just a quick update to this – apparently it was a tim thumb hack exploited by creating 100’s of similar pages and appending pharma links to each copy of the page.
so i cleared them from the cache directory and updated the fixed copy of tim thumb but the problem with ranking persisted – literally last week i discovered the problem – when these fake pages were created they used the list variable – webmaster tools showed google had cached 438 copies of my home page and because the list variable url crawling was set to crawl all the links were still showing – i set no crawl to the list variable and the sites now starting to move
