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And I took a quick look at the backlink profile for subconsciouschange.com... definitely spammy.  A nice cleanse will get you on the right track!

It's a good idea to include your main keyword in the meta description because when Google does show your custom meta description, the keyword will be bold if it matches the search query.

However, keep in mind that meta descriptions do not help your rankings at all.  Google announced this a while ago.  Despite not helping rankings, meta descriptions are still useful because they may help increase click thru rates on the SERPs

Matt Cutts did a good video on meta descriptions back in November 2013: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4gr88oHb-k

The site just launched?  It sounds like I am right, you just need to give Google some time to drop the page from the index.

When you find the homepage in the index, and you click the link, do you get redirected?  If so, Google will eventually drop it.

AJ,

I took a look at your backlink profile and it's pretty clear what the problem is.  You basically have nothing but spam backlinks (I will PM you examples).  It looks like there was a big influx of links around September 2013.  Did you pay someone to do SEO about 6 months ago?

Your site doesn't look bad, but it's got some instances of over-optimization (again, I'll PM you examples).

You should definitely verify Google Webmaster Tools, if you haven't already, and check to see if you have a manual action against you from Google.  After looking at your backlink profile, I would be surprised if you don't have one.  However, if you don't, it may be coming soon.  If you don't know how to do the backlink cleanup and reconsideration request yourself, it would be a good idea to hire someone with experience.

Imran,

I looked at semrush.com and it looks like you had a spike of traffic in August 2013 and then it quickly died back down.  I also looked at your backlink profile and I see that the overwhelming majority of your links are from blog comments.  It's okay to have some blog comments but you don't want that to dominate your backlinks.  You also want to be sure that you're using your actual name for the anchor text of the link (and you are, so that's good).  I also noticed that you have some links from other sites linking to you, like androidcentral.us.  Since you also own that website, you're effectively creating your own little link network, which could become an issue, if it's not already.

The quality of the content is also lacking.  There are a lot of grammatical issues and that may be because English isn't your first language.  Your English isn't terrible, but Google wants high quality and unfortunately the level of English on your site won't be considered high quality.

What you should do is work on getting more high quality backlinks and diversifying your backlink profile.   I checked a few of your pages on copyscape and they didn't turn up any duplicates found.  Assuming this content is actually 100% unique and not just spun/rewritten from another source, you should also have someone fix up the grammatical issues.  If the content is spun/rewritten from another source, start adding new content that is completely unique and original.  You also need to remove the "Example Widget" text in your sidebar ASAP.  That makes your site look incomplete.

If you haven't already done so, please check Google Webmaster Tools to make sure you didn't receive a manual penalty from Google.

I have not heard of any websites receiving a penalty from Google due to the Hummingbird update.  In my opinion, there is something else going on that affected your rankings.  I would not recommend you delete your domain and redirect posts to another domain.  That isn't solving the problem.  That's just a way to try and avoid the issue.  Like I said, a penalty can follow you to your new domain.

Are you referring to the androidrootcental.com website in your tagline?  Or is this a problem with another website?

Dillon,

Thanks for the additional explanation.  I do see the canonical tag in your code and see that it is being placed by Yoast's WordPress SEO plugin.

Honestly, you should not worry about the trailing slash.  Google and Bing are intelligent enough to understand that .com and .com/ are the same website.  You are receiving credit for your backlinks regardless of whether or not the trailing slash exists on the link.

Having said that, here's how you can remove the trailing slash if you still really want to.....

Login to your WordPress backend as an administrator and look for "Plugins" on the left menu and go to "Editor" within the plugins menu.  From there, find the dropdown menu near the top right and go to "WordPress SEO".  On the list of files that display on the right side, find "wordpress-seo/frontend/class-frontend.php".

In that file, use CTRL + F to find this line of code: $canonical = home_url( '/' );

Remove the / within the ' '

Click on "Update File".  Refresh your homepage and you will see that the trailing slash is gone from the canonical tag.  Keep in mind, this is a hack.  When you update WordPress SEO, this will most likely be overwritten and you'll have to do it again.

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 of all, I assume that by "using the keyword" you just simply mean an instance of it on the page somewhere.  If you happen to be referring to the meta keywords tag, that's a whole other topic, but you shouldn't be using that meta tag.

Anyways, there is nothing wrong with using the keyword "gear oil" on multiple pages.  Since there are different types of gear oils available, it's simply unavoidable, and Google understands this.  Imagine you have a site about food, and on that site you have a lot of pages about pizzas.  Pepperoni pizza, sausage pizza, sardine pizza, Hawaiian pizza, etc.  In this scenario, it would be as if you're posting the same question as you did, but asking if it's okay that you used the keyword "pizza" on multiple pages.  Of course that's okay

The whiteboard Friday from a couple days ago actually discussed almost exactly what you're asking.  You should definitely check it out: http://moz.com/blog/keyword-targeting-density-and-cannibalization-whiteboard-friday

3 competitors is the maximum that you can add for the rank tracking.

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.

If your main goal is to rank on google.com (and it sounds like it is), then you should go with the .com domain.

However, you should be aware that exact keyword matched domains are not as powerful as they used to be.  Google released an update to the algorithm that specifically targeted exact match domains and lowered the value that they provide.  You will not receive a significant chance of ranking higher just because your domain exactly matches the search query.

Although this particular post is 1.5 years old, it's still extremely relevant and has a lot of great info if you'd like to read more beyond my answer:

http://moz.com/blog/the-exact-match-domain-playbook-a-guide-and-best-practices-for-emds

Are the footer links internal links to other pages on your own site, or external links to other websites in your network?  If they're internal, there's nothing wrong it.  If they're external, you are basically passing almost no value to those other sites.  They may even potentially be seen as spammy links.

1. Do footer links have any value?  Very little value.  It's best to avoid trying to get a bunch of footer links.
2. Is this an old dated practice that no longer works?  Correct.  Footer links is an old and dated practice.
3. If we remove the footer links should we expect to see if have an impact on our SEO traffic?  You shouldn't expect a drop in SEO traffic from getting rid of a footer link.

If you don't make them VERY unique from the originals, the new site won't perform very well.  If the new site consists of nothing but 250 blog posts that were already discovered on other websites, you won't get good results.  Simply keyword optimizing the posts won't be enough.  They should be entirely re-written to avoid potential problems with Panda.

I'm not sure what you mean by this -- Would the articles need to be completely taken by all current publishers?

Matt Cutts has said that a penalty CAN follow you to your new domain if you just simply recreate the site on a new domain exactly as it was on the penalized domain.

Do you know why you were penalized?  Was it for duplicate content, poor site quality, spammy backlinks, or something else?  When did your rankings drop?  Mid-August?

If you put disallow: / in your robots.txt file, you will tell bots not to crawl the homepage plus ALL interior pages.  You'd be shooting yourself in the foot (or head, really).

Are you sure the redirect is setup properly?  Is it definitely a 301 redirect, or maybe a 302 (temporary)?  How long ago did you implement the redirect?  If the 301 redirect is setup properly, and you're still seeing the homepage in the index, you might just need to wait for it to drop out.

What's your backlink profile look like?  There's literally a million questions that I could ask you but without being able to see the query, the websites, or the backlink profiles, it is really REALLY tough to pinpoint the issue.

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

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.