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Unfortunately, other than being 99% sure there was an algorithm update around May 9th (dubbed "Phantom" by some folks), and even having seen it hit a former client, we have very few clues about what it actually did. Some folks have suggested it was "Panda-like" in which case thin content could be a culprit.

It's really tough to tell without seeing the site and the scope of the problem, but doubling up all of your rental pages could absolutely create problems, especially when you pair that with geographic searches and drill-downs. A couple of things I'd dig into before you completely change your structure:

(1) What's the scope of the doubling up, relative to your entire index size?

(2) Are there other culprits, such as search sorts and filters in play?

(3) Have you managed pagination (most likely with rel=prev/next, but there are other options)? With all of these geographic folders, you might have a ton of paginated search.

I think reducing your index size could be beneficial, but I'd make sure that the rental pages are the primary culprit first. I don't think the property URL change would help that much. It's a nice-to-have, but it wouldn't impact Panda or cause you major problems with Google the way it is. It's just slightly less user-friendly and slightly less keyword-targeted. I'd deal with the thin content first.

I'm familiar with some data clustering techniques, but not in the context of SEO. Broadly speaking, cluster analysis is a way to find patterns in data where the patterns/structure are unclear.

Do you have an article/quote/etc.? I'd be happy to dig deeper, but I'm just not clear on the context here.

Sadly, we can only speculate. I think it's reasonable to think that Penguin 1.0 may have acted sitewide, whereas Penguin 2.0 could be more targeted, but that's not so much an issue of where the links are pointing as it is of the impact of the penalty. The original Penguin did seem a bit all-or-none, in some cases. The update may be more nuanced. I think Google waited a long time for this roll-out because the collateral damage was just too high in testing. So, it's likely they found ways to make the action more targeted.

I just want to add that this is a difficult and even potentially dangerous process. There's no way to know exactly what Google didn't like, so it's easy to cut too deep. On the other hand, if you don't cut deep enough, Google may actually take that as a negative sign (don't just keep removing 5 links and then submitting a new disavow).

We don't know much about how Penguin 2.0 differs from 1.0, except some hearsay that it's targeting the page level now (and isn't just a sitewide action). So, I think the first thing you need to do is really pin down which keywords lost ranking and which pages those keywords target. It's possible that you've been too aggressive with links to a specific page or with anchor text using specific terms. If you see a pattern, then you can focus on just those links.

Also, keep in mind that, if the vast majority of your link profile is low quality, there may not be much left after you disavow. In other words, you may remove the bad links and still not recover. So, as Takeshi said, it's important to both address the problem and build for the future at the same time.

I think step 1, as hard as it can be, is not to overreact before you have all the facts in. It's been a couple of days now, and the US holiday weekend has passed, so the first thing I'd do is check to see if this drop was temporary.

Next, dig into your analytics, and look for a few things:

(1) Did the drop happen right on May 22 (Penguin 2.0) or earlier/later?

(2) I see a solid loss in the top 3 - which specific keywords were these, and do they have any commonalities (branded vs. non-brand, for example)?

(3) Were these keywords all ranking for the same page? Was it your home-page or a deeper page (it's possible this impacted a specific page or set of pages)?

It looks like Penguin 2.0 is more granular and may target individual pages now, although that's only hearsay at this point. So, you may want to start with bad links to the affected pages. Check Google Webmaster Tools for any manual penalty warnings, and make sure the pages are loading normal, are indexed/cached, etc. You really want to have the situation pinned down before you start disavowing links at large scale.

In theory, it would, but right now we don't have a lot of data about actual changes on any given site. We could track the ranking changes, but not the causal factors. We're working on metrics like what we use on MozCast - basically trying to figure out baseline "flux" for any given campaign, so that you can understand how much movement is normal vs. unusual. Even that is tricky. Rankings fluctuate all the time (even on page refresh, in some cases), so step 1 is sorting out what's abnormal. Then, we have to tie it to things like known algorithm updates and on-page changes.

