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Using what you think is a keyword on multiple pages isn't going to hurt you, unless you overdo it.

You should be thinking about how readers will accept and use the information you write. Don't overengineer it.

If you want your front page to rank for a specific keyword, and not a deeper page, then that is where the content that emphasizes that keyword should go.

The other pages that mention the keyword will not be "about" that topic, but related topics, so it isn't going to hurt. It will help because your site is about the main topic (that you say you want the home page to rank for) and those pages will reinforce that.

So I think your answer is #1, not #2, unless you purposely try to make every page rank for the one keyword.

Remember, you are writing your pages for the readers. Keep them informed and not confused and you will be doing OK.

What I mean is the website logs:

66.249.73.219 - - [21/May/2012:21:50:58 -0700] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 200 435 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"
66.249.73.206 - - [21/May/2012:21:53:00 -0700] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 301 239 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"
72.21.83.124 - - [21/May/2012:22:05:33 -0700] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 304 - "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"
66.249.73.219 - - [21/May/2012:22:50:58 -0700] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 200 435 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"
66.249.73.206 - - [21/May/2012:23:01:31 -0700] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 301 239 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"
72.21.83.124 - - [21/May/2012:23:44:15 -0700] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 304 - "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"
66.249.73.219 - - [21/May/2012:23:50:58 -0700] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 200 435 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"
66.249.73.206 - - [22/May/2012:00:16:58 -0700] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 301 239 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"
72.21.83.124 - - [22/May/2012:00:46:02 -0700] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 304 - "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"
66.249.73.219 - - [22/May/2012:00:50:59 -0700] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 200 435 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"
66.249.73.206 - - [22/May/2012:01:24:08 -0700] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 301 239 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"
66.249.73.219 - - [22/May/2012:01:51:00 -0700] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 200 435 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"
72.21.83.124 - - [22/May/2012:01:51:17 -0700] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 304 - "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"
66.249.73.206 - - [22/May/2012:02:32:28 -0700] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 301 239 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"
66.249.73.219 - - [22/May/2012:02:50:59 -0700] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 200 435 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"
72.21.83.124 - - [22/May/2012:02:56:28 -0700] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 304 - "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"
66.249.73.206 - - [22/May/2012:03:40:58 -0700] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 301 239 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"
66.249.73.219 - - [22/May/2012:03:51:00 -0700] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 200 435 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"
72.21.83.124 - - [22/May/2012:04:01:29 -0700] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 304 - "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"
72.21.88.227 - - [22/May/2012:04:38:59 -0700] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 304 - "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"
66.249.73.206 - - [22/May/2012:04:43:06 -0700] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 301 239 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"
66.249.73.219 - - [22/May/2012:04:51:02 -0700] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 200 435 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"

Congratulations.

You have a client who has successfully destroyed their own ranking in google.

Aleutianadventures.com - Index of

<cite>www.aleutianadventures.com/</cite>A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more.

Melissa,

Brent tells you exactly what is happening on your site.

The only thing I have to add is that you also are causing yourself some problems.

Your HOME link points to this:

http://vamospaella.com/index.php

So that means you are telling all the search engines and visitors that http://vamospaella.com/ is not your home page, but http://vamospaella.com/index.php is.

So you need to stop doing that. Make sure your internal links only point to one URL.

(as well as doing the 301 redirects that ensure your site only responds one consistent way.)

Hello Christian.

It depends on many things.

In my logs, I see four googlebots today. Each one has read the robots.txt at hourly intervals.

One more place to look is on LinkedIn - join the Guest Blogging group

Hello Norberto, Please check your link -that one is broken Here is what I do in our newspaper Within some stories, we have links to other relevant stories or to other pages, by linking internal text. For example, there is a page about Ban Kim Moon and we link to that. If a story refers to a previous story, for example it is a story about the fighting in Syria, we might link to the story about Kofi Annan making the announcement of the ceasefire agreement. After the story ends, there might be a few links to relevant stories, that we didn't link within the story. If you use Wordpress for your site, there are some really good plugins that can help. We don't use Wordpress, so I don't remember the name, but I think the best one is called Yet Another Related Page plugin

So you could list the other pages as though they are a threaded group of related items

Consider uploading images that are correctly scaled. You have large images and then you scale them smaller, That means you are loading half a megabyte of images too much.

Also, apply lossless compression and make them smaller without losing any quality.

The subdomains would have hurt your rankings.

It could be another site linked to you with the subdomain and that started the problem, because you didn't already have it handled.

About 5 years ago,  a big site linked to us, but they screwed up all the story URLs and my system knew what they really wanted it, so it provided the content. Google trashed all of our listings. It took a month to work out what the problem was, and it took months to recover.

John,

Don't worry about google, write the story for your readers.

Target it to their needs, rewrite, paraphrase, add extra information for one group and different information for another group.

I'm not suggesting you only change a few words. I mean to really target the article for each group.

