Just inherited client who has spammed SEs

[RaraAvis]

I have inherited a client who has been given very poor advice in the past about his SEO. He has 4 Web sites, nearly identical, with about 10 different domain names pointed to them. All of these sites are linked to one another and are actually ranked pretty well. Seeing they are designed well I don't know why the original developers would feel like they had to go "out of bounds".

My question is: What can I do to fix this mess? All of his sites get traffic. I think he "may" have already been booted from MSN. A month or so ago he was 5 times in the top 10, now he's nowhere to be found.

How can I tell if he's been banned by a particular SE. Is there anyone I can contact to tell them I'm trying to clean up his record?

Thanks for your help!

[Bradley]

Well, to start clean you could purchase new domains names and move forward from there. That way you know your efforts won't be impacted by the past work.

[mack]

Use the domain that gets the most traffic and stay with that as a brand... as for the rest use robots.txt to stop that getting spidered and interfearing with your work. Make the site as legit as you can and see if the results follow.

[littleman]

My take:
Keep the current domains to sponge off the legacy traffic, but poor no more effort into them. I would start anew, and isolate the new site(s) from the old best you can.

[RaraAvis]

Thanks for the info.

On the robots.txt, would I simply need to disallow each directory?

[soapystar]

whats the problem...are you saying they were crosslinking and/or mirroring? Because im about to set up multiple domains for someone.....create 50 standalone unmirrored sites..in that i mean they will look different from each other..then point each one at one main site.....so there would be no crosslinking or mirroring...and the main site would be on a different server to the others...would this be ok?...where could it go wrong?