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If they insist on having brand information, then yes, the alternative is to have a small portion of brand information, with a link to the full brand text on its own page.
if the domain name, and URLs are identical to what they were, and if there are no security issues with the server the site is now located on, changing an IP alone should not ever cause a loss in rankings. Something else is going on.
Nitin
200 words - what is the point / value of having that repeated on thousands of pages? It's not unique, and regardless of what some people think about it being okay because "lots of sites do it" or because "Major brand that's able to get away with lots of bad SEO because they own a market" can do it.
If there are two hundred words based on non-product specific information, this is not a best practice. Instead, that information should be contained on just one page, and if you believe, from a user experience perspective, providing a link to that from each product page is helpful, that's what I recommend.
EGOL,
Thank you for emphasizing the quality (helpfulness/human value). I only briefly mentioned it in my response, yet it really does need to be a top priority.
Lou,
"I just wanted to throw a few factors out there in order to encourage a response like yours - packed full of useful next steps for me to evalaute this further."
THAT is priceless 
Pagination:
Loading all content on one page and using a "more" button to "reveal" it, is not a best practice. Individual pages need to exist for individual sub-topic based content. This is especially true since it now appears that Google, while indexing content initially hidden to users, is likely giving less value to that hidden content than content immediately seen.
Pagination is important IF it is executed properly. If you have tens of thousands of results in paginated lists, is that one paginated group, or are they split out into separate groups based on similarity of content? If it's all just one massive group, that's likely another problem to look into, since pagination is meant to be used to say "these pages all contain links to other content where the entire group comprises very similar content around one primary topic".
Internal linking should always point more to main category page destinations than individual pieces of content. It would be unnatural from a usability perspective to link more to individual pieces of content, and thus it would be bad for SEO.
5,000 or so average crawl errors - what is causing those? Are they 404s? Were they previously valid pages? If so, those typically need to not generate 404 but instead be a direct 301 to a highly relevant live page (and where internal links within the site are updated accordingly).
So many more issues to consider...
You are asking some very challenging questions, and using some very limited metric comparisons to try to figure it all out. SEO is not so easy. If it was, many sites would be in a continual state of leap-frog as they out-do each other in similar ways.
Here are just a few questions / considerations to add to your process:
1. Regardless of the number of instances of one or more keywords on a page, what is the total volume of highly relevant content on a given page? How helpful is that information in answering questions your specific target visitors are needing to have answered? How helpful is it in being able to allow visitors to achieve a goal they came to your site to achieve?
2. How well organized is your content in regard to very similar pages being grouped together in both navigation and URL structure? Since my reading of your question implies the competitor site is much more "tight" in its singular focus, this is a critical factor for your site to evaluate.
3. If their site is much more 'tight' in it's singular focus, how much is dilution a factor on the other pages of your site regarding topical focus and goal intent? If there is any serious dilution happening, you'd likely need even more content within that section you are comparing, to overcome that site's strength in refined singular focus.
4. What technical issues may exist on your site that you may not have considered? Crawl efficiency, page processing speed, canonical or duplicate content confusion? There are many other questions I could list with just this one consideration. Even if the competitor site has some worse signals among these, if any of yours are problematic enough, that alone can be a contributing factor.
5. How much higher is the quality of the inbound link footprint for your competitor in comparison to your inbound links footprint? Just having more links isn't at all a valid consideration if you don't dig deep into the quality issue? If they have 10% of the inbound link volume, yet half or most of their inbound links are from very highly authoritative sites and you have less of those, that is another massive consideration.
Those are just starting point considerations.
Wordtracker for keyword volume and Overture PPC for keyword value were my two go-to resources. And WebTrends for the painful process of attempting to figure out what was happening on-site.
EGOL,
As always, you infuse wisdom into this discussion. I have always been an advocate of "content first, content last". Yet in 2015, search engines are only one piece of the puzzle, and until and unless other efforts for brand visibility / authority / trust are made, the overwhelming majority of sites on the web will leave way too much money on the table.
I happen to believe links need to be generated through our own efforts yet it's not the "traditional" link building. Instead, it's more about advocacy of brand, community service, and participation in the community in which our prospective/existing clients/customers live.
If we are not active in those ways, we build a house on sand.
Just my take on it.
The reason for the skepticism is the scale of spam out there, and the volume of ways spam efforts attempt to trick search algorithms. Google, even now, all these years into it, still does a very poor job of trapping some of that noise, and so the index remains polluted.
Of course, just building great content is never enough and won't ever be enough. So we just need to check the boxes regarding the potential for Google to think "this isn't legitimate".
This is one of the million questions we face dealing with a less than clear message from Google on what they do.
