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Thanks.

This is what I figured, but I realized that I've never tried it before and I wanted to be 100% sure before potentially noindex'ing my homepage

If I've got a page that is being called in an iframe, on my homepage, and I don't want that called page to be indexed.... so I put a noindex tag on the called page (but not on the homepage) what might that mean for the homepage?  Nothing?  Will Google, Bing, Yahoo, or anyone else, potentially see that as a noindex tag on my homepage?

1. Clean up (remove) those spammy backlinks.  This is VERY important.

2. Optimize your title tags across the entire site.  Use this tool to see what your title tags will look like on Google.  Your homepage title tag says "Colorado bernese mountain dogs | puppies | breeders Colorado" - I would put something more along the lines of "Bernese of the Rockies: Colorado Bernese Mountain Dog Breeders".  My suggestion/example is slightly longer than what Google will display but since it is your homepage, you want to make sure your brand name is front and center.  For the interior pages you wouldn't necessarily need to do that.  For the puppies page, instead of "Colorado bernese mountain dog puppies | For Sale Colorado" - I would do something like "Adorable Bernese Mountain Dog Puppies For Sale in Colorado".  My example barely fits within what Google will display, it says exactly what the page is about, it's clean, AND it has something a little enticing ('adorable').

3. Fix up your URLs.  They are very "keyword stuffy" right now.  Your "Education & Tips" page's URL is http://www.berneseoftherockies.com/colorado-bernese-mountain-dogs/ -- It should be something as simple as http://www.berneseoftherockies.com/education or http://www.berneseoftherockies.com/education-and-tips.  Editing your URLs will mean 301 redirects are necessary.  You're using Wordpress and there's a plugin called "Redirection" that works.  I still prefer just editing the htaccess file manually.  Some quick Google searches can tell you everything you need to know about 301 redirects.

Your overall site isn't that bad.  You're using H1s and H2s.  You have a lot of content.  You're inserting images and some video.  Do those 3 things above and you'll be much better off.  Of course there's more you can do, but check out the Learn SEO link I shared in my previous comment.  I can't go on forever

Hey Chris,

Unfortunately, Google didn't give you any secrets

"Meta tags" is broad.  It doesn't specify what the attribute is.  You can have meta keywords, meta descriptions, meta charsets, etc.  You can read a bit more about exactly what a "meta tag" is defined as here.

As for the meta keywords tag, Google does not use it at all.  Without looking up the exact date, I believe Google announced this in 2008 or 2009.  It's been a longggg time since the meta keywords tag was used as a ranking factor.  A couple years later, Google announced that the meta description tag was no longer used as a ranking factor.  HOWEVER, unlike the meta keywords tag, Google does still look at the meta description tag.  It just isn't taken into consideration while ranking pages.  Meta descriptions are important for click through rates, but they won't give you a rankings boost.

Why aren't you ranking for anything?  Well, at least 90% of the backlinks are spammy.  I only took a very brief look, but I saw a bunch of directory links and not much else (maybe nothing else).  If you don't have a manual penalty yet, you might be due for one.  I would highly suggest getting those spammy backlinks removed.

Assuming all the content on your site is original, it isn't a terrible site.  It could use work in some areas, but then again, that can be said for 99.99% of websites.  If you really want to learn about what you should be doing to improve your rankings, take a look at the Learn SEO section of Moz.

I've never seen this before so I don't have much to say, but if I ran into this I would think to check for double implementation of the analytics code.  Give the source code a look-see and CTRL + F for the UA code.  See if it's there twice.

The 'default' setup will be for no redirects to be in place.  It's not that something was done incorrectly, but rather, a best practice for SEO was overlooked.  It's not something your average Joe or webmaster with no SEO experience is likely going to.

In your scenario, you will want to choose one or the other, and setup a force WWW (or non-WWW) 301 redirect.  If your site is on a linux-based platform, that is accomplished with an htaccess file.  If you are on a Windows-based server, you will need to use IIS (I think).  A simple Google search for "force www redirect windows server" will likely return tons of solutions.

