Welcome to the Q&A Forum

You can try creating templates for your pages, and fill them in with details for each appointment type.  For example, something:

"Thank you for you interest in X, which is one of the best properties in Y.  To request more information about X, simply fill out the form below, and one of our representatives will contact you right away.  You can also find more information at Z"

Just add a simple template like that to your pages (obviously flesh it out more, include images, etc), and fill in the variables with specific details from each listing.  Your developer should be able to automate that for you.

Have to disagree here.  First of all, meta tags ARE used by a number of smaller search engines, including Bing, which uses them when they have no other information available about a site.

Also, beyond search, many directories and social bookmarking sites auto-pull meta tags to generate content for their pages.  If you use either of these linkbuilding tactics (which can be beneficial in moderation) having the meta tags will save you time.

I also don't buy the argument that meta tags will help your competitors.  Any competitor worth there salt will be able to figure out what your keywords are-- if it's obvious to the search engines, it's going to be obvious for them too.  So having your keywords in a meta tag isn't going to hurt you.

There's always the danger of being hit by Panda and other low quality penalties if you get too many of your internal search results indexed, but I've personally seen a significant boost in traffic by having my internal search pages indexable on many sites.  It's also a common strategy for comparison shopping sites and other similar sites.  So the answer is, it depends.  If you flesh out your search pages with keyword rich content, you could see a lift in your traffic.

All the things you listed are important.

As for ranking those factors, I would say #1 would be figuring out the goals of your site.  Are you trying to make money?  Build your brand?  What do you want your visitor to do once they get to your site?  What are your landing pages?  Once you have a better grasp of that, then you can start to figure out what keywords to target and how much effort you want to put into it.

On-page factors are important of course, most importantly having quality, relevant content.  If you follow SEO best practices and create content that other people find useful, then you're on the right track.

As for link building, MozRank, PageRank etc. it's all relative to what your competitors have.  Once you've identified your keywords, you can take a look at the sites that are ranking higher than you in the search engines to figure out how much effort you need to put into linkbuilding to outrank them.

Hope that helps.

It's not a penalty, but it sounds like it could be a duplicate content issue. Google doesn't like to show duplicate content in its results, so if the content you had on your backend is ranking, then that's probably why the new domain isn't.

It really depends on how much unnatural links we're talking about.  Hundreds?  Thousands?

If your current site doesn't have too many backlinks (aside from the spam), moving to a new domain could work.  Just check to see first whether your content is being scraped on other sites, as they may outrank your new site if so.  Not sure how canonicals would work in a Penguin situation.

Rankings in Google change all the time, so try not to panic.  There are a million reasons why your site could have dropped: An algo change that favors some factors over others, competitors building more links, some of your links being devalued, etc.

Bottom line, if your page isn't being penalized, then focus on building high quality links, especially to the inner pages that you want to rank.  It looks like your on-page factors are good, focus on building more links.

Search engine spiders still read websites from the top down, as far as I know.  Have not heard of any recent changes to the contrary.

What theme are you using?  Different themes implement dropdowns differently.

Yeah, that is weird.  Rankings shift all the time though.  If it wasn't a named algo update, it could be just some change that Google made to the algo.

For example, if you have a lot of sitewide links (or blog links, or directory links) it could be that Google lowered the value of those for your type of query, relative to other types.  Or some of the sites that are linking to you could have been penalized for selling links, or seen a drop in pagerank, or got shifted into a different niche from your site, which lowered their value.

Whatever the case, unless you're being directly penalized for something, your best bet is to just build more links.  If your competitors have high value links that you don't, that could be a good starting point for regaining your ranking for your keyword and improving your site traffic overall.

Google's algorithm is changing all the time, even out side of the big named updates, so it's natural for rankings to fluctuate for specific keywords.

Have you noticed any fluctuations among the other sites in SERPs?  If that's the case, Google could have rolled out a change that affects queries of that type.

It could also be possible that your competitors have stepped up their SEO efforts over that time, how have their backlinks been growing, and how do their link profiles compare to yours?

Finally, links tend to lose value over time as blog posts are pushed into archives, sites go down or get penalized, pagerank goes down, etc.  How has your link building been during that time period?  If you're not suffering from an actual penalty like Penguin, the best strategy would be to make sure your on-page factors are solid and continue building better links.

I think it will only get worse before it gets better, with the recent combination of Google Place into Google+ and increasing G+ adoption in general.  We can hope the anti-trust regulations will eventually lead them to provide this data again.

In the meantime, you can get an idea of what some of the lost keywords are by paying attention to what landing pages they're landing on as well as seeing which keywords are getting high CTR in Google Webmaster Tools.

Webmaster tools is generally out of date and incomplete.  As far as actual rankings go, they should have an impact when they're crawled by Google, not when they show up in GWT.

Local SEO involves link building too, so not sure what your question is there?

If you're looking to improve your SEO, you have to look at 2 things: your onsite optimization (is your site optimized for search engines?) and offsite factors (link building).  If your site is already good, you should focus on link building.  If your site could use some work, it could make sense to focus on that first before focusing on links.

Here is a good article on the topic:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whats-better-on-page-seo-or-link-building

PR4, DA57, 415 backlinks from 49 domains, that's pretty decent and comparable to the other sites that are ranking for the query.  A list of links isn't the greatest content, but it's relevant and they have a high domain authority and some decent backlinks.