Generally speaking, just one scenario is that they need to get confirmation signals when new content is discovered. Unfortunately that's not something that always happens, yet it does happen. The stronger a site is long-term, the less likely that will happen, yet even then it can.
There's never one perfect solution, however here's the bigger issue. Some people hear "flat" and they take it to the extreme. Which is a terrible concept in 2011.
If you go too flat, you muddy up the proper group relationships. This is where Siloing comes in.
In my presentation at SMX Advanced this week, one of the many methods I recommend for "sustainable SEO" is to group your content, and reinforce that group relationship in URL structure, then with breadcrumbs, and finally with section-level navigation, where all the pages in that section have a link to all the other pages in that section, but where that specific sub-navigation is replaced or disappears as appropriate when you leave that section.
If you've got more than a handful of pages in a section, you should definitely go deeper.
The trick is knowing how wide, how deep to go. It's an art as much as a process studying site data over time.
Another factor is the competitive landscape for a particular niche market. The more competitive, the more important this concept becomes.
Without having direct experience with RestultFirst, I can't speak to their ability to obtain results, however a careful review of their site points out several serious concerns.
1. They carry a "Best in Search" "badge" from TOPSEOs. TOPSEOs sells badges for a price, they do not award these based on actual proven or independently verifiable success.
2. The site is chock full of grammatical flaws, the type of which generally come from outsourced solution providers where Americanized English is not the native language. It's actually quite poor when reading content in its entirety.
3. The claim of "white hat" SEO actually appears to be misleading at best. They describe in their services section, how they provide content - if the content they provide is written as poorly on a client's site as it is on their own, this itself would be a turn-off to many would-be clients or customers. It's highly unprofessional. So even if they could get a site ranked, there's just as much likelihood that many of those visits would be lost before conversion to clients or customers.
They then go on to state:
"the product & services of the client are made popular on social networking site and else, so as to spread the word of the brand. Numerous articles with targeted keywords are submitted on the submission directories which act as a link to the client’s site and this is another of the steps taken by the SEO Services Company to help attain a higher rank on the search engines.'
Ignoring the poor writing, they come right out and say that their primary link building method is what is actually considered a very low quality method of obtaining links, not high value nor SEO best practices.
In one of their "case studies", they state:
"In less than a month’s time, the website achieved rankings in the top 2 pages for keywords". Honestly, if the best they could do was get a site into the 2nd page of Google, that's not very good. And it's another validation to me, in my experience, that they don't really do high end work, but "just enough low quality methods" to get a site "sort of" ranked.
Now, they very well could do much more than I was able to ascertain, or than they claim on their site. They could even implement best practices, and not just "questionable" tactics. There's no way to know from their site however. And nothing on the site indicates they do truly high quality, long-lasting work that isn't in the "gray-hat" arena.
So - exactly what is their promise? How much does it cost? What does the guarantee specify, and what are the loop-holes in that regarding the possibility that some of the tactics they use might eventually fail due to search engines devaluing low quality methods?
Many questions need to be asked, and much written documentation would need to be presented for anyone to ever truly have the knowledge based confidence to want to hire them.
So please - be very cautious if you choose to proceed.
This is a classic case of one of two things. Either the Panda Update (or it's follow-on tweaks) hammered you, or your site just got wacked for not having the right stuff for ongoing trust.
Google will initially rank a site just on the core factors. Then, over time, if other signals are not found, or if other signals are low quality (such as the mentioned anchor text all being too much alike), Google will adjust rankings accordingly.
This is why ongoing work is critical - adding fresh content regularly, obtaining new links with diversified anchor text, coming from a wide variety of sources, pointing to pages across the site, social signals - these are all important as reinforcement factors.
From a cursory look at your site I'm quite concerned about several things.
1. Unique Content
You have almost no unique content - so little that I can't see why Google would rank you significantly for many phrases over the long haul.
http://www.dentistinsaltlakecity.com/index.php?base=xcp_FeaturedServices is one example - there's nothing on this page that supports justifying this page's being ranked, especially for any important phrase. Not only is there essentially zero content, only one of the services listed is a link, without any related content wrapping around it.
That in turn offers no ability for that page to drive any ranking weight to the Teeth Whitening page that is linked in the content area. It's a similar situation on other pages, such as your staff page http://www.dentistinsaltlakecity.com/index.php?base=xcp_OurStaff. Compared to the top, sidebar and footer that are essentially duplicate across all pages, those three sentences are all of a sudden very weak when looking at the "is this page mostly unique content" perspective.
2. Topical Dilution
Then, on the Teeth Whitening page http://www.dentistinsaltlakecity.com/index.php?base=xcp_TeethWhitening
You've got "Dentist in Salt Lake City" wrapped in an h1 tag, and "Salt Lake City Teeth Whitening" wrapped in an h3 tag. While HTML header tags are not ultimately critical for SEO when all other aspects are well optimized, in this situation, it's not helping and probably adding to the hurt. This is because the h1 tag signals "this is the most important topic on this page", and the h3 not only says "this isn't most important, it's not even really important, since it's not even an h2".
