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Thanks. Thats exactly what i needed.

i have added "Disallow:/search.php?" to the robots.txt file. Google seemed to be adding details to the form and then adding the results to the index. This means there are 100,000's of pages in the index that i dont want in there. Hopefully stopping the pages being crawled will help.

I'm having problem that gogole is index my search results pages even though i have added the "noindex" metatag. Is the best thing to block the robot from crawling that file using robots.txt?

Quite a lot of traffic lands on the listings pages so im reluctant to set them to noindex. There are only approx. 4,000 listings pages. I'm trying to find where these other pages that are being indexed are coming from.

The duplicate content is a problem as a lot of teh listings are pulled in via XML from agent sites. I've been trying to find a way to make it all more unique without editing each listing manually.

Thanks for this.

What is the best way to find where all of these links are coming from? The only place i can see is the search results page. I have set this 'noindex, follow'. Should i set it to 'noindex, nofollow"?

Thanks for your help. It looks like I'll just have to keep doing what i am doing and hope it bounces back quite quickly.

Before i took over the site the owners had taken on the service of some link building company. The links the company added where just added in to any wiki type site they could find. it seems that they only used four different types of key words when they were doing it. I have managed to remove over 600 of these links and the site was just starting to rank well for a variety of keywords, then all of a sudden this week the site has dropped back for its main keyword.

Do you think the best strategy is to keep removing the bad links? Apparently the site ranked better before these links were built.

The past week the main branded keyword for a site i am working on has dropped from the top three on Google US to page 7! It is still ranking in the top three on Google in other areas. I recently redirected /index.php to / using .htaccess. Could this have caused a problem?

If not, what else could have caused such a huge drop?