I can't argue that that would be useful, but to tell you why your ranking changed would basically require reverse-engineering the algorithm. If we could do that, believe me, we would

In terms of future directions, I see us heading a couple of places (this is partly my knowledge of the product, and partly speculative):

(1) Tracking more aggregate metrics, as opposed to individual keyword rankings (including aggregate rankings). The value of any individual ranking is declining as the SERPs become more diverse.

(2) Tracking broader analytics, including landing-page metrics. This may be a necessity as Google strips away more and more keyword data. We expect [not provided] to only increase, for example.

(3) Separating keyword visibility from keyword opportunity. Visibility is a broader sense of how well a keyword or group of keywords are performing (not just ranking, but CTR, social, etc.) and opportunity would be areas that you may be missing out on. I think opportunity metrics would be a lot more actionable than just rank-tracking, but it's not an easy task.

This is something many people on the team put a lot of thought and time into, but as Google and SEO both evolve, the target is always moving.

Yeah, the worst thing you can do is remove 5 links, then go to Google and say "Hey guys, is that enough?", then 5 more links - "How about now, guys?", etc. You're wasting somebody's manual labor at Google, and believe me, it does piss them off.

So, here's the problem - it depends on how big you are. I've seen companies use reconsideration as a back-channel in some cases where the penalty seemed algorithmic, and they were big enough for Google to communicate with them. I suspect it's not the "approved" method and it won't work for most of us.

What's irritating is that some Google reps have said that disavow is applicable to Penguin, but others have said that disavow doesn't work without reconsideration. So, if Penguin is algorithmic AND we're supposed to disavow links BUT disavow only works with reconsideration AND you can' use reconsideration for algorithmic penalties, then pardon my French, but WTF? Some piece of "official" information is wrong - we just don't know which one.

The picture from SEOs I've talked over the last couple of years is much murkier than the official advice, as usual.

Even Google's reps don't seem to agree on whether reconsideration works for Penguin, but I've seen a fair amount of evidence that disavow won't solve any problems without reconsideration, so I actually think you do have to file reconsideration in these cases.

"Creative" 301-redirects are very dangerous and do not work like they did 2+ years ago. At best, you'll see a temporary uptick and end up in a worse position down the road. I've even seen some folks suggesting (on limited evidence) that Penguin 2.0 clamped down harder on bad, redirected links. We've absolutely seen 301s carry penalties, both manual and algorithmic, over the past couple of years.

Just wrote up some data on Penguin 2.0:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/penguin-2-were-you-jarred-and-or-jolted

I just want to add, though, that I'm not speculating about the new ranking factors yet, because we just don't have that information. No one has specifically recovered from Penguin 2.0, and I don't think anyone can tell you exactly what changed.

By the very fact that it's called "Penguin", though, I think it's safe to assume that these new factors are an extension of the old philosophy. I generally back Alan's procedure, because I've talked to reputable SEOs who have had success with it. That success often comes after a hard-fought battle, though. The number of Penguin 1.0 recovery stories that I can document are fairly few.

If you know for a fact you have bad links, you do need to try to remove them first. Disavow can work, but Google needs to see a clear removal effort and it almost always has to be paired with reconsideration, from what I'm seeing. Unfortunately, 2-3 Google reps have given us 2-3 stories on the process, so I'm going by what I've seen work for SEOs who I trust (who have shared details privately, in most cases).

It's tough, because these variations/customizations are legitimately what you do. My gut feeling, though, is that 80K (I'm seeing 90K with a site: search) indexed pages is just too much for your current link profile. It doesn't mean you'll get in trouble, but it could mean that your ranking power is spread far too thin.

