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Hi Sophy, I had a similar problem. I combated this by adding url conical. I also removed most of the backlinks to that particular category and redirected it to my index page. It took a couple of weeks to get back to how it was. It will be hard to find out the reason without posting a link though! Thanks
'Google Shuffle' Give it a couple of weeks and it should come back. Check the usual culprits (Dupe Content) and go over all the changes implimented before it occured.
Hi CruiseControl, If you want to see how Google views your website you can download a tool called Lynx, Lynx is a text based browser which is very very similar to how Google's crawler views your website.
Hi,
Usin;
User-agent: *
Disallow: /folder/subfolder
is fine, however if you have information stored in your website that you certainly want crawled make sure it is in your site map and use ...
User-agent: *
allow: /folder/subfolder
adding a no follow attribute to all of your pages wont be practical, if a spam crawler ignores the robots.txt it will ignore your no follow attribute. If anything new occurs with robots.txt check large website's robots.txt as they always update to new trends i.e
Hope this helps:)
Hi Lisa, It will be a little tricky without actually looking at the website but my starting point would be what you have done, duplicate content elimination. If the rel=canonical is in place I would double check that it is a 301 re-direct. I would certainly take a look at the content to see if it is duped on third part websites. Some SEO firms just copy and paste segments of the website and add links. Another concern i would have is the backlink hosts status so I.E a website which seemed appropriate at the time has also been hit by the panda update and is now classed as spam. I would run a backlink checker + search for the content to see if it’s duped. Let me know how you get on with this, it will be interesting to see what the culprit is.
Hi Asif, This is something I have started to study. As Bing is fairly new I have always imagined it to be similar to Google's algorithm 2-3 years ago. Bing is not Microsoft’s primary income so the r&d within Bing will be relatively small compared to Google. As i believe 90-95% of Google's income is Ad words and Google currently has 90% of the UK's searches. If you need any help within the research just drop me a line I would be happy to help. As you say it would help everyone. There are a few websites dedicated to Bing SEO but offer no specific comparison.
Yahoo seems to be more advanced than Bing. You can do a lot more in Yahoo site explorer than Bing & Google's webmaster tools. Yahoo I have always ranked well in its primarily Bing that’s a concern.
I can't help but agree with Lisa, YouTube video optimisation also follows backlinks. The more websites that display your video the more hits you’re going to get and YouTube will class your video as being more relevant. The king of YouTube optimisation is making useful, informative and valuable videos and the traffic will come. I occasionally use videos for a small injection of traffic in times of a promotion.
Hi swgolf, There are several factors that would have an impact on your url. You can have a URL with no keywords in and still rank high in a competative market. If you can generate enough backlinks to the url and the previous link was doing well then go for the easiest on the eye and for this smaller is normally best. SE's do pay attention to how your URL is structured however I dont believe this will always be the case now being truthful and if a client asked me to structure their url I would go with golfsite.com/golf-clubs or if i sold multiple items I would go with golfsite.com/golf/clubs and keep it consistant for the rest and have golf/caddy golf/caps golf/balls as it looks as if it's a category within your website as opposed to constant repative urls. You can also go to webmaster tools (google) and see how many variations of the word golf club you have and how many times its repeated if its high then try and lower it. It's a little hard not knowing the website to say for sure, this is just my opinion.
My best hidden SEO secret would be adding the websites phone number into the meta keywords for the homepage only. If you have a missed call from someone, most people just Google the number however if you have the number in your meta description/keywords it will display your homepage as opposed to your contact page. Once they are on the homepage they will more than likely check the contact us page then hopefully browse the website. I sometimes use an image for the contact number on the contact us page so it isnt picked up by the crawler. Its a pretty small secret but its one of mine 
Hi Sophy, I had a similar problem. I combated this by adding url conical. I also removed most of the backlinks to that particular category and redirected it to my index page. It took a couple of weeks to get back to how it was. It will be hard to find out the reason without posting a link though! Thanks
My best hidden SEO secret would be adding the websites phone number into the meta keywords for the homepage only. If you have a missed call from someone, most people just Google the number however if you have the number in your meta description/keywords it will display your homepage as opposed to your contact page. Once they are on the homepage they will more than likely check the contact us page then hopefully browse the website. I sometimes use an image for the contact number on the contact us page so it isnt picked up by the crawler. Its a pretty small secret but its one of mine
I can't help but agree with Lisa, YouTube video optimisation also follows backlinks. The more websites that display your video the more hits you’re going to get and YouTube will class your video as being more relevant. The king of YouTube optimisation is making useful, informative and valuable videos and the traffic will come. I occasionally use videos for a small injection of traffic in times of a promotion.
Hi Lisa, It will be a little tricky without actually looking at the website but my starting point would be what you have done, duplicate content elimination. If the rel=canonical is in place I would double check that it is a 301 re-direct. I would certainly take a look at the content to see if it is duped on third part websites. Some SEO firms just copy and paste segments of the website and add links. Another concern i would have is the backlink hosts status so I.E a website which seemed appropriate at the time has also been hit by the panda update and is now classed as spam. I would run a backlink checker + search for the content to see if it’s duped. Let me know how you get on with this, it will be interesting to see what the culprit is.