Nice link Dan.

I support Dan's reply with the exception of when exact match is used. If you want to target a specific form of the phrase, exact match should give you only the form you submit.

I agree with you Paul.

As you pointed out one possible cause is a CMS-related issue which I would refer to as "coding" meaning something in the code which was used to present the website. Perhaps there is a better way to phrase it but nothing comes to mind at the moment.

Another possibility you mentioned is Litespeed which would be a server-side issue directly. Either way, it is a legitimate issue which should be addressed.

@DentalID, the same reply I offered to Guy applies for you as well. This is an SEO issue which does need to be fixed. Something on your end is causing the page to show with a 403 response code. You really need a programmer to get in there and determine the root cause of the issue. You could try asking your web host if you have managed hosting, but this level of assistance would normally be outside the support of managed hosting.

Guy,

In looking at the page this appears to be a legitimate problem. Your server settings allow you to present a page with any header code you wish. You can 301 a page but still present the page with a 200 code if you want. Presently it appears the page is being presented fine but your server is offering a 404 header code.

I can't tell the actual source of the problem other then to say it appears to be on your end and should be fixed. I originally looked at the code with the MOZbar but then checked independently with another tool as well. http://web-sniffer.net/

All tools show a 404 header code for the page. This response code is generated by your web server.

Hi Joshua.

There is no concern at all with internal pages outranking your home page. It can be perfectly natural.

Let's say you have a site about...well, almost anything. Today you perform an interview with the President and talk about...well, almost anything. You publish that interview on your site. Overnight that interview will probably attract thousands of links causing that page to be the most linked page on your site. There is nothing wrong with that result.

You can try to sculpt your PR within your site a bit. You can say hey, I have a ton of PR on this one page and I want to move some of it to my latest or most profitable products. In that case, you can add a sidebar to the page with "latest products" or "featured products". You may also be able to sneak in a few anchor text links within the content itself depending on how the interview progressed.

A video which may help: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qigo05nAqKw

Can you offer an example of a URL which is causing this problem?

Hi Elad.

Alan's answer is 100% correct. A .org site has absolutely no inherit value greater or less then a .com site with respect to search engine ranking. In fact, all the domains ranging from .net, .info, .edu, .gov etc all have the same value, zero. The value they gain is by building your site, adding content and earning links.

Where a particular domain has increased value is in public perception. A .com is seen as the legitimate business domain, which is as the domain was intended. Think of any major business such as McDonalds, Walmart, Facebook, Google, ATT, etc. and simply add a .com to it, you will land on the company's site. That is not the case of any other domain.

In that sense, .org is seen as for non-profits, .edu for educational institutions, and so forth. This is the public perception and it is by design. If you attempt to run a .org as a commercial site, you are likely to lose some traffic due to people not willing to conduct normal commercial business (i.e. shop online) with a .org site. SEOmoz pulls it off nicely in large part because of all the free SEO offerings: blog articles, Q&A, tools, etc. The basic services are offered for free and users can pay for upgrades. This business model combined with an exceptionally friendly organization and customer service works, but most businesses would not be able to pull it off.

With respect to an exact match, an Exact Match Domain (EMD) has been devalued and it is ridiculously overvalued by people who do not understand SEO. The domain name is one of over 200 ranking factors. You will find all the best names such as "insurance.org" have been taken. If you find a name left, it is because no one else wants it. The bottom line, the amount of traffic you can obtain with the EMD is not worth the effort it takes to provide the content and backlinks to make it work. You will receive a ranking boost for the exact match search, but not the rest of the searches for your site.

You clearly have a firm belief a .org site is advantageous. I am certain it is not, but feel free to purchase the domain and prove us all wrong. You clearly will have a bargain as there are plenty of domains available.

It would entirely depend upon which software you build your site upon.

I use Joomla and AceSEF is one example of an extension which provides automatic internal linking. There are numerous other extensions which provide that functionality as well.

I would guess all major CMS solutions have at least one extension which provide that functionality. I know Wikipedia uses MediaWiki and all of their articles use automatic linking.

An offsite established blog such as Google's blogspot or WordPress.com can benefit your site. Those types of sites overcome several of the challenges which arise when you try to set up a blog.