The same problem exists with the Implant page. And in both cases, having the "Dentist in Salt Lake City" wrapped in an h1 is a conflict with your page titles unique to those pages.
And having "Teeth Whitening Dentist in Salt Lake City" in the footer of pages that should have a different focus doesn't help either. It dilutes those topics. ESPECIALLY because it's wrapped in an h1 tag, fighting against each page's own primary h1 tag in the main content area (the only place an h1 should be found).
3. Local SEO
From a local SEO perspective, your business address is nowhere to be found. It should be on the sidebar, or in the bottom of the main content area of each page (not even in the footer), in HTML readable text. Without an address, you're lacking that extra validation that you really are a Salt Lake City service, which just adds to the already weak topical focus depth I've already described.
4. Broken Pages
Then there's this problem: http://www.dentistinsaltlakecity.com/index.php?base=Home and http://www.dentistinsaltlakecity.com/index.php?base=xcp_Cash - you've got a handful of entries in Google's index like that. Those have to be fixed, and those URL's either need to be redirected to other pages or have unique content on them.
5. Duplicate Content
You also have a duplicate content problem because both http://www.dentistinsaltlakecity.com and http://dentistinsaltlakecity.com work. Pick one or the other, then have the other version set up to automatically redirect to the one you chose - across the whole site. (These are called "301 redirects" - it's a server instruction).
Duplicate content also exists in that http://www.dentistinsaltlakecity.com/index.php?base=home also goes to the home page, which should only be found by either http://www.dentistinsaltlakecity.com/ or http://dentistinsaltlakecity.com/ So change the links on your own site pointing to the home page (including the logo wrapped link).
6. Inbound Link Profile
As for inbound links, a quick check on OpenSiteExplorer.org showed you've got just over 350 but they're coming from only four domains. That's an extremely high link to root domain ratio. The higher that ratio, the weaker the overall inbound link profile.So you have a LOT of work ahead to build up many more links from a much larger variety of root domain sources. That alone will have a huge impact in your situation over time.
Note:
My very cursory review didn't see any duplicate content issues across your various web sites (like from http://www.dentistinprovoutah.com, http://www.dentistonuppereastside.com, and http://www.dentistincherrycreek.com ) so that's a positive. (I assume those are your sites) But it begs the question - how many sites do you have? And is there any cross-site duplication of content? That's something to be sure isn't going on.
Actually that first recommendation you got in this answer thread is both backward and flawed and does not follow best practices. No offense to Brad but it's just outright wrong.
The first step should be to clean up all the link mess - documenting the process - noting which sites were contacted, how they were contacted. Only after that is done should a disavow be submitted with all the links you couldn't get cleaned up.
And a resubmission request should only be made if a manual penalty was assessed, not if it was an algorithm penalty. So unless you got a manual penalty notice in Google Webmaster Tools, resubmission requests are not going to help.
I'll just add that Yahoo closed the Yahoo Directory down last year.
Alex,
I've had the opportunity (misfortune?) to perform audits on a few ecommerce sites that saw a major hit due to Panda. I can tell you that Google set up a mechanism for submitting your site to let them know. You won't however, get individual site reconsideration, you'll simply be giving them an opportunity to include your site in their ongoing evaluation process. And be able to commiserate with others.
Taking a quick look at your site here's a few factors:
**1. Duplicate product descriptions. **
I pulled up a random product on your site and did an exact match search for the first line in the product description. I got your site among some bizrate.com listings, and a couple rogue sites.
Having a truly unique description for every product page is critical. It should be at least a few paragraphs long. Yes, that's a massive time-suck. However it's one of the most significant factors in the long list of factors.
2. Topical Confusion
With so many sorting options included in primary navigation (New Arrivals, full catalog, Sale, Final Sale links up top as well as the entire left sidebar navigation that's site-wide), you're not doing anything to help Google comprehend content relationships that are unique on the site. Many of these pages are purely pagination with no unique content other than product images, a one word product name, and price. There's no way any of that content can stand out as truly strong content pages uniquely identified to a particular set of important phrases.
There's also no navigation breadcrumbs, which would reinforce topical relationship focus and separation.
3. Inbound Link Profile
A quick check in OpenSiteExplorer.org shows the majority of links contain "swimsuit" anchor text. Overall, there are hardly any phrases built around variations such as "bikinis" or "women's bathing suits" or any of countless other variations - without that breadth, your site is too heavy on too few variations.
That's just an overview that should get you going in the right direction, however it's just what stood out in a quick review.
