Hi Ramon,

This is a very difficult question to answer. Before I even try to answer it I'd like to point out the following:

The first Panda filter came out on Feb 25, 2011. On Feb 24, 2012 Search Engine Round Table published a survey asking how many webmasters recovered from the filter one year later. The survey can be found here. As you can see, not many were able to recover from the filter even one year later. This is by no means a conclusive study, but it's really the best we have.

To answer your questions:

1. In my opinion, it's beyond fixing if you lose rankings and you did NOT receive a warning from Google. If you received a warning consider yourself lucky. Follow Google's instructions and use a service like linkdelete.com to get the bad backlinks removed (or just do it yourself).

2. Open Site Explorer works great for identifying bad backlinks. Go through the list of exact match keyword anchor texts and you'll be off to a good start.

Finally, I'd like to plug my post on this subject:

How-To Recover From Google Penalties & Filters

It's a long one, but I include several pictures and examples to make this process easier for folks in your situation.

Good luck!

sure or e-mail me davec@evolvecreativegroup.com

Some people swear by setting up the blog on a separate domain to give it its own identity, but any SEO would likely say to have it on your own domain.

One of the reasons you create content is to attract links to your site so you can rank higher for your 'money' keywords - ex. 'buy isle surf boards'. If the content is being created on a different domain, those links will point to the other domain and not your site.

The best solution is www.islesurfboards.com/blog

The second best solution is blog.islesurfboards.com

The separate domain strategy does have merit, but only for brands who are willing to invest SIGNIFICANT (100k +) cash into the blog.

I've done a TON of research on this to get Google's opinion and the only thing I could find was this:

As long as the new site has unique and relevant content it is not considered spam.

I've probably spent over 20 hours researching this EXACT topic and that was the best I could find in terms of spam vs not spam.

Another route to take is to create relevant content on the main site specific to each location. Perhaps you can create 1 page for the location with the NAP, site manager etc. and then another page off of that page that lists that specific location's directions and then another page off of that page that lists the reviews for that location. That gives you 3 unique relevant pages and 3 new Title tags. You can target the main city on the main page with the NAP info, a sub-city on one of the review pages and another sub-city on the direction page. I suppose this method is more "whitehat" but who really knows.

If the client has good rankings in all of those cities with your microsites what are they complaining about? Fear of a penalty?

If anyone else has ANY info on this I would LOVE to know as well!