If you want to see how much google cares about duplicate content, try this search on google:

Romney wins Ohio, 4 other Super Tuesday states

Check those results and tell me that google cares about duplicate content.

If google really cared about having only one original story, none of those sites would get any search traffic.

You can see this for every single AP story, all day every day - those sites are paying a lot of money for AP content. If google was penalizing them for always having duplicate content, they would never show up in search results.

Hello Maarten

Those RewriteCond entries are cumulative and it looks like there are missing commands.

Who edited that file last, and what did they change?

The way conditionals work is you set a condition, Then you add a command, then a line break You can add more than one condition and it acts as AND

This page has what look like too many conditions and not enough commands -but it could be ok

Try adding a blank line between the rule entries and the Cond entries (but not between the Cond and the Rule entries)

Here is what to do to test anything like this: Save a copy of the .htaccess Then start editing it Delete everything below ##Start rewrites See if that fixes it. If not, the problem is above or if that fixes it, the problem is below Keep cutting the file in half or adding half until you discover the problem line

It is harder with all those conditionals, I suspect it is the lower block that is the problem

So remove those Cond entries from the bottom up

After almost 2 years of panda destruction, and constant work on my site with no recovery whatsoever, I don't know if I have anything useful to contribute yet, so take this as some input.

Large site with over 2.2 million pages.

Deleted around 1.5 million pages

Removed all duplicate titles (removed for fixed)

removed all duplicate descriptions (removed or fixed)

Removed all problem pages (extra short, damaged content, empty)

Removed all duplicate body content pages.

Prevent addition of any new duplicates and if any slip past, fix within 24 hours.

Also, checked for incoming links and discovered some sites with problems pointing in - fixed or had these removed.

RESULT after almost 2 years? - zero improvement.

Almost ready to slash wrists, but about to try subdomaining first.

It would be funny if not so sad.

One thing you could try is a section somewhere that has changing content, for example, tweets that make announcements about new things or other changes on your site, or relevant news. If you did have a separate blog, where you comment on site changes, trends or other relevant news, you could put some snippets of text over on the right side in a section of its own. That way, you would always have movement that is current.

If you have shell access on Linux you can use wget or GET or run lynx.

If google is getting the wrong robots file then your web server must be sending out something other than what you think is the robots file.

What happens if you do this in your browser:

http://yourdomain.com/robots.txt

Your sitemap should only list pages that actually exist.

If you delete some pages, then you need to rebuild the sitemap.

Ditto if you delete them and redirect.

Google is always lagging, so if you delete 10 pages and then update the sitemap, even if google downloads the sitemap immediately, they will still be running crawls on the old map, and they may be crawling the now-missing pages, but haven't shown the failures in your WMT yet.

If you update your sitemap quickly, it is possible they will never crawl the missing pages and get a 404 or 301.

(but of course, there could be other sites pointing to the now-missing pages, and the 404s will show up elsewhere as missing)

I am always checking, adding, deleting and redirecting pages, and I update the current sitemap every hour and all the others are rebuilt at midnight every night. I usually do deletions just before midnight if I can, to minimize the time the sitemap is out of sync.

I agree with EGOL, with the caveat that if you are using Wordpress, you should have a plugin that prevents the excessive multiple pinging of posts and pages after editing.

If you edit a story and it pings other sites, then you edit another part and it pings again, and you keep editing and saving, you will cause problems for yourself.

So I use MaxBlogPress Ping Optimizer

Hello Chris.

I see you have an apache server.

You should be able to add a few lines of redirect code in your .htaccess file in the document root directory.

Here is a response from Ryan Schwab that answers your need to redirect:

http://www.seomoz.org/q/is-there-an-easier-way-from-the-server-to-prevent-duplicate-page-content

Unfortunately, some people have linked to you with www and some without it.

You may suffer a little for a while, but you could come out of it even better than you were before.

I don't know why you would want category pages to rank, especially if the content changes from time to time.

By the time they appear in search results and reders click on them, the content has changed, and what they were looking for is no longer there.

If it is still there, they have to look through the page for what they really wanted.

Be vewy careful !

Obviously, it has to fit your theme or your general area of coverage.

ditto your style. It has to fit with your standards and ethics.

If it is paid advertising, you should say so - check to see how other sites do it.

Here is an Australian story: Crikey where they talk about how standards have changed over time.

BTW: I sent you a private message too.

The engine is already invoked, with that code.

Add a few blank lines between RewriteEngine on and the other lines

Keep those other lines together. (I don't think they work)

And put the new code one blank line after invoking the engine.

keep a blank line after the new code.

-- Those other lines say this:

IF a request comes for proofs.enbphotos.com

OR a request for www.proofs.enbphotos.com

THEN redirect it to  http://accounts.exposuremanager.com

• but it doesn't work, so either there is a problem (your apache doesn't redirect or some config has turned it off - or it could be that the proofs subdomain has a different document root.

Sorry, yes, it should crawl the links - they used to do that.

But you can prove it to yourself, by doing what I said - and then report back.