Here's a little tidbit. At SMX Advanced today, Stephan Weitz, Head of Search at Bing, confirmed two things I asked.
1. He was recently interviewed by Eric Enge, owner of Stone Temple consulting. In that interview, Stephan said that Bing is moving from how they currently interpret words in content as nouns, to where they want to understand words as they relate to actions - to understand web site intent - to then match that more accurately to searcher intent.
After I read that interview, schema.org was announced - a way to help search engines better understand the intent of the content. And those to concepts clicked in my head - so I asked him - do schema.org and their desire to understand web site intent (as described in that interview) go hand in hand? Are they directly related? He said yes - schema.org is the key to it all.
2. He also confirmed that "schema.org is not a ranking factor now, but it will become a ranking factor. THAT is huge. Why? because people will be required to implement it because failing to do so will harm their rankings. Adopting a microdata solution is no longer a "it would be nice if you did". it's going to be a standard practice.
The search engines, in one shot, with schema.org, drew a new line in the sand. Either get with the program, or suffer. Not today, but it WILL happen.
My experience with other evolving changes to this industry over the 10 years I've been involved with SEO is that when a major shift occurs, it's usually about a year before it's critical for best practices SEO.
When May Day happened, I saw the writing on the wall back then - and spent the next six to 9 months helping various clients change their site architecture accordingly. None of those clients lost rankings when Panda happened. Several clients I got who came to me AFTER panda, who were seriously harmed by Panda, saw a plunge as a result of May Day. It was the advance writing on the wall for Panda in many ways. At least in my experience.
So that's why I am now more confident than ever that people in this industry have a year to generally get on board. Those who can do it within six to nine months will have a competitive advantage.
Actually the correct deeper answer based on both Google policies and SEO best practices is as follows:
SO - the only issue then is this - WHY would you want multiple sites? Do any of the following reasons match your vision? If so, then you CAN have multiple sites IF they are done properly.
A) If you've got a big active brand, with a lot of customers/clients, it can help to create multiple sites often including:
B) If you have specific separate and quite distinctly different service or product offerings, you can create multiple sites so that the very different topical intent of each site is kept uniquely refined in that specific funnel and doesn't "pollute" or "dilute" the umbrella topical focus of each niche.
C) If you have an eCommerce site (where intent is online sales) you may have a desire to have a separate community or blog site (where intent is informational) as another way to keep the "intent" funnels cleanly separated.
NOTE:
It is VITAL that you understand the concept that when executed properly, multiple sites are very useful. However, these need to factor in the following:
1. Every site needs to be able to pass the "5 Super-Signals" test:
In regard to the above, content needs to be truly unique across each site. While you can have similar content specific to your brand identity, and even some similarity about the umbrella topic of your product or service offerings, this needs to be done in a way that does not violate the "multiple sites for ranking domination" except as it relates to your brand (as opposed to generic non-brand product or service offerings).
2. Each site needs to have a LEGITIMATE business case reason for its existence not considering SEO - the "why this site exists" question needs to pass muster.
3. Every additional site you create requires its own consistent quality effort, as well as trustworthy off-site reinforcement. If a proper concerted effort cannot be maintained over the long-haul on multiple sites, it is much wiser to go with one single unified site.
If the client is not open to consolidation you're left with a difficult challenge. Not atypical of site owner thinking though. Sometimes SEO is just not given the trust value to be able to implement a best case solution.
So - in this case, I'd suggest it comes down to resources. Are there enough resources to devote to three separate blogs consistently enough with enough content unique to each site to justify three? Likely not.
More likely, a single blog would be best. This way, content can be created for all three locations as needed, and any "generic" content that doesn't apply to a specific individual location can all be kept on that one resource.
I would then link to the blog from each of the three sites as a main navigation link - make it the last one to the right in top nav. Or a footer or sidebar link on those sites. And then on the blog, I would include links to all three location home pages on the sidebar or in the footer.
Caution is needed to ensure no problems with link penalties (algorithmic or manual). So no keyword stuffing of links back and forth. And ideally, I would even consider a nofollow attribute on the navigation, sidebar or footer links to be absolutely sure.
You should set your WordPress to require moderator approval on first comments, and any comment with a link in it. That way all trackbacks will be stopped at the gate. You'll need to go through them though if you want to see if anyone ever links back - it's a good thing to know.
However if you're overwhelmed by them, go ahead and just shut them down. Real links back will still exist when they're created, and you'll still get the inbound link value.
1/7/2015 A comprehensive case study on how I helped a site recover from a massive Google algorithmic loss...
12/29/2008 The economy is in the tank. Hundreds of thousands of people are losing jobs every month. Unprecedented numbers of people are losing their homes. Yet we, as Internet Marketing Professionals, are blessed to be in the right market at the right time.