Hi Chris,

You didn't mention 301-redirects in your post. Did you set up 301-redirects for all of the URLs that you changed? If not, that explains the drop. If you did set them up, have you checked them all to make sure they are redirecting properly?

What about canonical tags? Did you update your canonical tags to reflect the new URLs?

In 2008 I worked for a company that migrated from self-hosting to Volusion and all of their URLs change. I was not doing SEO for them (yet), and they mismanaged their 301-redirects and lost about half of their traffic. It took a long time to recover. The good news is once they fixed the 301s the site traffic came back iwthin about 6 weeks (but I know 6 weeks can seem like an eternity).

Hope these questions aren't too basic and hope this helps somewhat.

Dana

First of all, let me say welcome to SEOMoz Q & A forum. THe best forum on or off the planet!

Okay, I understand you confusion. As SEOs we are all told "Multiple H1 tags...Bad!"

However, think about it this way:  Imagine you are a resource in a library referencing articles on a variety of topics. You are basically presenting a page of abstracts (short summaries) of the documents. You have no idea, based on how the user navigated to your (index card) Web page, which article or topic is going to be of interest to the use. Consequently, you present a list of headlines, all equally stressed, equally important. They are presented to you this way because not a single one of them is more important to the hosting document than another. Okay so each document has a major title, headline, whatever you want to call it. Because it's a listing of equally important topics served to searchers in a broad audience, the multiple

tags actually make perfect sense.

Now, one could argue that

The Daily SEO Blog

should be the lone

title, but it really doesn't express what's most important on the page. Also, with  a bunch of paginated pages it would be near impossible for a search engine to discern what is really important on the paginated pages if that same

tag was used on all of them. What really makes sense is that the individual headlines each gets and

tag. That signals to Google "Hey, Googlebot, this is a page with headlines and summaries that click through to the full articles."

You will notice that on the subsequent pages, the tag

The Daily SEO Blog

plus the

for the main article remain, but are the only

tags on the page.

In terms of <h>tags try to think like a librarian. This will help a lot in determining which ones to use where.</h>

Hope that helps!

Dana

# The Daily SEO Blog

  Now, one could argue that 

Hi ursalesguru. I'm not trying to be flippant, but man, if we all knew the answer to that question, none of us would be here.

It's a struggle. Search engine spiders like Googlebot are really stupid...no, really, they are. They can't see some of the obvious things that human beings can see when looking at a page. That's why SEOs spend so much time writing "alt" attributes, meta tags, <h>tags, transcribing videos, researching anchor text and building links and adding structured data as prescirbed by schema.org. All of this is an attempt to try to get search engines to see a page the way a human sees a page.</h>

Still, it's possible to get all that right and still lose. It requires time, patience and intelligent work. Our mutual frustration is one reason this forum is so gosh darned popular

Keep on keeping on. Learn, read, stay passionate. The rest will follow.

Dana

This sounds like a fun project, seriously (no sarcasm intended here), because you have so many possibilities of getting great quality links that everybody struggles to get. Here are my ideas:

Educational sites - schools (.edu links anyone?), school raitings sites, school stats, etc.

Divorce lawyers - (people often move after getting divorced) - Lawyers also have very specific states where they are licensed to practice

Local chamber of commerce sites

Local storage companies

State government resources for child support, driver's licensing, hunting licenses, voter's registration (.gov links anyone), anyone relocating is going to need new ID and re-establish child support through new agencies.

Just some thoughts! Hope they are helfpul,

Dana

Hi yacpro13. We had a similar problem. We aren't on Magento, but definitely we had the same issue. For us it was a combination of several things. Make sure that your canonical tags are squared away In our case, we had a program running that was automatically writing canonical tags that matched these URLs with the URL parameters attached. Eventually we stopped using the parameters completely, but by then many of these pages had already been indexed (even though they weren't technically separate pages, Google saw them as such). No, Google definitely wasn't smart enough to decide. In our case, Google had sometimes indexed 4-5 versions of the same identical page, and of course we were getting dinged for having duplicate content.

Because we aren't using the parameters any more our solution was to ask Google to remove those URLs from the index. This is a painfully long process for a big site. We've already submitted over 500 remove requests and only about 1/2 have been completed. In your case, since it appears you are currently using parameters, this may not be the best solution. I would start with the canonical tags and investigate those and make sure they aren't part of the problem.

Good luck. Hope this helps a tiny bit.