While it's not a decision I'd take lightly, I do think there's an advantage here to either:

(1) Consolidating variations under one URL

(2) Having multiple URLs, but possibly using rel=canonical (I think that's your best bet) to focus Google on one parent URL for each product

Just a minor clarification - you can use both rel=prev/next and rel=canonical, IF you have something like search filters. Then, the canonical would point to the unfiltered current page and the rel=prev/next would point to the filtered paginated pages. Yeah, I know, that made a lot of sense. Let's say your page is:

http://example.com/stuff?page=2&sort=price

...then you might have

It's more than a little confusing.

Definitely check out that JavaScript issue, though - it might be that bots aren't seeing what people are seeing, and that could be very dangerous.

Yeah, internally, "nofollow" still dilutes PageRank, so it doesn't really have a big impact. Practically speaking, I don't think there would be much difference. The links have a customer-facing purposes, I assume, and you just don't want the end result indexed. That should be fine. The only advantage to nofollow might be that it would waste a little less crawl bandwidth (instead of bots visiting the page and then seeing it's blocked, they wouldn't bother). I've tried it both ways in the past (after Google changed the PR-sculpting rules), and could never really measure much difference.

To add to what Tom said (and I endorsed his answer) - if Google honors the cross-domain canonical (and it's not a guarantee), then the non-canonical domain would fall out of the rankings (or, at least, certain pages would). Clients don't like to hear that, but the alternative is two domains competing with each other. At best, Google is likely to filter out one of the domains anyway (even without canonicals or redirects). At worst, there's potential for a Panda-scale penalty. There's very little to gain from this scenario, and a lot to lose, IMO.

I'm gonna disagree mildly. It is common to have color variation pages, and it is perfectly useful to end-users. So, you're not doing anything wrong, in that sense. However, these pages don't look very different to Google (minor variations in title and content), and so we do flag them as near duplicates because Google might consider them "thin". At large scale, that could dilute your ranking ability.

If you have 100s or 1000s of these pages and a relatively weak link profile, it might be worth considering canonical tags here. The trade-off is that you would consolidate your ranking power, but one variation would fall out of search results. So, it really depends not only on the scope of the problem, but the strength of the site, and how important these long-tail color-based searches are to your current traffic. There's no one-sized-fits-all answer.

Yeah, I've general heard positive things where it's a clear issue of content syndication and you control the content. If they're honored that way, they should pass link equity. The major newspapers use it.

I'd only warn that Google can process cross-domain canonicals at their discretion, so it's not guaranteed. Worst case, they just ignore them, and you may have to reconsider, but I think it's safe to attempt it.

Unfortunately, I think this may not only be the best option, but the only option. You can't NOINDEX or use rel=canonical if the https pages aren't resolving, so you would have to do the redirects in .htaccess.

Unfortunately, messing with .htaccess for anything sitewide can get pretty tricky, and a little dangerous. I believe this code should work, but I'm not sure about any quirks in WordPress or specifics of your site implementation:

http://www.highrankings.com/forum/index.php/topic/35833-how-do-i-redirect-https-to-http-on-my-site/

You may want a WordPress specialist to take a look.

Yeah, definitely agree - the how/why of using https in general is a much broader and more difficult question.

You said the first link was http (not secure), but it looks like it redirects to a secure page? I'm not seeing any crawl issues, although I wonder if the combination of a footer link and the page looking like a lead-gen page is causing Google to ignore it. Honestly, though, it feels more like a technical issue. I'm not seeing any red flags, though.

I'm honestly not entirely sure how rel=prev/next would even be implemented in your current configuration. It would be very complex. My cut feeling is that GWT parameter handling might be a pretty safe first try.

Oh, so the "Loading More" is basically JS, but Google is crawling it? It might be better if you could use AJAX style ("hash-bang") URLs, and try to keep Google from crawling that at all.

The other option would just be to block the "page=" parameter in Google Webmaster Tools. It's not always ideal (since it's Google-specific), but it might be your easiest bet here.

Yeah, it gets messy. I think I'm on the same page as Dan, but just some clarification. The two "approved" options are:

(1) Canonical all of the paginated series, including filters, to the "View All" version. One warning - Google only recommends this if the view all page loads fast and isn't too huge (and that's just good advice for usability, too).