If you're on Wordpress or a similar CMS, it is usually very easy to do from within the backend.  If you have no idea what server you're on, or what platform your site is built on, use builtwith.com to find out

How do you choose between www.example.com or just example.com?  You'll want to go with the one that's linked to more often, and then work on sticking with that as often as possible in the future.  The majority of the link juice that's pointing towards example.com will be transfered to www.example.com with the 301 redirect, so it's not like those links without WWW will be worthless.  They only lose a very tiny amount of their value through the redirect.  The good news is, you're fixing a big issue so it isn't going to get worse for you.

Let me know if you have more questions.

Hey Kimberly,

I would highly suggest checking out the resources on this page: Learn SEO

A good place to start with the Moz Toolset is to click on (from within your campaign) "Search >> On-Page Optimization >> Add & Manage Page Grades".  You can enter your main page URLs and their corresponding main keywords.  Moz will automatically check a plethora of areas on your page and give you feedback on where you can improve the grade given.

Also check out "Crawl Diagnostics" under the same "Search" menu.  There's a lot of data in there about what's potentially harmful to your site.  Things like 404 pages, duplicate content, missing title tags, duplicate title tags, overly dynamic URLs, and much more.  If you are unsure of what something means, like "overly dynamic URLs" for example, and you've got 90 results for that, you can search Google for help on fixing it.  Or ask here.  Or you might even stumble into that issue and ways to resolve it in the "Learn SEO" link above.

Good luck!

You could setup 301 redirects from the sold property URLs to another relevant page, like other properties available in the same neighborhood/town/city.  Or possibly even to search result page that contains very similar properties in regards to square footage, bedrooms, baths, etc.

The answer on this page is from someone that tested it, with 2 authors: http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/25140/how-to-implement-rel-author-on-a-page-with-multiple-authors

You can test it as well and use the tool (http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets) to see what happens.  I don't doubt that you'll end up with the same results -- the 1st instance of rel=author is going to be used.

I've come across this discussion a few times, and it always ends the same... there just isn't (currently) a way to handle multiple authors for 1 page using rel=author.  On your forum, is there a "best answer" chosen?  Maybe you can assign the respondent that gives the "best answer" the authorship?  I'm not sure how Google will feel about that though, as it's not a clear article or blog post that is being assigned authorship.  Rather, it's just a response in a discussion.  Much like blog comments.  Although blog comments aren't exactly like your scenario, it's similar enough, and it would be strange if a blog comment author was set as the author for a whole page.

Hey Robert!

There are a few tools you can use to get a good idea of when an external link was created.

1. opensiteexplorer.org (a Moz tool) will give you a "date discovered" date.
2. ahrefs.com will give you a "first seen" date.
3. majesticseo.com will give you a "first indexed" date.
4. Google Webmaster Tools will give you a "first discovered" date when you export "recent links."

Between those 4, you should be able to find the link you want.  Webmaster Tools is free but will be limited.  The others show you some data for free, but require a monthly subscription for all the details.

If you decide to remove that page from your site, disavow will not be necessary.  Once the links point to a 404 page, they wouldn't count against you.

You could leave the page on your site, and use majesticseo.com, ahrefs.com, opensiteexplorer.org, and webmaster tools to compile as many of the links pointing to that page as you can -- then disavow them.  But first, check your analytics and see if anyone ever visits that page anyways.  If the traffic is 0 or anything you're worth parting with... just remove the page and 301 it to his homepage  That's a hilarious idea, btw.

I would steer clear of removing 250 blog posts from the other web properties.  They may be driving traffic to those websites.

The client is requesting 250 particular blog posts to be rewritten.  This isn't the best content strategy in the world, but that's what you're being asked to do, so the BEST way to handle it is to completely rewrite every post so they are 100% unique.

If you were to remove the blog posts from the other websites and simply post them on the new website, you're running the risk of taking traffic away from the already established websites.

"Would google pick up on the fact that these blogs are already appearing elsewhere on the web and thereby penalise the new site for posting material that is already indexed by Google?" -- Yes, you run the risk of being penalized by Panda with such a large amount of duplicate content.  Google wants to rank websites that provide value to visitors.  If a website is entirely made up of content that already exists on another website, you're providing no added value to visitors.  Again, you could remove the content from the other websites and 301 redirect to the new one.... but you're taking a lot of value away from those websites if you do that.

