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I admit, I do need work on the delivery. It was late at night, and I was aiming more towards being of service and answering a question than getting the delivery done. Due to the hour, and being my first attempt, the channeling was a bit weak.

With only five or ten products, you can focus your time on them and make each page for that product the best resource out there on the web for that product. Make it the type of product page a reporter would want to go to when researching that niche for a news story. Use the products, write your own review in your words, rewrite the manufacturer's description, make a chart of resources out there about those products that no one else has.

Do a search on the name of your products and look for questions people are having about it in forum sites. What are people asking when they talk to each other? What information are they trying to find out? Does that information exist? Put it on your page.

Hi Harry,

Have you had this work for you personally, or can you give us some more information? This seems to be counter to what most people are saying in the thread, so it'd be interesting to hear more about your experiences.

Thanks!

Let me see if I can channel EGOL on this one. My guess is he would ask why not invest that effort into adding content to the landing page or the ecommerce site itself?

The normal stuff should be producing the quality content on the pages with the conversion actions, not directory submissions and blog commenting. Make sure you've got a good destination, first.

Hi Jesse,

I'm going to touch base with a couple of other people at SEOmoz and ask their suggestions for where might be a good place for feedback. It'll probably be morning before we're able to get back to you, I know some of the staff isn't around at the moment (though obviously some of us keep some late hours).

If I were in your shoes, I'd look at some of the top professionals in the field and read their blog posts about how they do keyword research and their review of tools. You'll get an idea of what they find valuable in tools. If your market is more for small business owners, read posts written by some of these same experts but that are on small business websites, telling the owners how to do keyword research for themselves.

On a forum site I have, "post" is one of my most common words. My personal opinion is that I wouldn't worry about it too much as long as some of the other stuff IS on target, and you're also not seeing signs that your site is hacked (it is time to get worried if you see pharma words as significant keywords).

Hi Jesse,

When I go to that URL, all I see is a place to sign up for notifications, but I don't see a place where someone could actually use the application. When I search on Jesse Heaslip, I see a page saying that person is the co-founder of Touch Keyword.

Is there a working application that we're somehow missing? And can you give us some more information about what type of feedback you're looking for in your product (while keeping in mind that this isn't an external product development forum)?

Thanks so much!

There are often times pages you don't want indexed, and that's what robots.txt is there for. These are just some things you may not want indexed:

• Premium content for subscription-only members
• Your admin directory
• Printable versions of pages
• Development servers

You keep things you don't want out of the index, and you also don't waste the crawl budgets of the search engines on stuff that's not what you want in the engines in the first place.

I'm an associate for SEOmoz (a contractor), which means I can edit posts and delete duplicate responses. I rarely edit posts, and do so just for clarity of viewing.

I accidentally deleted the response to Chris' post. I edited the formatting of Chris' response so we could read it without as much scrolling, then there were four duplicate responses showing. I deleted one, and they all disappeared. I'm so sorry. Could you please repost?

Admin note: I changed this question back to unanswered (it automatically changed to answered when Ryan was marked as a good answer) so it can get some more visibility and other opinions.

Templatemonster, thanks for such a well-written question with relevant details!

Hi Perri,

This is an older thread, and people may not see the new response if they're not subscribed to it.

You can certainly redirect the index.html to /. The above thread gives some help, as well as http://www.smartlabsoftware.com/howto/redirect-index-page.htm (though I don't know the age of that post and if it's for a current version of Apache).

I suggest opening a new question here with a title something like "redirecting /index.html to / in apache" and give your details in that question, with a link to the above URL and ask if this is still valid. A link to your site in the question, if you can give it, would also be great.

Thanks!

SEObook also had a recent posting (June on "Super Size Your Listing" at http://www.seobook.com/how-super-size-your-listings-google.

Google's homepage recently went from a toolbar pagerank 10 to a toolbar pagerank 9. What are your other metrics like? Has your organic traffic from Google changed in the six months? Toolbar PR is just one indication of how Google views your site, and is on that is infrequently updated and not totally accurately reported to the user, and is several weeks old by the time it is published.

What Ryan means is that when you write an article and link to your own site, be sure to use the full "http://www.sitename.com/page-im-linking-to" instead of just "/page-im-linking-to". The first one includes the full URL, which means that if someone else puts it on their site, it will still link to you. Most of the scrapers are lazy, and don't replace those links.

Yes, the 301 response is what you're looking for. Test a couple of your interior pages in addition to just your home page to make sure it works right, then you're good to go!