(2) Using rel=prev/next for the paginated series, but then rel=canonical to point the filtered version to the current page. It's a bit mess.

Here are two good posts on the subject, but I'm afraid they reveal just how messy it is and how much SEOs differ in opinion. No real-world solution is perfect, that I've found:

http://www.ayima.com/seo-knowledge/conquering-pagination-guide.html

http://searchengineland.com/the-latest-greatest-on-seo-pagination-114284

If the canonical version of your URLs is secure (HTTPS), then yes - you should use absolute paths with "https://" in the them for your canonical tags.

Unfortunately, "index.php?mact=Calendar" is not a folder, it's a page+parameter. If you tried to block that as a folder in GWT, it would mostly just not work. If it went really wrong, you'd block anything driven from index.php (including your home-page).

A couple of options:

(1) Programmatically META NOINDEX anything that calls the calendar parameters. This would have to be done selectively in the index.php header with code, so that ONLY the calendar pages were affected.

(2) Block "mact=" or "year=" with parameter handling in GWT. under "Configuration" > "URL Parameters". ONLY do this if these parameters drive the calendar and no other pages. You can basically tell Google to ignore pages with "year=" in them.

You can also block parameters in Robots.txt, but honestly, once the pages have been indexed, it doesn't work very well.

I just see a lot of stuff that's of questionable quality, such as:

http://www.squidoo.com/how-to-turn-power-off-usb-port-on-windows-computers

http://www.hathmaluwa.org/ (multiple links)

http://shetoldme.com/Technology/Google-puts-stop-to-accidental-porn

No single link would be enough to put you in penalty territory, but the profile as a whole looks weak to me, honestly, and once I see a pattern of quality problems, I start to worry.

You also seem to have a redirect in play from www.thespicygadgematics.com/ - any link issues to that site could be effecting this site as well.

We saw the May 5 spike across multiple data centers, but we don't track a ton, so it's always tough to tell (our larger system was down for testing that day - it's not public yet). I feel like this is more than a test, though, and some relatively big changes are coming.

I haven't seen this solution in play, but I'd be cautious. It's a bit gray, at best. Google is okay with AJAX-driven menus, for example, and often won't crawl them, but this adaptation of HTML5 is kind of cheating the attributes of a link, and that could get you into trouble. Google may just outright crawl them anyway.

Truthfully, the data on mega-menu usability is really mixed. People often find them much less useful than webmasters and business owners think they are. Many people never see them at all. I think  you should really consider your information architecture and whether even having mega-menus is useful. When you make everything important, each thing becomes less important, both for people and for Google.

It's a little tricky. While Andrea is right about Robots.txt - it's not great for removal once pages/domains are indexed, you can block the sub-domain with robots.txt and then request removal in Google Webmaster Tools (you need to create a separate account for the sub-domain itself). That's often the fastest way to remove something from the index, and if it has no search value, I might go that route. Just proceed with caution - it's a delicate procedure.

Doing 1-to-1 canonicalization or adding 301 redirects may be the next strongest signal (NOINDEX is a bit weaker, IMO). However, Google will have to re-crawl the sub-domain to do that, so you'll need to keep the paths open.

I'd tend to agree - this used to be a bigger deal, but as IPv4 space runs low and more and more sites share IP addresses, Google has had to be more forgiving. I'm slightly concerned that the 20 domains are all duplicated, though - that could start to look like a link network. If it's just one site and you have a solid link profile, it's probably no big deal. In most cases, Google would just filter those links and they might even filter the domains (basically, they'd be ignored). If you're seeing this situation repeat itself, though, that's a different matter.

The value of any one link is tough to measure, and it's often not what we'd hoped for. I think Google tends to look at the entire profile and often depreciates new links, adding in their value over time. The days where a couple of strong .edu or .gov links would make all the difference are in the past, IMO.