Wow, this is a tough question. I think the answer is, "whatever number of additional links you can sustain in your link-building on a consistent basis over a long period of time." In other words, if you go gung-ho and build 500 backlinks in your first week, and then only 1 a week for the next 8 months...something might look fishy about that link profile.

The question is asked almost as if you have an endless pool of backlinks...which makes me suspect to begin with. If they are all legitimate links, then I want to go fishing in the same pool you're fishing in!

Joking aside, if you know you can get 100 solid links right out of the gate, but not so sure how long you can sustain that, I'd add them little by little over the course of a few weeks or months so that your link profile stays consistenly growing. Then, after your site's been up for a while, your site should settle into a pretty natural pace. There will always be spikes and dips as different parts of your site might get more attention at certain times (new realeases, news articles talk about you, etc.), but overall there will be kind of a "norm" for your site established that you won't want to go crazy and upset it unless the spike is produced legitimately.

Good luck and happy fishing!

I have heard good things about Webtrends but it's going to cost you, and implementation is doubtful if your site doesn't receive a certain amount traffic). I've used Clicktracks a little. Our IT guy loves it and the marketing team prior to my arrival hated it, so there is definitely some dissent there. Woopra is also a possibility, but Google Analytics is way better.

I had a painful (and very expensive) implementation experience with Coremetrics. I wouldn't recommend them to anyone under any circumstances.

I totally agree with your comment about Google devaluing their own product. I can only think of one reason why they would go ahead with their "not provided" plans....and that is that they are planning on charging for analytics data that will include the "not provided" keywords (and we'll all be queueing up to give them our $$$).

I am interested to hear from those using Omniture, with which I have no experience.

I sympathize with your frustration. I know what it's like to come into a situation after years and years of technical missteps made by folks who never took SEO into consideration and then have to start cleaning up the mess.

You have a lot of hard technical problems and I'm not a developer so I will let those more technically gifted than myself address some of those.

There is one question I felt I could answer and that is #4: "If a site is scraping our content (same title, image, excert) but linking to us, should we contact them and tell them to remove it?"

You could go that way. But in the event that it is a decent site (despite the fact they scraped your content), first make sure you have a canonical tag properly implemented on your page, then, contact them and say "I see you found my content interesting enough to share on your site. Instead of me asking you to remove it, would you mind adding in an attribution line, giving credit to my site as being the source of the content and including a link back to me please? I think we can both agree this would be better than having me file a DMCA request with Google."

Just a thought

Hi Carol,

I thought the same thing for a site I was researching several weeks ago. I just went back and checked and yes, I cam getting the same problem too as maurizio. All pages below home page have the same Page Authority.

Here is a link to my Q & A post on the same problem: http://www.seomoz.org/q/how-can-we-improve-our-e-commerce-site-architecture-help-best-preserve-page-authority

Keri, one of the SEOmoz community manager's suggested I try again after the index update completed rolling out. I waited, adn still, the same problem. I am emailing the issue into the help desk. It might be good for you to do the same: help@seomoz.org

hope this helps!

Hi Keri,

I just went back and checked this again and the same results just happened. Here is another post in Q&A from today where someone else is noticing the same problem:

http://www.seomoz.org/q/page-authority-is-the-same-on-every-page-of-my-site

I am going to email help as you suggested. Thanks!

I have seen the same problem, sporadically, when doing research. Hopefully one of the SEOMoz admins can chime in and give us some insight as to why this happens.

Hi Steve,

I am an in-house SEO for an e-commerce company that deals with many of the same issues. Although our products are entirely different from yours, we too struggle with the large number of products we need to get online, the fact that everyone is using manufacturer's descriptions and the duplicate content problems that creates.

From experience, my advice would be to get the products up on your site. If you can at least create unique titles and meta descriptions, that would be great. Then, tackle the content over time. Google likes seeing pages maintained and updated. If you've already uploaded the products, it actually might hurt you now to take them all down, and start over uploading them once you have content.

Google also understands the difference between an e-commerce site and a blog. The content and purpose of content for these two different types of sites is quite different.

We have some products that it's just silly to spend a lot of time and effort optimizing for amazing unique content. How flowery can you really get about a CAT5 cable? It is what it is. Still they need to be on the site because if they aren't, we can't sell them.