This is what we do, to try to make sure we get credit for our own stories, and it seems to be working:

Connect your G+ profile to your articles.

Add your own profile page to your site.

Link the G+ profile to your own profile page.

google will know that you are real and you are claiming ownership of the content.

It is too soon to tell if this is the answer, but it is what google says and it is what we are doing.

Here is a short video I made for our writers, to explain how to do it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccVX2q_nbGo

Valery's idea sounds better for you.

Rather than ratings, get testimonials and make them rank by adding a link to the testimonials page from the front page of the site, get it into some bookmark sites, add a facebook Like button, maybe a G+ button and get links from a few other relevant places. Be sure to set up the page title, description and content correctly.

The best part of this solution is that it is much easier to get set up and working - you probably already have some good testimonials, and if you don't, then use Steve's idea of following up and asking for a testimonial. If you have a free report to offer them, that will be good, otherwise, just ask for their help.

Hello Hafiskani

Your blog only has a single post - and it isn't really very useful.

There is no terms of use and no privacy policy.

I haven't looked at your external link profile, but from what you said,you've redirected all of the bad incoming links to your home page. That is probably a bad thing. You would be better off either removing all the 301s and losing all of the links or reviewing the external links and only redirecting for good sites pointing to the old pages.

If your previous pages were as thin as this new one, my guess is that all of your old links were not from good quality or related sites, so readirecting them to the home page is a great way to tell google you love those bad links, and you're not prepared to give them up.

I just searched for your domain and I see you had previously been busy going around to blogs and dns test and stats sites, getting listings and links. Some of those blogs are completely unrelated to your old posts. I didn't see any blogs that were good quality, that willingly linked to your posts because they were useful.

I don't want to say that it is a lost cause, but either you need to continue on with this blog or dump it and start again.

In either case, you need to read the google guidelines at the links they provided to you. Then you may work out the deficiencies you currently have. Unfortunately, the google guidelines are quite vague and not exactly what I would call useful or readable, which is what they keep telling us we have to do. So that means you may not work out what is wrong.

This may seem like a radical idea, but if I were you, at the stage you are now, with am empty blog and such thin content, I would go back to school, and learn all the things you need to do to build a really useful blog, and then go and put what you've learned into practice. Or I would forget blogging and do something else.

There is inexpensive training around, or if you have no money at all, you could go to read problogger or copyblogger - or both.

I also recommend you don't ask for reconsideration until you have at least 10 useful posts. If you are a good writer and you learn the lessons you need, you should be able to do that in a week. If you are not a good writer, then you shouldn't be doing this anyway. Find something else to do. In any case, I recommend you get as far away from the "How To Earn Money Online" niche as you can. You are really the blind leading the blind - you should leave it to the people who really know what they are doing.

Look around and find a real business that you can do, that you don't need to keep writing new content for. Resell domains, or go to flippa and buy an existing website business that is already running, because (and I really don't mean to be mean to you)  I believe you really don't know anything about blogging, so to try to teach other people how to do it is really a bad idea - for you and for anyone who decided to follow you.

Don't feel too bad about this, because when I first started (a long time ago), I thought I wanted to help other people do stuff like this,because I had a technical background and I could teach, but that niche is just a bad place to be and after I realized that, I got away from it. If you had "a brand" I wouldn't have said this, but abcdblogger isn't a brand.

Listen to what other people here tell you - they may have a solution for you. I am just one voice, and that is my advice to you.

Best Wishes with whatever you decide to do.

Eliathah, This is a good way to build links. Having a relationship with webmasters of other quality sites is worthwhile. Be careful though, because I tried to call an SEOMoz member and they freaked out. The telephone may be old technology but it is much more valuable than email and posting in forums You can also explain much more. Be sure to get a single, relevant link, not site wide.

The webserver log is what you need.

You may be able to see that in Cpanel, depending on how it is configured.

The log may also be in the document root, updated daily and compressed.

If you haven't looked at logs before, it can be difficult to determine what is really going on in there.

I would immediately report that to google and send the complete headers of the email.

That is good to hear, Jo.

Thanks for letting us know. feedback is good.

Be vigilant, because the hackers never stop.

My dedicated server constantly has hackers trying to break in, mostly chinese and russians. Complex passwords and countermeasures keep us safe, but it only takes one weak link somewhere to break it all down.

This is true, you can wait for google to deindex them, but that can take 6 months or more.

You could also wait for the 404s to show up and check the referrer and then manually set up the redirect, but if you miss seeing them, you may also risk the linking site removing the link.

Another thing you could do is pull reports from GWMT and Bing WMT and Majestic to discover who is linking to which pages, and then start with those redirects, then watch out for the 404s and pick them up as you discover them.

If you do want to push google along with removing the old pages, you can do it by requesting them in WMT. 12,000 isn't really many, and last time I tried it, you can ask for 1,000 per day, but you have to do them one at a time. That means either a slow manual process or do it with a macro. I think I've had 20,000 or more deleted that way.