seattle + Redfin + Author = Glen is the author of the Seattle market page on Redfin!" Any ideas on how to stop Google from making this mistake?

Do you let the old URLs 404 or do you redirect them?

You're right, there is no API to access trends data which is a damn shame. I did find this: A python script which returns google suggest data along with the number of times it was searched. (Does not provide a time period though). If this doesn't work, could you use the AdWords Traffic Estimator API to get the data you're looking for?

This is a good response but doesn't really answer the question.. How would KD/Volume  compare with typical KEI or KOI?

Rand recommends a pre-emptive reconsideration request if you really don't know the source of the bad tactics. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/negative-seo-myths-realities-and-precautions-whiteboard-friday

Good timing - one of Australia's biggest sporting stars has just shut down his Twitter account after getting outed for buying followers. Article here Quite funny that a fellow sports star outed him! So yes, it does happen.

It goes the same for Forbes. http://onforb.es/SUetXL I saw this page on Google News. (150-word comment on a 12 month old video, there's your fresh, unique content!). Just look at the page, it has at least 4 adsense units on the same page, not to mention other ad units. It also has this floating ad on the right sidebar. Look at the image attached. See how it ranks with 150 words and a 1 year old video? Unique content, page quality, Adsense TOS bla bla bla... j7gyt.jpg

That's how I see it....the old homepage was at ..../af/index.asp -- this will definitely get 301ed, its just about the other 800+ random URLs. There is no penalty for redirecting a page that could otherwise have a 404? Or, once GoogleBot views a 404 on a particular page, is it too late at that point to 301 it? With the "index.asp" page, it still makes sense to redirect because there are links around the web pointing to that location, and those visitors need the redirect.