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I am working on a clients site and the last two weeks rankings and traffic have gone down hill. I have taken Bing rankings for a grain of salt lately because they seem sporadic in my ranking tools. I did some manual checks and my client's site does not even index or rank on Bing when searching by their domain. Also why is the Bing site index results so off. My client has 29,000 pages under Google but in Bing they have only 40. What am I missing?

Still waiting to look at the analytics for the timeframe, but we do know that the top keyword dropped on or about April 23, 2012 from the #1 ranking in Google - something they had held for years, and traffic dropped over 15% that month and further slips since. Just looked at Google Webmaster Tools and see over 2.3MM backlinks from "sister" compainies from their footers.  One has over 700,000, the rest about 50,000 on average and all going to the home page, and all using the same anchor text, which is both a branded keyword, as well as a generic keyword, the same one they ranked #1 for. They are all "nofollows" but we are trying to confirm if the nofollow was before or after they got hit, but regardless, Google has found them. To also add, most of sites are from their international sites, so .de, .pl, .es, .nl and other Eurpean country extensions. Of course based on this, I would assume the footer links and timing, was result of the Penguin update and spam. The one issue, is that the other US "sister" companies listed in the same footer, did not see a drop, in fact some had increase traffic.  And one of them has the same issue with the brand name, where it is both a brand name and a generic keyword.  The only note that I will make about any of the other domains is that they do not drive the traffic this one used to. There is at least a 100,000+ visitor difference among the main site, and this additional sister sites also listed in the footer. I think I'm on the right track with the footer links, even though the other sites that have the same footer links do not seem to be suffering as much, but wanted to see if anyone else had a different opinion or theory. Thanks!
Jen Davis

Received quite a surprise when I gained access to the Google webmaster account and saw 4 domains that are link to my clients domain and the number of links for each domain range between 10,000 and 90,000. Come to find out this was a result of their former agency.  The business is very local central.  I will use the example of a burger place. They main site is burgers.com and burger places are listed by city and state.  Their former agency bought several domains like californiaburgers.com and duplicated the listings for that state on this domain.  You can view certain pages of the second domain, but the home page is redirected as are most of the city pages with 301s to the main burgers.com domain. However, there are pages on the additional domains that do  not redirect, as they are not duplicated on the main domain so nowhere to redirect.  Google has only found four of them but looks like there could be at least 50.  Pages that are not redirected are indexed by the engines - but not ranking (at least not well). There is a duplicate content issue, although "limited" in the sense that it really is just the name of the business, address and phone number - there is not much to these listings. What is the best approach to overcome? Right now GWT is showing over 300,000 links, however at least 150,000 to 200,000 of that is from these domains.