You are already at a disadvantage using a hyphenated domain name. It's just another challenge using the "z" replacement.

Think about the user experience. How many people looking at your site will go to keywordguides.com when they are actually looking for keyword-guides.com? The same idea with the "z" replacement.

From a search perspective, you will not be an exact match. You will be "one off" which will put you in the same category as other mis-spelled words.

It is definitely preferable to get a .com, but if push comes to shove the options I would consider are:

• search for other TLDs such as .org, .info, .biz, etc. From a search engine standpoint, the TLD doesn't matter. Your focus would be ensuring those who look for your site are aware of your extension.

• create a brand. Twitter, Google, Myspace are all brands whose name has no indication as to the type of content is offered on their site.

• www.keyword-guidez.com is a bad option. It's bad for users who are looking for your site, it's bad for creating a keyword phrase match, and it appears a bit spammy so even when users find your results in search engines they may be less likely to click on it.

Bing and Google are two independent companies. They often evaluate site rankings very differently for various reasons. A few items I noticed:

• your sister site, american-waterworks.com already ranks on the first page of Google results for the given phrase.

• the nfsmn.com links prominently to the american-waterworks site from the home page

• Google frowns on a single company / site owner trying to rank multiple sites for the same term

There are many possibilities. Further analysis is needed to determine the root issue in your particular case. There are clearly other sites attempting to rank for the same term. The nfsmn site has hardly any links, it links out to multiple other sites from its home page and the content quality and site architecture aren't that good. I would not expect the site to rank #1 in Google for anything other then a perfect match for a non-competitive keyword.

I also noticed the american-waterworks site does not rank on the first page of Bing, yet it does in Google. Each search engine may recognize these sites are related and choose the site they feel is best suited for the term to rank.

**The client can not provide any access details for their existing site. **

Can you elaborate further?

If the client lost all usernames and passwords, they should still be able to contact their web host, obtain their user name and reset the password.

Even if the site is no longer hosted, as long as they own the domain they can add details to the registration record so they can access the Google WMT account.

"As for the client's site hacking, as far as I'm aware their webmaster & in-house team dealt with that when it happened."

The webmaster and inhouse team likely had a gap which was exploited. It may be best to bring in an outside security consultant to review the matter.

"if our messages go unacknowledged, what else can we do about it?"

In my experience, 25 - 60% of removal requests are honored, depending on the site. If you are working with numerous site owners, either some of them will respond or you are likely doing something wrong. Ways to contact a webmaster:

• use the WHOIS information to send an email

• use information from the site. Before you say they don't have anywhere, check thoroughly.

• use the site's Contact Us form

• call the site with the number on the site or their WHOIS phone number

• mail the site

• check for social pages such as facebook and contact them via that method

You shared there are around 20 sites linking to your client's site. Some of them should respond.

Where did you learn this information? Can you offer a URL?

How exactly did you make this determination? Can you offer the URL and the key term you are using?

There is no advantage to holding back from a search engine perspective. The only reason I can think of to hold back relates to promotion opportunities for the articles. You could publish one article each week, tweet it and otherwise generate interest around the weekly article. If that is not of interest to you, then I would publish all five articles.

There are a few reasons this can happen. Each tool crawls the web at different times and see different things. I would recommend at least investigating any issues you find regardless of which tool you used to discover it.

Personally, I would pay good money for a tool from Google which used their algorithms and data, but that isn't an option so we do the best we can with the available tools. Google WMT and SEOmoz crawl reports are two parts of that solution for me.

You can have some duplicate content in the manner you mentioned above. It is a natural and expected part of the internet that existing sources of information will be utilized.

There is not any magic number which says "30% duplication is ok, but 31% is not". Google's algorithms are private and constantly changing. Use good sense to guide you as to whether your page is unique and offers value to users.