Hi Thomas

Firstly, i would suggest having two sites is not you trying to monopolies the market. There are many companies out there that have several sites all connected to each other and who are selling various types of products. Have one page about a product you sell and then developing a website within that niche to sell that one product shouldn't be an issue.  I have worked with websites before that have done what you have done.

However, i am assuming they designed your other site as well as your main site? At which point this didn't point out their "concerns"?

The last Penguin 2.1 update was around October and the one before that in May. The Penguin update is meant to improve the search results by targeting spam website. Those that have bought links or who have been adding their website to websites specifically boost Google Rankings. This article should explain it better. http://searchengineland.com/library/google/google-penguin-update

I noticed that you said there is no Google Analytic in place? This is very odd for a company that is meant to be doing your SEO. How do they track anything or even see what keywords your customers are coming in onto your site.

I would suggest that they have dropped the ball, if they ever had it. Now your site is suffering and they are blaming Google for it. If they had always been doing your SEO and correctly then there shouldn't have been such a massive dip in your listings. Yes sometimes you can be unlucky. However, from what you have said and the way that Penguin works it shouldn't have affected you this much because of one page and one website.

I would advise you not to pay the £1250 plus VAT. Firstly that is a large amount of money. I would also suggest that you consider shopping around for a new SEO company. That would be my personal thoughts after doing SEO for a few years.

Bex

Hello

I worked for an agency for a little while in SEO and i can tell you the people getting in the business weren't always good at explaining the full truth to customers when it came to SEO. Which upset me greatly.

Can you maybe explain more where this duplicate content in? I am a bit confused by your link. I would also agree with the other person who has answered. Simply changing your logo shouldn't result in such a drop in positions. What i would suggest it could be is bad backlinking. The reason i say this is because the Agency i left had no SEO person for 6 months after me. All sites were doing well then after i left they just anyone to just do the SEO. This resulted in people constantly link building to sites that were no good. Then one company crumbled in the SERPS their traffic dropping for 10,000 a month to about 2,000 a month in what should be their busiest time. A friend of mine who worked there still kept me up to date on the situation told me their rankings went from page 1 all the way back to page 5 for keywords they had ranked highly on for a long time.

I believe their only option in the end was to take down the site and relaunch on a new domain to break the links with the old bad sites. I believe they seemed to have picked up in traffic slightly.

So in answer to your question this could be the problem. Duplicate content shouldn't cause such a drop. However, surely your SEO company should be making sure there is no duplicate content? As for the phone number i haven't heard that before. If it is in the header or the footer, i shouldn't think it will make much difference. AS there are plenty of companies out there that have the same registered address but are different companies. This info is on the website in the footer normally and their websites are being penalised.

They want to charge you £1250! When i worked in an Agency it was about £40per hour. When i do freelance i charge 20 per hour. Based on those figures they say it is going to take 31 hours to fix!! As i assume you will have to pay VAT on top. I am not sure how they can say 31 hours is the amount of time it will take to fix. What are they going to be doing on it? I would demand a breakdown of exactly what they are doing for that money.

Also can you confirm if both sites are selling the same products or to the same market place?

Hope this helps.

If you have less than 200 fans i think you can change the username of the page (only ones) and you will retain the fans that you have. However, if you have more than 200 fans then you can ask some of your loyal ones to "suggest an edit". If they know what you want to change your page name to (if its something more appropriate) then get them to fill this in. If you get about 15 i think it is suggests in about 2 days, Facebook should ask you if you want to change your name.

I have never tried this myself, however, i have heard of other who have said its worked. All "likers" kept. Remember If anyone is searching for you with your old name they won't find you once you have changed it as Facebook doesn't redirect. Hope this helps.