The last update of OpenSiteExplorer was on June 6th, which is likely why you haven't seen the changes. The next update of OSE will be later this month, and those links should be picked up with the fresh crawl.

Also think of website structure for analytics. The URL structure can make it easy to get some good information about the site. Lunametrics has a great post on this at http://www.lunametrics.com/blog/2010/09/22/designing-google-analytics-friendly-site/.

If you're still in contact with a web developer, that would be great. If you're not, a note to everyone else on this thread that the website in question is using IIS 6.0, so apache info isn't going to help in this case.

Hi Mike and Cesar,

I've asked the help desk to come in and answer this thread here, so it can be on record for other people who may have similar questions. You should be hearing from them in a bit.

Keri

Hi Roy,

Storwell is correct, the best bet is to send an email over to help@seomoz.org. I don't think there's a simple option for being able to change the day right now, but they can help you out at that email.

Thanks!

To see if you did it correctly, put in the non-www domain into a server header checker like http://www.seoconsultants.com/tools/check-server-headers-tool/ and see if it uses a 301 redirect to redirect to the www domain (or vice versa, if you set it to remove the www).

If that didn't work, we're happy to help walk you through doing this! What we'll need from you is a little more information about your server. Specifically, if you're using IIS or Apache, and if you're using a content management system. That will help us give you the right info if you still need help.

Here's a YOUmoz post about deleting your Google Places listing, if you want to go that route. Let us know if it helps.

http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/the-right-way-to-delete-a-google-places-listing

Do you mean in creating your own RSS feed, or in displaying RSS feeds from other sites on your site?

Google has some good information about what it looks for in quality sites at http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/05/more-guidance-on-building-high-quality.html.

Of particular interest to ads is the statement "Does this article have an excessive amount of ads that distract from or interfere with the main content?"

There are times when Google notifies you in the messages area regarding things that it has noticed that are not in their guidelines (as an example, see this post on Search Engine Roundtable at http://www.seroundtable.com/google-link-spam-notifications-13652.html).

Can you share any information you have about knowing you have a penalty as opposed to the algorithm having changed?

I just re-read your original question and you said this was a health site. Now, I'm really confused as to which site we're talking about.

For bullet points, Google has a couple of dozen of them relating to what counts as a high quality site that can apply to any site. If you ask yourself those questions (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/05/more-guidance-on-building-high-quality.html), that will really get you started in the right direction.

Hi Diane,

Some of the advice you received on your other sites can be applicable here, especially since you appear to be using the same template.

Specific to this site, my first impression was that an individual article had redirect to the home page when I went to visit the article about adults regretting not taking vacations (http://www.cheapflightsgatwick.com/adults-regret-not-taking-advantage-of-special-youth-holiday). I see 41 article abstracts or headlines above the actual specific article, in addition to three separate advertisement blocks. In addition, the banner for this page reads "IN2TOWN CHEAP FLIGHTS", and I have no idea where that came from.

Think critically as to why a user would like or value this site, and why another site would link to it. Why do I see news about Yemeni security checks on the first page of a site that is supposed to be about Gatwick? In this site, as well as another of yours based on the same template, the thumbnail images are way out of proportion. Combine that with text at the bottom that appears unnatural and keyword stuffed, and a user is going to have a hard time finding a reason to stay here. Google will also have a hard time trusting that this site answers a user's query.

Hi Diane,

Can you include your site URL so we can see if there are some basic things that you might have overlooked or that are configured wrong, which could be impacting you?

Thanks!

Hi! Can you give us any more information about the type of website, and how the content is to be generated?

For example, if it's a Wordpress site with a handful of pages and a page with FAQs in a Q&A format that's going to be updated once a month by an admin, that will have a different answer than a site wanting to be the next Yahoo! Answers.

Hi Phatride,

Have you verified the site in Google Webmaster Tools and in Bing's Webmaster Tools? The webmaster tools will often give you information about any penalty, and let you submit a reconsideration request.

I'm seeing many pages indexed, which is a good sign. A not-so-good sign is that the article on How to Pluck a Chicken was categorized under Games, and has at least five separate ad blocks on it, some with multiple ads. The sheer number of ads may be an issue.

How do you know that you are still penalized?

Google has officially said that the Wonder Wheel has been removed. More details in this post on Search Engine Land. http://searchengineland.com/official-the-google-wonder-wheel-is-gone-84105

Some of the plugins have features that will automatically tag the external links and downloadable items for you, which can be handy (Google Analyticator does this, for example).