I'd say leave the products there and develop a game plan to develop unique content for them over time. Fabio Ricotta gave a great presentation at MozCon 2012 about how he achieved this with an e-commerce site in Brazil. I highly recommend his 15-minute presentation. There are a lot of great ideas packed in there. Ideas that are great if you have limited resources.

Hope this helps!

Dana

When I moved across country I used this one to let people know that I had moved my consulting business:

http://www.prlog.org/

They did a good job. I even got picked up in a few local print newspapers.

PRWeb is a perfectly acceptable outlet for press releases. However, I think they are a bit pricey. No, you don't need to worry about duplicate content as I believe PRWeb uses proper canonical tags. If you have your own blog, or Web page where you can publish the release first (like a SMPR page), you could certainly use the canonical tag and then distribute to various news organizations. This would give you credit for the original content. For press releases you aren't so much going after original content as you are a link back to your site.

Be careful. The days of churning out press releases that aren't really news-worthy and getting good backlinks are over. You could actually do more harm than good. That being said, if you've got legitimate news to put out there, PRWeb is good, but they aren't the only game in town. Depending on your industry there might be specific PR outlets that could offer you better targeting for less money. Because I work for a company that does a lot of B2B with churches, for example, we frequently use Christian News Wire.

There are also a few free ones out there, but again, be careful. If they are just publishing anything and aren't filtering for real news and announcements, stay away from them.

Hope that helps a little?

Yes - I am struggling with exactly the same issues. I actually sent a private question to SEOMoz last month asking for advice because I was so frustrated. One of our competitors has set up hundreds of fake blog networks with exact match anchor text all over the place linking back to their ecommerce site (to the tune of 300,000+ links)....I know their tactics, because I used to work for them (and it's obvious when looking at their inbound links in ahrefs.com). I disagreed with their SEO approach and frequently voiced my opinions. Fortunately, I was hired away by one of their competitors

Now I work for a great, honest, hard-working company that does great #RCS every day. Still my former company, even after Penguin and Panda and more Penguin and Panda,  consistently makes Page 1 while my current company is lucky to make Page 2 for some really important keywords. It is very very frustrating!

Hi Keri,

I have reached out to Google for an answer to this question. I asked that the post something both in the Google forums and also here. We'll see how far I get

Dana

You are welcome. I would add ta canonical tag to the first page of any category or article page that results in multiple  (paginated)  pages. Watch the video, there are several different ways to go. One easy thing you could do is add a "View all" option link to the first page. Add your canonical tag to the page in its "view all" state, and that should resolve it. There really are 2-3 ways to solve the problem. It just kind of depends on your content and preferences. You will also want to make sure that you direct Googlebot not to crawl or index your search results pages. This can be done in your Robots.txt file.

Because it takes time for Google to crawl, index and recognize your new canonical tags, it might take a few weeks for the duplicate content errors to go away. The same will be true for Roger Mozbot.

This is all, of course, presuming that pagination is your problem. It could be that there's another issue, but this is definitely worth trying.

This appears to be a pagination issue. If so, then the solution may be fairly simple. You have a few options. You might want to first make sure that your canonical tags are in order. How you do those will depend on whether or not you want pages in a paginated series (like a category page with more than one page of products listed) included in Google's index. If you want them indexed, then each paginated should have its own rel=canonical tag, specific to that page. If you really only want the first page included in the index, then you could include a tag like this    at the top of each page in that

partcular paginated series. You may also need to include rel=next and rel=prev,

depends on your content.

Here is an excellent video on pagination from Google that describes various options,

depending on what type of content you have and how you would like it to be indexed:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/03/video-about-pagination-with-relnext-and.html

I understand your position very well because I work in e-commerce too, and many times, the only difference from one product to the next is dimensions. I work with audio visual equipment and this is often the scenario for things like power cords, cables, microphone cables, audio snakes, etc.

If all of your product descriptions are the same, then yes, it's duplicate content. If you are super-concerned about that, then that makes the case for creating hub pages with options that allow people to select the size of the furnace filter they want.

Personally, on large e-commerce sites, I'm not sure that spending tons of time writing elegant, unique descriptions for products that are obviously the same is worth your time. Google understands the difference between a site that is e-commerce based and a site that is content based (like a blog).

I would say, set it up both ways and have some users test it. Which way makes it easier and faster for them to find exactly what they want? Choose that one. I think if you choose the one that is better for usability, the SEO will follow.