I don't know the company or offering, but this focus on .edu and .gov links and $500/link just makes me uneasy. You mention the links are contextual and that education/government are relevant to your business, but my gut reaction is that this may not be money well spent. For the price of a few links, you could build content that might attract hundreds of links.

Valuing any given link is an educated guess at best, but Rand had a decent post about it a while back (post is from 2009, but much of it is still relevant):

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/17-ways-search-engines-judge-the-value-of-a-link

Sorry, had an email glitch in Q&A. I'm pretty confident there was some kind of update around 5/5-5/6, and I'm equally confident that it wasn't Pengun. Panda is in "everflux" now, so I don't expect we'll see any more typical Panda updates (although it's hard to say).

There were some change reported to local search, and Google also rolled out or at least tested a number of new features. My gut feeling right now is that there are a lot of small things going on that, collectively, had a sizable impact. Unfortunately, the data isn't very clear. Overall, though, I saw enough reports from webmasters, industry people, and other flux-tracking systems, that the volatility during this period seems real.

I'd tend to agree - you're basically putting out copies of your own content. Google can index those PDFs, which may end up looking like low-quality duplicates or some kind of article marketing. That could get you into Panda territory, or it could just devalue the content on your own site and boost the other sites.

It depends on the situation, but you'd almost be better off just syndicating the content as regular web-pages and then making sure it links back to you (or has a cross-domain rel=canonical). Otherwise, this spun off content is going to be seen as very low-value.

I'm seeing your home-page ranking by name, so I don't think "android" in the domain is the culprit here. Whether that's a good idea long-term is a different issue, and depends entirely on Google.

I do see certain exact-match phrases bringing up tons of your pages, but not the actual posts, such as:

"Sony Xperia Ion LT28i Android 4.1.2"

This could indicate a technical problem, or it could be a link-based devaluation or penalty. Your link profile definitely looks a bit questionable, at first glance. I'm seeing some pretty low-quality stuff, enough that it could be causing you problems.

I can't find the exact-match title itself on your domain, but I find dozens of pages referencing the title in internal links. This has the feel of a penalty, but it's oddly specific.

I'm also seeing a ton of low-value pages indexed, like all of the "Index of..." pages. Run this query in Google, for example:

site:androidgadgematic.com intitle:"Index of"

Unfortunately, I'm not sure there's anyone one smoking gun, so much as a collection of small problems, and that can be a tough situation.

I'm with Keri that, in this reality, Roger would never fight Spider-Man. It's just not TAGFEE. Let's say, though, that Spider-Man is infested by the Venom Symbiote and turns temporarily evil, forcing Roger to intervene. How would this play out?

The closest comparison to Roger in the Spider-Man villain entourage is almost definitly Doctor Octopus. Doc Oc has the advantage of having more arms than Roger, but Roger has the advantage of not having a squishy head that can pop. So, I'd call it roughly a toss-up. We know Doc Oc has bested Spider-Man on occasion, so Roger has a fighting chance.

Roger has limited distance attacks, whereas Spider-Man has his web shooters. At best, web shooters would probably only temporarily immobilize Roger. Roger's large eyes are fairly wide apart, and his antenna has additional sensors, so Roger can't be easily blinded with webbing like a humanoid opponent can. Spidey's primary advantage is outdoors surrounded by tall buildings. Being from Seattle, Roger stays indoors, because what's the point of going outside? Also, coffee shops and micro-breweries aren't very tall. So, on home-turf, I think Spider-Man's long-range attack advantages are small, but I'll still lean toward Spidey.

At close range, Roger has one formidable attack. You may know about his Hugs/Destroy switch. What you may not know is that Roger's most powerful attack is also hug-based. His arms, in battle mode, are capable of intense crushing power, roughly equal to 14 Benders from Futurama (see issue #17 of "Adventures in TAGFEE"). If Roger can get Spidey close enough, his close range strength can incapacitate even the Venom Symbiote. Advantage: Roger.

