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http://www.seroundtable.com/google-update-brewing-18447.html

Ours do the exact same thing. Keyword rankings for one of our campaigns were reported today and there were fluctuations from down more than 48 to up more than 26. One term is ranking 17 in Bing and 7 in Yahoo - and Bing dropped this week while Yahoo increased. Some terms rank on the first page for Google but not even the top 50 for Yahoo and Bing, and vice versa.

And then we have the whole issue of accuracy. This morning, one of our mid-level keywords reported as position 4 in Google with an increase of 9, but I immediately checked and saw that it was 14 (not logged in, non-personalized, location-neutral, etc). This happens every week.

A Moz team member looked our account and said our keywords are just highly volatile.

I don't know what else to say other than you're not alone. It's frustrating.

Yes, delete it. Sounds like you're using something to automatically generate meta descriptions which is prepending this item count. Either change the way that program is running or do your meta descriptions manually.

Yes, disavow them. Better to be proactive and disavow now than wait for a penalty and warning to do it.

Hard to give an answer without seeing the traffic graph for the time periods you mentioned the drops. If the drop in May was around the 22nd to 25th, it likely was a Penguin update. We got hit by it at that time.

Other things could've been dragging the site down over the last year and then Penguin may have hit and caused the free-fall. Definitely get rid of the directory links and any other links you think Google might penalize you for in the future.

For the future - if you feel like you're getting into a situation where you won't be fully supported to do the best you can, stop and get out.

Are you talking about a dev site? If so, the easiest solution is to add it in Webmaster Tools, verify ownership, then use the URL removal tool to take the whole site out of the index. Just enter / in the removal field.

Duplicate content isn't a big deal for ecommerce sites, you're unlikely to be penalized for it.

I agree with Moosa - his suggestions on checking things besides links are spot on. If rankings are dropping continuously over a 9 month period, that doesn't sound like just a links issue. Algorithmic penalties (speaking from experience) cause a drop at a certain point, but they don't make rankings continue to drop.

If other things look fine and you think links may be the problem, run Link Detox. You'll still need to manually review each link in there (you'll occasionally find false positives), but it'll give you a very good idea of how healthy your backlink profile is.

• searchenginewatch.com
• searchengineland.com
• seroundtable.com
• searchenginejournal.com
• webmasterworld.com

Just read those sites every morning and you'll be up to date on everything. Books are a waste.

sterlingbuild.co.uk has a poor quality backlink profile with anchor text heavily weighted towards [velux windows]. But links are still the most important factor for ranking well. Despite Penguin, crackdowns on link networks, etc., old school link building still works and this is just one of many examples of it. It's definitely not a good long-term idea, but if you need sales quick it works.

Those are poor quality pages and poor quality backlinks for your site. Get rid of them.

Digital Millennium Copyright Act being used here? No.

OP, it does sound like you have duplicate content issues. See what you can do to make those omitted pages more unique.

A cross-domain canonical tag would probably be a good idea.

They don't do it continuously like Panda. Based on previous Penguin dates, we're due for one at any time now - like this weekend!

Keep doing what you're doing. As long as you know how to properly identify if a site/link is good or bad, you shouldn't hurt your site. Better to do this work now and prevent another penalty in the future than to put it off.

RE: total backlinks - I recommend combining and deduping Open Site Explorer, Webmaster Tolls, Majestic, and AHREFs for the most thorough picture.

Drop them as a client. They're paying you for SEO help but they obviously don't trust/like it. Not worth your time.

Duplicate product descriptions alone are probably not why you got hit by Panda 4.0. Matt Cutts is on record saying that duplicate product descriptions are not a big deal for ecommerce sites.

A flat URL structure would be ideal, meaning .com/rho instead of adding in leves of categories/subcategories/filters. You should be able to make the URLs flat while still keeping the full breadcrumb structure of how the customer's navigated - I know it's possible because we run Magento Enterprise and have done it.

I'd look at tracking/reporting on your end - sounds like you've got direct reporting as AdWords.

While you're going through the disavow process, make sure you're building new quality links. You won't get your rankings back just by disavowing, you need new links to improve.

1. Yes - clean now before you're penalized again

2. I work for a big ecommerce company (as in market-owning) that operates 2 completely unrelated businesses - I did link cleanups and disavowed 90%+ of our backlink profiles because they were poor quality links. And now organic non-branded revenue is up ~130% YOY for one brand and ~65% for the other, sessions are up as well. So if those 83% you have really are bad, it's not too dangerous.

Re: destroying your actual rankings, based on my own experience, disavowing shouldn't hurt your rankings further, but don't expect them to increase either. Your rankings were propped up by artificial backlinks so once you remove them you'll need to get good links in their place to boost rankings back up.

Every backlinks tool - Webmaster Tools, Majestic, AHREFs, OSE, etc. - will give you different results because they all have their own index. You can't rely on one to get a complete picture. The best method is to get backlinks from as many sources as you can, compile them in one list, remove duplicates, and then start reviewing.

Use backlink checkers of your choice to pull competitor's backlinks, filter by domain authority high to low, look for blogs. Yes, it really is that simple. And that's only one of multiple ways to do it.

1. Get new, better quality links ASAP, before or while you're disavowing

2. It depends on your outreach methods - I had ~50% removal rate with one of our sites which is multiple times higher than the average. You can just disavow and hope it works or you can get as many links removed as possible, disavow the rest, then hope it works. I'd go with the latter.

DA will shift up or down depending on the size of OSE's lastest index. A bigger index = DA goes up, a smaller index = DA goes down.