Personally, I like hub pages. You know, you could do both. Most E-commerce platforms allow you to build a hub page, and then also have individual product pages that just aren't part of the navigation structure. I have used both Volusion and 3DCart to accomplish this. It just means building all the product pages, creating a "parent" page for your hub page, associating the products with the parent and then just not placing those individual products in any categories. That way, they still get indexed and if someone does search by dimension, it's possible the product page matching their search will be the one they see in the SERPs. That's hard to predict of course, but it would at least make that a possibility.

Also, last thought, if you do a good job of featuring the dimension in your page title and meta description, and also on the page, then I really don't think the duplicate content issue will be a problem.

I forgot to address your question about duplicate content. Are you using canonical tags in your blog? If you place a rel=canonical tag on each of your blog pages with the full URL of the page you want to be viewed as the source of the original content, this should solve the duplicate content problem. If you already have tags in place then you may have another issue. If you are using canonical tags, you may want to go through and make sure they don't all look like this:

The tags should be specific to each page. This may be something

you've already done, and I might be explaining

in a way that's too basic. If so, I apologize. Just trying to make

sure you're covered!

Hi Brandon,

If your site is connected to Google Webmaster Tools, you can find out what page is the source of the link producing the 404. This can be done by logging into your GWT dashboard, clicking Site Health then click on "Crawl Errors" and then click on the "Not Found" tab. You will see a list of links producing 404 errors. Click on the link you want to investigate and you'll get a pop open window with more info. You will see three tabs "Error details," "In sitemaps," and "Linked from." Click linked from and you'll see the information you are wanting.

If you are not connected to Google Webmaster Tools yet, the process is fairly simple, even if you have limited access to your site. There are several ways to load your site into GWT and verify ownership, including simply installing a meta tag, or uploading a simple file to your root directory. GWT offers a wealth of information that can be a great supplement to the info you get from SEOMoz.

I hope this helps!

Dana

Yes. I believe there is an advantage in choosing your second option, for exactly the reason you state. In other words it's better for you and your own organization of your content. It will also make it much easier when and if you implement URL rewrites to give you SEO friendly URLs because if you use any relative URLs on your pages, they will be much easier to identify correctly and update if they are constructed "/state/michigan."

I don't believe there is going to be an advantage or disadvantage to your campaigns or SEO if you choose one versus another. That's my personal opinion. I certainly don't pretend to know what Google favors or doesn't favor at any given point in time.

I certainly hope this helps!

This is a very subjective situation I think. If you had an older, very large, well-established site, the rate at which links are acquired might have a history. As with anything, there are times when things might have peaks and valleys. For example, if you are Coca-Cola and you release a new product, you might see a huge jump in the number of inbound links as the news breaks, and then things will setlle back down to normal. Google understands that this type of thing is normal.

I'd take a look at the linking profiles, site-size and domain age of your competitors. Since your site sounds like it will be a brand new one, Barn-burning your way past your competitors in terms of inbound links in the first week is probably going to raise Googlebot's eyebrows a bit.

However, I have to (as always) throw in the caveat that no one, not me, nor anyone here, can predict what Google will or won't like, rank or penalize.

Look at the profiles of your competitors, if at most they are adding a link or two a day, then stay within that. But of course, ideally, the links are coming because you've built a better site than your competitors and people just are naturally wanting to link to you (I know, I know....in a perfect world....)

Trust your gut. If you are going agreesively after links and have to ask yourself "Is this too many too fast?"...then it probably is.

It is my understanding that in testing done by many to track click-thru rates on SERPs that listings with a picture that results from the rich snippet does get more clicks than a listing without. Rand referred to testing that SEOMoz had done on this today in his Whiteboard Friday blog post.

I think there is a residual benefit to SEO as a result of that. SERPs with higher click-thrus and lower bounce rates can benefit and get a higher ranking over time as a result.

I believe AJ Kohn also referred to testing he had done on click-thru rate for his SERP results in his presentation at MozCon 2012. He even split test his Google+ profile picture, I believe, and found that one did better than another.

I don't think the benefit is limited to Google+ snippets either. For example, if you've used Structured Data to mark up your site to let Googlebot more easily discover your customer review ratings, these too might show in your SERP listings as star ratings that could greatly impact click-thru rates (and by association, SEO).

Thanks so much for your comments and suggestions. I just checked and it looks like the canonical tag you suggested is in place. Still, OSE is showing our linking structure split between these two URLs. Is this just an idiosyncracy of OSE that I shouldn't worry about, or is Googlebot going to see the same thing and credit nearly all of our Internal Links to one URL and all of External links to the other? Isn't this eroding the potential Page Authority of both pages?