A word of caution, from personal experience. If you need to do anything custom with GA, don't use a plugin as well as the custom GA, unless you want your bounce rate to fall to almost zero and a couple of other metrics to be off because you have two instances of GA in use (for me, I have custom GA so I can integrate data from an ecommerce system).

I've seen mention of it on Twitter, and I'm seeing the URL directly under the title tag in my results, both logged in and logged out. I bet there will be coverage of it on Search Engine Roundtable in the next day or two.

Do you have a news sitemap in place? I believe with Google News you need either a news sitemap, or URLs with three digits that are not dates included. See the following two Google News help articles for some more details.

http://www.google.com/support/news_pub/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=68323
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=74289

Thanks for posting the followup to this, it's very helpful to know both that the problem is solved and that Alex had a fast turnaround.

The best program is one involving hard work and writing your own email outreach to other sites and offering them a reason (good content/resource) to link back to you.

If you can share your site or the topic of your site, we may be able to come up with some ideas for you.

Just a quick note that you may want to edit out your personal information (phone numbers). This is usually best shared via a PM so it doesn't get into the index and stay there forever. Thanks!

Another one of the many not-quite-right things on the site are some of the older posts like http://www.livingorganicnews.com/games/2010/panasonic-announced-the-jungle-handheld-gaming-platform/1965/ which end with "incoming search terms" and several search terms that all hyperlink to that exact same article. Search engines will not see that as providing any value to the user (users are already on that page, they don't need to link to that page) and they will see it as just another attempt to manipulate the engines.

When there are a couple of thousand other pages like this, yes.

http://www.livingorganicnews.com/games/2011/get-cool-with-selected-berber-carpet-tiles-now/3215/

The subject of the article is about berber carpet tiles, yet the text has links (I used bold) that are totally off base and make no sense. For example:

"The berber carpet tiles might also be renowned for the durability and stain resistance at extended stay motel rates."

"To get rid of the difficult to vacuum Provillus scam dust particles..."

"An important benefit in using berber carpet tiles is a likelihood to eliminate the damaged location alone and replace it with a new carpet tile, a comparatively low-cost way of capatrex scam damage control, to make your ground look just like new."

The text doesn't really seem like a human wrote it. The current most recent article has the title "Religious Credit card debt Enable Provides You With the Meaningful and Economical You Need". Other posts are about acne treatment reviews, alcoholism, and other seemingly random things.

It really looks like it's been through an article spinner. The article about alcoholism ends with "So, Think before you Beverage." Uh..really? Or what about "As emission safety glasses are put on in the office, they need to provide ease and comfort, safe healthy and crystal clear eyesight to make sure they are usually not golf clubs to the wearer." An article I found that wasn't spun is instead indexed 94 other times on the web.

I would say the content is why Google has not indexed it. They can't find the value to the user for returning this in a search result. Is this truly the content that your friend has put up, or has the site gotten hacked?

This does sound like a bug. You can send an email to help@seomoz.org and the help team will get back to you.

Ryan, the help desk employees usually come in because I or another associate send them a note. We're all still trying to figure out the best balance of how and where to address these issues.

Have you by chance changed your URL structure or made any other changes to your site that might have had an impact? Are you able to share a URL with us? And do you still have Google Organic traffic that is not from news?

Actually, bounce rate would be of a concern to search engines, at least for visits that originate from the search engine. The SEs want the users to have a good experience, and if a user clicks on a result and then comes right back to the results page, the SEs may feel that the user did not have a good experience with that result and maybe a different result for that query should be shown.

Would love to hear more about your experience with this, and any data you have about this!

These are great suggestions Donnie. Donnie and Gemma, the feature forum at http://seomoz.zendesk.com/forums is a great place to put in these requests, as other people can also vote on them and help SEOmoz determine priorities. Thanks!

I've asked the help team to come in and answer this one. If it's something beyond a known glitch, they'll likely ask you to start a thread over at the help desk.

Generally school ends in mid-late May (semester system) or mid-June (quarter system) and starts mid-late August (semester system) or mid-late September (quarter system). IT staff and department staff are often there year-round, even if the professors are not.

If you're specific in your targeting, you can look at the department or program home page and it will tell you the schedule, and even which professors are teaching which terms.

Will the entire page be just those ten snippets from external sites, or will there be any unique content on the pages at all?