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Thank you Peter, Will reply to the spec issues via email

Hey, that's fine, I'm just saying that if your old site was being penalized for bad links and you just 301 redirect it to a new site, the new site will likely also get penalized. If you can clean up the link profile, great. Note that 301s do not pass all the link juice, so you will be losing a little bit of link value by redirecting. As for the new domain, like I said, it's not going to have any value just because it was originally registered back in 1999. But if you just want it to branding, that should be fine.

Actually, there is a fair amount public from each site. Here are some of the partners that Twitter has where you can access this data (in addition to going through the API yourself) https://dev.twitter.com/programs/twitter-certified-products/products#Certified-Data-Products. Facebook also makes available ways for a person to see and show off how many likes their page has, for example (see http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like-box/ for a plugin you can use). Here are a bunch of other things Facebook makes available through an API, either for getting data from or pushing data to Facebook.

Well Mary, I took my eye off the ball last year. So I didnt really notice but year on year graphs through analytic show the drop around end April. Almost 60% drop in traffic and rankings from #1 to 60 Up until that point I had more than enough work, i spread myself thin to earn the money being self employed, and never really checked my work. However the EMD finally finished me off. Apart from being annoyed with myself, the Google WMT  forums (are they G employees?) were so damn rude and ignorant. Apparently I shouldnt be in business have such a spam site! I have more than enough happy clients to counter that. Funny how the business I got through G SERPS actually turned those clients into Adwords clients through me? Another annoying feature is all this so called seo`s who couldnt rank above me, now claiming they are experts....basically as they never had the nous to use anchor text.......they never knew the Penguin update was coming as nobody did. Lucky. Im like lots of people basically being punished for doing what everybody did. Now we are pariahs. EVERYBODY chased backlinks and anchor text.  My only saviour is Bing and Yahoo and by looks of it Adwords. However is Penguin a penalty? I assumed it was an algo change not a penalty, so effectively those links arent worth nada, zilch, zero. I can remove them, the bulk....change some to urls etc. Im probably ranking where a site with no backlink structure would rank. However the over optimisation of my footer links wasnt planned as a lever for rankings. Im thinking about a rebrand and of course url and branding links are the order of the day and the emphasis on content more than ever. But I dont really want to lose my domain age even if i can redirect 301 the whole caboodle to a new url.

Thanks Cyrus, Well domain age is very important and the link clean up for up to 90% can be achieved by me. There could be a correlation between the huge rise in footer links by the CMS`s and the period of the ranking fall, that just coincides with the Penguin update, then got noticed. I really think that this could be the major cause of the problem. 13,000 footer links optimised for anchor texts in 6 months? Not a good sign. WMT is by far the most valuable tool for me as all is listed. Analytics show a 68% average drop in organic traffic...ouwch! In meant time I can boost my adwords budget and hope. Removing comment links? Just a case of contacting blog admins? *Shall I keep the highest page authority links and make real effort on the blog comments and less quality domain authority first? I surely must be able to have anchor text links....I see lots of sites still ranking well from text link pages only and very thin content. Cetainly no WMT messages from Google. I just dont have the time to build thousands of manual links.....and if I do for SERPs its surely for trying to improve ranking. We all know that good SEO is really about improving ranking, else why do it. ....its a bit of a contradiction by Google. NB. Have removed over 19,000 Links with unnatural anchor texts so thats a start!

Hi, Do you have different sites targeting different countries? Or do you have a main site but with different folders or subdomain for different location?  If it is the former, you should purchase a new ccTLD that targets that country.  For example, if your site targets people in UK, you should buy a .uk domain.  If it is the latter, you should include rel="alternate" hreflang="x" tag and use geotarget.  These two methods will help you avoid duplicate content issue. I believe the bigger sites that you mentioned are doing this thus they are still safe from search engines and are ranking pretty high. Google understands sometimes you just can't rewrite something and thus they offer the rel="alternate" hreflang="x" tag.  Check out the following article from Google Support http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=189077