Because our homepage URL was this:

http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/IAFDispatcher?iafAction=showMain

for a very long time. I am very concerned about that old URL not passing page authority ("link juice" - I hate that term, but just trying to be clear) to www.ccisolutions.com  If I understand correctly, a 301-redirect will pass most of the page authority, but a canonical tag will not pass any.

Here is what OSE is seeing when comparing all possible versions of our homepage URL:

http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/comparisons?site=www.ccisolutions.com%2FStoreFront%2FIAFDispatcher%3FiafAction%3DshowMain&comparisons%5B0%5D=www.ccisolutions.com&comparisons%5B1%5D=ccisolutions.com&=Compare

I thought fixing the meta refresh would fix the problem and show all the links credited to our desired URL www.ccisolutions.com ...but that doesn't appear to be what's happening.

Thoughts?

I think your site looks great. I'd buy a bin from you. You've done a good job with all the basics I think. Now comes the hard part right? building relationships and getting people to love you.

Have you thought about getting involved in the Box Tops for Education program? This joins businesses and K-12 schools and the businesses give schools equipment based on how many box tops of certain products the kids and their families turn in. Every school I know uses bins, tons of 'em. If you got involved in the program it would be great for the schools and kids and it would potentially give you a boatload of inbound .edu links.

Just a thought!

I never thought about the TTL being an issue, but I suppose it could be? It's certainly a bone of contention between marketing and IT, I'd love to have a solid reason to get away from our whole "24-hour wait to see what you messed up" model.

I thought about your post when I put up this question. I even looked for "Webmaster" in the categories in hopes SEOMoz had added it. This is definitely a Webmaster issue. Thanks PolarKing!

Woot! Way to go!

Thanks Streamline - I am going to have him try your suggestion. Since our site does not update immediately, we won't start seeing the redirect work until tomorrow morning. Is this something where we should see the effects right away, or will it take time for Google to recognize the change?

We recently fixed a meta refresh issue on our home page. Our store URL:

http://www.ccisolutions.com  had a meta refresh on it that was going to:

www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/IAFDispatcher?iafAction=showMain

The meta refresh is now gone, however there still seem to be some problems:

1. Our IT Director has not been successful in trying to make www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/IAFDispatcher?iafAction=showMain  301 redirect to http://www.ccisolutions.com  - so I believe we now have a duplicate content issue
2. If you look at both of these URLs in OSE, you will see that www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/IAFDispatcher?iafAction=showMain  is getting credit for almost all of the Internal Followed Links, while http://www.ccisolutions.com is getting all the credit for External Followed links. Why doesn't http://www.ccisolutions.com show the same number of Internal Followed Links?

I realize this is more of a developer/webmaster question and would be very appreciative of any suggestions or advice. Thanks!

I am in 100% agreement with Jared. I especially agree with his suggestion to have some kind of obvious, prominent link from the home page to this main product. Be prepared to ride out a dip in rankings, traffic etc. It might not be a bad idea to read Seth Godin's book The Dip as you go through this process

Are you planning on achieving this via a Meta Refresh? (I thought I'd better ask first before officially shouting "Danger, Danger Will Robinson!")

Yes, definitely. Depending on what type of site you have you might want to consider meta tags for Facebook'g Open graph, and definitely you will want to include or

You might also want to include Structured Data. Information on this can be found at http://www.schema.org

Hope that's helpful!

I agree with Streamline's comments. It's not going to hurt or help your SEO efforts. So, there's not going to be a benefit in removing them (other than effecting your competitors ability to see them, as Streamline said), nor will there be a benefit in populating them.

I think so. You can always run it through a sitemap validator like this one: http://www.validome.org/google/  I'm sure this will give you everything that you need to know. The 404's are pretty normal as long as you are monitoring them and making sure that they are 404's that you want, or if not you might create 301 redirects, etc.

Hope that helps!

Have you loaded the sitemap into Google Webmaster Tools? That's a good starting point because Google will tell you where most of the problems are and give you suggestions on how to fix them. One of the most common things I have seen is having characters in the Product names or descriptions that XML doesn't like, i.e. HTML.