Finally, the Venom Symbiote is vulnerable to sound waves and flame, both of which Roger is impervious to. So, Roger could just crank up his Metallica playlist and set himself on fire. Advantage, Roger.

Yeah, I tend to agree with Michael. Make sure this isn't an issue with your home-page. Google does seem to be preferring more targeted pages these days, though, and it can happen for a lot of reasons. This is an older post by Rand, but it's still very relevant:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/wrong-page-ranking-in-the-results-6-common-causes-5-solutions

It looks like the site was indexed at some point in the past, but I can't find it currently. Unfortunately, that could be a sign of quality problems and even potentially a past penalty. It's very hard to prove that from limited information, though.

I agree with Sha that the parked domain issue can be a problem. In the past year, Google has worked to de-index more and more parked domains and try to clean up sites they consider to have no value. Some parked domains still get listed - that's true - but that number is declining all the time. If you want the site to have a fighting chance, I'd put some kind of placeholder page up with at least basic copy and META data. Then submit that to GWT and at least set up your social profiles, etc.

Truthfully, without that, why does it even matter if Google has indexed the site? You're not going to rank for anything useful on a default parked-domain page, and no one could do anything even if they did find you.

Many "branded" queries do result in 7-result SERPs, but not all, and some non-branded queries can generate them. I've dug into this in some detail, and the picture is pretty complex:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/secrets-of-the-7-result-serp

Google is doing more and more entity association - trying to match queries to concepts, and that could tie into brand detection, but there's really no simple way to identify a query as being a brand, and there are many exceptions to simple rules.

I also think they factor in the usual signals - links, social, etc. They are working hard to integrate offline signals and this all factors into Google's general idea of dominant intent. In other words, if someone types "IBM", it should bring up the IBM home-page, even if that page happened to have terrible SEO and no links, because that's the best answer.

There are many, many arguments, though about whether Google actually favors big brands, or if big brands dominate through other, more mundane factors. Keep in mind, too, that "brand" doesn't mean big. Bob's Plumbing in Walla Walla, Washington should rank for brand queries (assuming that there's only one Bob's Plumbing), too, even without links/trust/social signals, for the same reason. In other words, someone looking for Bob's Plumbing wants to find that specific business, not just plumbers named Bob.

My post has a lot more details, but there's no clear or easy answer, I'm afraid.

Interesting - hadn't heard that re: G-docs. Makes some sense. I only balked because I've seen plenty of people provide links directly in the request in the past and ultimately be successful. I can see where it could turn into a headache for Google. I would be surprised if they refused a request solely on that, but you never know.

It's always tough to speak in generalities, but unfortunately I've seen many examples in the past 2-3 years where footer links from clients got devalued. It's not necessarily a penalty situation, but sometimes it just means waking up and finding that those links that helped you rank for years just aren't helping you anymore. This can result in a situation where your actual ranking is much less than what your link metrics would suggest.

Obviously, as we go forward, we're trying to build better models to account for this, but it's an incredibly complicated problem. What's a "good" link changes weekly.

Unfortunately, this can be a very frustrating process. Let's say for example that you have 2,000 back-links, and 500 of them are of dubious quality (not outright spammy, but questionable). You remove 400 of those, at considerable time and cost, and think you're doing great, but it turns out Google only actually cared about 5 paid links, and you didn't touch those. So, no go. If they told you any of that, it might be easy, but since they don't, we've seen this situation play out over and over.

There has been some mixed information coming from Google regarding the relationship between disavow and reconsideration (one rep we talked to gave us information that differed a bit from John Mueller's info). My best guess is that, if you file reconsideration, they will take the disavow request into account, so it probably isn't a question of just bad luck with the timing. Odds are good that they're still seeing something they don't like.

