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Here is what you need to do:

a) Create a g+ profile

b) in the 'contributor to' section, link out to the blog for which you write.

c) on the blog post, add a rel=me tag and point back to the g+ profile or, setup an author page on the blog. From the author page, use a rel=me tag and link back to your g+ profile. If you were to setup an author page, each post on your blog will need to link to the author page using rel=author tag.

Cheers,

Rajesh Dhawan

Agreed, he needs to evolve a strategy that is based on 2 things:

a) Claiming authorship of his original content

b) Devising ways to prevent content theft

At the same time, if his site was inflicted with a Panda-penalty, he will make a lot of gains using authorship.

Hi Sorin,

If your site tanked on 25th-26th April, then it is safe to presume that your site was indeed hit by the Penguin update. There was a smaller Panda update that happened on 18th April as well. If you have access to Google Analytics or rank trackers, you should be able to tell by looking at the dates whether it was Panda or Penguin.

Coming to the issue of your small website, I would agree with Sha. It would be most appropriate if you can disclose the affected URL on the forum for real helpful suggestions.

Penguin penalized everything that was on the 'over' side. It punished sites with over-optimization at each level. Be it links (internal and external both) or the covert keyword stuffing across web pages. Penguin's impact could be felt more extensively because it affected almost everything that an SEO would have done to boost site's rankings.

I guess, if you are really looking for non-generalized approach towards helping your cause, then website's url is much needed.

Best Regards,

Rajesh Dhawan

There are 2 aspects to adding a listing in Yahoo directory.

1. It helps in SEO efforts for Yahoo aka Bing.

2. It helps improve the trust score of the site.

If your client has a budget for it, then go for it. It is one of those links that are still held in high-trust list. It could balance out a lot of spammy links in your site's overall backlinks profile.

Do you mind sharing your site's URL? One of the easiest ways for you to rank higher than those sites would be to setup author profiles and claim yourself as the author of the original content. It would be a way to tell Google that it's your content.

It may take a few weeks time for things to settle down.

A sitemap is just a file. So, as long as you can modify the automated sitemap file and insert the tags for the second CMS, you should be fine. You would have had a problem if there were 2 sitemap files in the root as it would mean that your site is giving different sitemap files.

Out there in the webmaster tool, you can list the path of your sitemap file and Google bot would automatically pick up the file.

So, your approach looks good to me.