Hi Don. And it works. Here's a thumbs up to get you one step towards that t-shirt

Hi Endlessrange, I love SEOMoz too! Pretty much I agree with everything you just said. Is cold-emailing people to try to get them to link to your site worth your time? No. But I'm willing to bet there are tons of people who you haven't emailed already, who you have some kind of connection with. Those people are definitely worth emailing. But, if you email, maybe a better approach would be to have something specific in mind. Maybe you want to announce something. Maybe you just want to share some information. If you email them, make sure something's in it for them, maybe something more than just a link back. Maybe you offer them a guest blog spot. Maybe you interview them. Maybe you send them a gift. I don't know, be creative.

I personally discard all emails from people who don't have an "in" with me. By "in" I mean, they know enough about me to use my first name, perhaps know someone I know, or know enough about me to know what I'm really interested in.  They have to talk to me in my language, and they better not start their email with "Greetings dear friend."

That being said, just today I contacted 4 editors of industry-related Web publications with whom I have had prior business relationships with. I had a press release I thought they might be willing to post on their sites. All four of them said yes. All four said yes because they know if I say it's a press release it's really a press release, not a badly disguised piece of marketing drivel. I also never presume anything. I don't contact them expecting them to do anything for me. I ask them really really really nicely, and I accept the fact that they just might say no.

Do everything you mentioned and always be on the lookout for an opportunity to contact with someone new. Then, do some research and find out how you might already be connected to them (6 degrees of Kevin Bacon right?). Figure out where the connection is and then email them.

Good luck and make the most of Q & A. It's awesome!

How long has the site been non-existent? By non-existent do you mean none of the pages are in Google's index or that they are simply not ranking as high as they used to? If site X has been de-indexed, try resubmitting a corrected sitemap. It might take a little bit for Google to crawl and re-index, but I'd think then it would be fine. If you truly have been removed from Google's index, fix the sitemap and file a reconsideration request. I would think Google would recognize this as an honest mistake.

Good luck. I hope that helps a little.

I agree with Adam.

I'd say that's a substantial enough change. I'd wait and see what happens in the next week or so. Does googlebot visit your site fairly often?

My gut instinct would be no, don't do anything as drastic as getting rid of 45 pages. Is there a way you can give your visitors a reason to visit these other pages? 45 pages isn't a huge number. Could you add something compelling to each one of those pages? Even if it still didn't get a lot of traffic, at least it would have more of a purpose.

What does your internal linking structure look like? Are you linking to these other 45 pages, or do they all pretty much just link back to your top 5? That's also something to consider. You might work on optimizing your internal link structure and see if that helps.

Just be aware that removing all those pages could just make everything even worse. So proceed with caution would be my advice.

Hah! That's hysterical. I have never heard this term....but I'll have you know I just wasted a good 20 minutes trying to come up with a two-word combination that would produce a single hit. No luck  [and that wasn't one of the terms I tried]

Thanks Keri. I will take a look and if it is the same I'll definitely email.

I tend to agree with you although I am not a programmer so may not be the right person to answer. Could you try removing the popup requiring an email address as WSPL is suggesting, and see what happens in OSE?

Hi Erik,

Yes, you were correct. I was in IE. Ah, yes, in Firefox, much better, but George's comments below are very good. I would definitely follow his advice. Good luck!

Dana

My first suggestion would to take the site, which appears to be 100% flash-based, and put the flash in an HTML wrapper. Search engines cannot crawl 100% flash sites very well at all. It's going to be hard to get the saite to rank wellI would do that before starting to do anything else. Once that's done, go to work on optimizing page titles. Refrain from using all caps. A good title for the homepage of this site (once it's in an HTML wrapper) might be:

Steven Holmes Studio Photography

If you look at the site in google by typing site:http://www.stevenholmesstudio.com in the search box, you'll see that Google is indexing the individual images (but not very well), but not really any of the content. An HTML wrapper should fix that. All of the images also need "alt" text describing the photos for accessibility reasons (people who are using screen readers, etc).

Hope that's helpful!

I agree with the previous comment and would add this:

When I went to Google just now and started typing "western ma" and then didn't hit enter, and looked at Google's auto-suggested terms, this one was first "western ma craigslist" - You might want to make sure you have an ad in Craigslist, or bid on that term if you are going to do any Paid search marketing.

Just a thought!

I have heard about this "honeymoon phase" but I have seen no data to back it up. I am very interested if anyone here can point to proof that this actually happens and that it is deliberate on Google's part.