Syndicating content is generally not a problem, if you have a site with decent site authority and you are publishing articles on your site first, like you say.  2 things that will help Google sort out the original article:

1. If you have control over the code on the sites you are syndicating to, add a rel=canonical back to your own site
2. Include links in your syndicated articles pointing back to the original article on your own site.  This will help Google determine which was the original, as well as get you some link juice

Hope that helps.

You're probably seeing the drop because SEOMoz just updated their index:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/may-mozscape-index-update164-billion-urls

The sites that are indexed are going to change between updates, and as more/different sites get changed, the values for domain authority are going to shift.  If you haven't seen a corresponding update in GWT, then don't worry about it, it probably means that nothing has changed for your site, it's OSE that's changed (similar to how toolbar Pagerank is just a snapshot of a site at a certain time).

I'm seeing the same thing too... could be a problem with their broad match thinking that link building is somehow related to auto insurance.  Or maybe SEOs don't know how to drive, LOL!

Yes, all links on a page will lessen the link equity of all other links on the page, even if they are nofollowed or in the comments.

Looks like each comment has 3 links each-- the name, date, and a reply link.  I would at least remove the date link-- I'm not familiar with Joost, but it should be fairly easy to edit in comments.php.

Could just mean the data in GWT isn't current or Google hasn't re-indexed all the content yet.  How long ago did you put in the canonicals?

Not sure about top 100, but here's a list of the top 10:

http://www.kronikmedia.co.uk/blog/top-adsense-earners-10-sites-that-earn-millions/1876/

It's a grey area-- we've sponsored various students clubs before, and saw some great .edu links.  The way to frame it is not so much you are paying them for links, so much as you are making a charitable donation to their organization, and they mention (and link to you) in order to recognize their sponsor.  You can do the same thing with sponsoring scholarships, or making donations to non-profits like charities, libraries, and museums.

Are people still linking to you at your old .htm pages?  Then you should keep the 301s in place.  There's no need to "clean up" your .htaccess.

If you decide to remove the 301s anyway and start seeing a lot of 404s in Webmaster Tools, that's a good indication you should put the 301s back in place.

Any examples of pages that are blocked?  I don't see any pages being specifically blocked in your robots.txt: http://www.jobshadow.com/robots.txt

For nofollow, it's perfectly normal to nofollow thousands of links if you get a lot of comments.

Exact match domains are definitely still worth it.  Check out this case study on a couple thousand sites, which shows that exact match domains suffered LESS from Penguin than other sites:

http://www.jonathanleger.com/anchor-text-optimization-how-much-is-too-much/

Penguin tends penalize sites that spam anchor text exact keywords, instead of a more natural link profile that includes your branded keywords.  However, when your brand IS your keywords, then it's very hard for Google to penalize you.

Gotta disagree with this one.  Creating high quality blog content with the same keywords you are targeting on your products page can be a good strategy.  The blog post will add more content related to your keyword on your site, increasing relevancy.  It's also a lot easier to build links to a blog than a product page.

Just make sure to link from the blog post to the product page, and the product page can get a boost.  If you rank really high in Google, you could even get 2 listings for that keyword.  If for some reason the blog content outranks the product page, you can just take that same content and throw it on the product page with a canonical from the blog post.  If all else fails, you can 301 redirect it.

If you are using Wordpress, there is also a plugin called RSS Footers which allows you to put your link at the bottom of all your syndicated posts, so even if they are scraped they will link back to you.

500 words seems pretty short, are you sure these are high quality articles?

What are you doing to promoted these articles?  Are you sending out e-mails to other people in your niche that would be interested in your articles?  Contacting them on Twitter and other social media?  Posting your article to social bookmarking sites?  Submitting your articles to news sites for your niche?

Like Donnie said, you can just build it and expect people to find it.  Make great stuff and do some outreach.  If that doesn't get you any traction, maybe your content isn't being received by your audience as well as you thought it would be.

Yes, directory submissions are completely white hat (unless you're spamming anchor text) if they're reputable.

To make sure that a directory is in Google's good graces:

1. Do a site: search to make sure they are indexed
2. Search for their brand name, to make sure they aren't penalized
3. If it's a paid directory, look to see that you are paying for manual review and not paying for a link

On the off chance that the directory gets penalized, your will not be penalized, their link will just stop passing value.  Unless you're submitting your site to hundreds of directories, you should be safe.

You can turn off snippets by using the following code:

HOWEVER, this will also prevent text snippets from being shown for your search results, so probably not what you want.

The best thing to do would be to go into your analytics and determine how many pageviews Google Instant Preview is generating.  If it's a significant amount, and you feel it's impacting CTR, then spend the effort to create a pretty Javascript-free version.  Otherwise, ignore it (less that 5% of our visitors use Instant Preview, for example).

Here's Google's answer on the webmaster forums:

https://sites.google.com/site/webmasterhelpforum/en/faq-instant-previews#11

Just echoing the other responses, don't ditch the domain (unless you've used any black hat tactics that may be penalizing you).  Keywords in the domain help, but they aren't the be-all-end-all of SEO.

Fabric, as others have pointed out is a pretty broad keyword, but if you want to rank for it, focus on creating more high quality content related to fabric, and go after high value links in your space.  Avoid anchor text over-optimization.

Since you already have a high authority domain, adding more content could bring you more traffic for a whole host of keywords related to fabrics.  Consider starting a blog or create a tips page or Q&A for fabric-related issues.