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I'm currently working on an entire website redesign and restructuring.  My current website is extremely spammy.  I really worked on it before I knew much about SEO.  Now that I have a better foundation I have been remaking my site to get rid of duplicate content and to have a much better UX.  With this said, I still depend on the current site to bring in my income while I'm working on getting my new site up. Google seems to constantly kick me out for about a month at a time and then let me back in.  The few other times I thought it was because the new site I have been working on is on a different domain and was exactly the same for a while (I don't want google to find this new domain it's just for testing purposes).  So I removed the new domain from google and in a couple weeks my main site was back in.  Problem is yesterday google hit me again.  I'm out of google for all my search terms.  Before I was ranking on the first page for just about every "keyword + city" phrase I was trying to rank for. I can find plenty of reasons why google would give me problems with my current site.  For example I have TONS of duplicate pages with just the keyword/city changed.  Pretty spammy.  I did buy about 5 links a year ago or so but they are pretty nothing sites. My question is if google's going to ban me why don't they just do it?  They keep taking me out and putting me back in.  No messages in webmaster tools.  My domain is below: http://yourmusiclessons.com Also when I just started out I got the idea of "keyword + city" from a competitor that ranks for EVERYTHING which is also found below: http://www.musikalessons.com All of the links I bought were the same links the above site bought.  I tried buying a link from classical.net which has a high page rank and links to musikalessons.com on each page of their site.  As soon as google found the links, I was kicked out.  I had them remove it.  My question is musika has basically the same "spammyness" as me just on a much larger scale and yet they never seem to be kicked out of google and still rank high. I've thought about reporting musika, but I'm afraid Google will ban me as well because my site is just as bad.  Again I'm working all day on fixing my site and doing a 180, it's just taking a long time and I can't launch quite yet.  I live off the income from my current site though, so it's very disheartening when this happens. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated!

I would like to include a list of links in a select type box which I would like google to follow.  In order to do this, I will be styling it with the help of javascript, and in turn change the select box into a ul and the options into li's.  The li's would each contain a link, but if javascript is disabled it will fallback to a normal css styled select box. My question is would google follow the links made by the javascript?  Or would the bot just recognize the select box as a select box and not links. Thanks for any help!

I run a business where we offer music lessons in student's homes throughout a local area.  We currently rank for phrases like piano lessons + city, or voice lessons + city because we have a page specifically made for each keyword + city combination.  The result is a very spammy looking site. I'm afraid that eventually this duplicate content will be penalized especially when we move into hundreds of cities throughout the US.  With that in mind, I came up with a system that would give each page original content specific to the keyword + city.  Whenever we hire a new teacher the teacher must fill out a short teaching philosophy which will be displayed next to their picture on pages where they can teach.  I go through the teaching philosophy and add a keyword or two for search engines as well. For example someone who can teach piano lessons in Los Angeles would appear on the piano lessons in Los Angeles page.  This way I have some more original content.  I am also going to systematically ask for testimonials from all of our customers which will then be displayed on the respective pages as well.  Therefore the more teachers and students we get, the more content we have available on our site. With that said, I'm still trying to think of ways to make a better user experience with more specific content on each page.  Recently I was looking through whiteboard Fridays and found this video: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/external-linking-good-for-seo-whiteboard-friday I thought it may be a good idea if I went out and found perhaps local sheet music stores and added them to my database.  Then I would link out to them on specific pages, saying "this is where you can go to buy sheet music" or "buy a trumpet here".  It would be a lot more elegant than that, but hopefully you get the idea.  My entire site is database driven so as soon as I put the new stores information in the database it could show up on the instrument/city pages within 10 miles of the store, or something like that. I'm posting this for opinions.  Is this a good strategy?  Some of my worries are that these other businesses almost all provide lessons in their store, so they would be direct competitors.  I also really don't want to detract from what I'm selling, which are lessons.  I'm worried about conversion rates mostly. The positives to the approach though may be that I can get some good linking to these individual pages from these stores (if they'll link to a competitor), which is something that would be very difficult to do for these deep instrument+city pages.  Also I'm thinking if I included the stores physical address then perhaps search engines would be more encouraged that the instrument+city page actually represents a local service. Any ideas and thoughts are greatly appreciated!