Advantages: quick and easy to set up, a unique C block for hosting, no worries about site maintenance, etc.

Disadvantages:

• your blog content would not be on your site so would not benefit from the main site's DA. Also, your main site wont benefit from the links your content will hopefully generate. While you can link from your blog to the main site, it is not as beneficial as having a direct link to your site.

• as Alan shared, your main site would also lose out on the freshness benefits a quality blog can offer

• internal linking is also a fantastic means of properly directing the flow of PR throughout your site. With a single site, there is software which can automatically generate all your internal links as appropriate. For an external site, you would need to manually create all the links which is a lot more work.

Overall the best results should be achieved by integrating a blog into your existing site. You could choose an external blog and it can benefit your site, but not as much as an internal blog would.

I want a sure way to know this ...person....did what they are telling their client they did.

Perhaps someone has more creativity then myself but I do not know any means by which you can be 100% certain a sitewide 301 is implemented without seeing the file on the server. The "file" varies based on the server type. As you know, for Apache servers the .htaccess file is the right one.

Even if you saw the .htaccess file, it is possible for another file to overwrite the command. The way I always have verified is by looking at the site itself. Check the home page and a few other pages. If they are all 301'd properly, then I presume the developer performed their job correctly. It would actually be a lot more work for the developer to attempt to fool you by 301'ing part of the site but not all.

I also suggest ensuring your site's www or non-www standard appears correctly in your crawl report.

Is my assumption that if a 301 was done in .htaccess, there should be no www showing in Google Site:?

That is not necessarily true. If you have a site which shows mixed URL results, then overtime the results from a site: search will be standardized, but it will take time as Google needs to crawl each and every page of the site and see the 301. Also if any page is blocked by robots.txt for example, then Google may not see the 301 for that page and still list the old url.

If you changed the Google WMT preferred domain setting, then it is true you will only see one version of the URL. I would specifically advise you NOT to change that setting in this case as it may cover up the developer's issue which you are trying to locate. As for now, you can wait 30 days and perform a site: search. Investigate any bad URLs you find.

Well if Robert Private Messages Sha, then you would be missing that message

Hi Cassi.

My highest recommendation is one site owner, one content focus = one site. By keeping the blog and the main site on the same URL, you will have the benefit of building up domain authority. Higher DA will allow all of your content from both sites to perform better in search results.

Maintaining one site is usually cheaper and easier then multiple sites. You have one set of software, one host and only one place to look if something goes wrong.

If you attempt to split the blog and main site, Google will recognize they are both owned by the same person and your interlink value will be diminished. It also can cause confusion for visitors, along with the natural loss of link value as sites links pass from site-to-site.

You can establish relevancy for a given area with your content and backlinks without depending on your URL.

Hi Robert.

Once you determine which version of a URL you would like to represent your site, the best method to enforce that decision is to use a 301 redirect. For example, direct all non-www traffic to the www version of the URL the same way SEOmoz URLs appear. With this approach, 100% of your URLs will appears as the "www" version in SERPs and there will never be any confusion or conflict.

I've heard people talk about using canonicals or setting the preferred domain in WMT. Neither step is necessary as long as the 301 is in place. The reason I still do both is I like to account for failures in a process. You never know when someone will make an error and modify an .htaccess file incorrectly and wipe out your redirect.

If you have the redirect in place, OSE and similar tools should clearly see the redirect and act appropriately every time. If the tool does not work correctly, I would examine the header tag of the page to ensure the 301 is working properly. If it is, then I would perform the same action you did and report the bug.

If you do not take the proper steps to enforce a "www" or "non-www" structure, you will see the results which you described. Some users will visit and link to each version of the page which will lead to both versions of URLs being indexed. Google will index a version based on which was discovered first or which version it deems more important based on links and other factors. When you perform searches for a site, some URLs will appear with the "www" and some without it. The backlinks will be divided and, as you know, that is bad for SEO. The duplicate content issue will set off alarms for the SEOmoz crawler and similar tools, but Google will still index one version of the page.

I am not sure if this completely answers your question Robert. If I missed anything, feel free to ask.