First thing that comes to mind is maybe the site had a lot of site-wide links before.  If it had 5,000 or 10,000 links coming from 1 single domain and that website went down, that would be a huge loss of referring pages in a short amount of time.  Maybe they were in web directories and asked to be removed?  While simultaneously attempting to build some high quality backlinks from more referring pages?

It's all speculation of course, but plausible.

Where are you seeing the trailing slash?  If I go to threewaystoharems.com in my browser, there is no trailing slash.  I do see a trailing slash if I do a Google search for "site:threewaystoharems.com" but that is normal.  Every website will show that trailing slash.

I think you might be obsessing over a non-issue  Let me know if i am misunderstanding.

Ah!  I misunderstood the bit about reverse proxying.  In that case... to be perfectly honest, I'm not sure.

When you setup a reverse proxy, what happens to the sub-domain?  Does it go away or does it still exist live?  If it remains live, you'd end up with a duplicate content issue.

EDIT >> I found this at the source you linked to (which answers my question) -->

"The next thing you can do is add a robots.txt file to the sub-domain that stops robots from indexing it. As Reverse Proxying keeps the requested URL the /blog/ URLs will use the robots.txt from the main domain rather than the sub-domain.

The final (and most extreme) thing you can do is to register Google Webmaster Tools for the sub-domain and remove it from the index. If you are doing this, you need to do it in conjunction with robots.txt."

Hey Chris,

Unfortunately, Google didn't give you any secrets

"Meta tags" is broad.  It doesn't specify what the attribute is.  You can have meta keywords, meta descriptions, meta charsets, etc.  You can read a bit more about exactly what a "meta tag" is defined as here.

As for the meta keywords tag, Google does not use it at all.  Without looking up the exact date, I believe Google announced this in 2008 or 2009.  It's been a longggg time since the meta keywords tag was used as a ranking factor.  A couple years later, Google announced that the meta description tag was no longer used as a ranking factor.  HOWEVER, unlike the meta keywords tag, Google does still look at the meta description tag.  It just isn't taken into consideration while ranking pages.  Meta descriptions are important for click through rates, but they won't give you a rankings boost.

Why aren't you ranking for anything?  Well, at least 90% of the backlinks are spammy.  I only took a very brief look, but I saw a bunch of directory links and not much else (maybe nothing else).  If you don't have a manual penalty yet, you might be due for one.  I would highly suggest getting those spammy backlinks removed.

Assuming all the content on your site is original, it isn't a terrible site.  It could use work in some areas, but then again, that can be said for 99.99% of websites.  If you really want to learn about what you should be doing to improve your rankings, take a look at the Learn SEO section of Moz.

The Google Disavow tool doesn't work like that.  It won't actually remove links from any pages.  It is basically just a signal to Google that you want those links to be nofollowed.  Ahrefs would have no clue if something has been disavowed or not.

Canonical will pass link juice almost exactly like 301s will, so there's no harm in going that route.  Matt Cutts explains that in this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zW5UL3lzBOA

You sound like you're good to go.  You've got duplicate content worked out, and you've got a plan to retain link juice (canonical).

How to see if your site has received a manual penalty from Google?  Sign up for Google Webmaster Tools (http://www.google.com/webmasters).

From within there you will be able to see if the website has received a manual penalty from Google.  Once you've got the account setup and verified, look on the left menu for "Search Traffic" and then "Manual Actions".  If there is a MANUAL penalty imposed, you'll see it there.  It will either be "partial" or "site-wide".  The former means that only some pages are affected.  The latter means that all pages are affected.

If you have a manual penalty, you will NEED to do outreach to get links removed, and THEN you submit a disavow for the ones you were unable to remove.  You're right, most spam sites won't have contact info, but you can check http://www.who.is and find an email address in most cases.  You will more than likely not get the result you're looking to get if you forego the link removal process and skip straight to a disavow.

One last note, if there's no manual penalty in Google Webmaster Tools, then the site may be penalized algorithmically.  If you know there are spammy links in place, you should act as if you were penalized manually, with the only difference being that you won't be submitting a reconsideration request to Google.  If the site quality is poor, you will want to research Panda recovery options.

By the way, www.SubconsciousMind.com doesn't seem to exist.  So either you typo'd the name, or you have an ever bigger problem on your hands now