Of course, also keep in mind that Google seems to want to see a good faith effort to actually remove those links. So, as Sha implied, just a disavow list might not be enough, and they may choose to disregard it if it doesn't seem to go hand-in-hand with an actual attempt to clean up the link profile. As Thomas said, you want to document that attempt as best you can. I'm not aware of any restriction that you use Google Docs, but the more information you can give Google to show good faith, the better.

If you had a very large number of internal links, that could dilute your authority in some cases, but some of that should be factored into MozRank. Having too few internal links shouldn't be an issue, unless you were artificially restricting your internal PageRank flow somehow.

This is almost impossible to diagnose without seeing the specific case, but keep in mind that none of our metrics really account for any filtering or devaluation Google might do. So, if they felt some of your links were low quality, or there was a bad pattern to them (too much reliance on one type of link, such as footer links from clients), or you were hit for excessive exact-match anchor text, etc., that wouldn't necessarily show up in our metrics.

The other issue would be any sort of technical issue with the page or even an on-page problem (a low ratio of crawlable text, too many ads, bad targeting, etc.).

It is usually a mix of our crawl timing and a quantity/quality trade-off. We try to filter out some low-quality links. Crawl timing has been faster recently, though (maybe 2 weeks), so generally that's only a short term issue.

There are cases, though, where a link might not be crawled or counted - nofollow, bad headers, no crawl paths, etc. I've seen Yahoo Directory and DMOZ links, for example, that were buried so deep even Google didn't crawl them.

Unfortunately, it's really tough to tell without seeing the site in question. If these are very recent links, then it's just an issue of time. If these links have been around for a month or more, then this could be a quality issue or a technical issue with the link.

(2) It could take a while, yes. There is no speedy way to de-index a lot of content that is no longer crawlable, I'm afraid, unless it's currently in a directory that can be removed in Google Webmaster Tools.

(3) So, basically, let's say all the pages live under "/events" - you'd create "/events2", put all the new events in that going forward, and them remove "/events" in GWT?

It could work for removal, but changing your site architecture that way carries a significant amount of risk. You'll also have to make sure that you have a plan going forward for de-indexing new content that becomes outdated, because this is not something you want to do every couple of months. Honestly, unless you know the old content is harming your rankings, I probably wouldn't do this. I'd stick to the slower method.

Yeah, I think canonical is fine for "index.php" variants. One important addition, though. Check your internal link structure. Many sites link to "index.php" via their "Home" link or logo. I'd suggest changing that to an absolute URL or just "/". That way, you're not creating the non-canonical version in the first place.

Are you saying to treat "Service > Blue Widgets" as page 1 and "Guide > Blue Widgets" as page 2? I think Google would likely ignore rel=prev/next in that context, but it's hard to say. You might be better off using rel=canonical. I'm not sure that both version have great search value, honestly.

I've seen rel=prev/next used on a series that wasn't strictly paginated, but where there was a clear order. Unfortunately, it can be really tough to measure the effectiveness of rel=prev/next, even on fairly large sites.

Oh, wow - yeah if only 2K are current and 120K are indexed, you definitely should be proactive about this. Unfortunately de-indexing content that's already been indexed is tough. Robots.txt isn't terribly effective after-the-fact, and the folder-based approach you've described won't work. You can move the pages and remove the folder (either with Robots.txt or in Webmaster Tools), but you haven't tied the old URLs to the new URLs. To remove them, first you have to tell Google they've moved.

First, pick your method. If these old events have any links/traffic/etc., then you may want to rel=canonical or 301-redirect. Otherwise, you could META NOINDEX or even 404. It depends a bit on their value. Then, a couple of options:

(1) You can wait and see. Let Google clear out the old events over time. If you're not at any risk, this may be fine. Monitor and see what happens.

(2) Encourage Google to re-crawl the old pages by creating a new, stand-alone sitemap. Then, monitor that sitemap in GWT for indexation. You don't have to do all 120K at once, but you could start with a few hundred (hopefully, you can build the XML with code, not by hand) and see how it progresses).