It's definitely a good idea to 301 redirect index.html to your root to consolidate link juice. I am assuming you have an .htaccess file so the following lines should work -

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /

redirect html pages to the root domain

RewriteRule ^index.html$ / [NC,R,L]

If you want to redirect all index.html(s) to their roots, then try this code -

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^index.html$ / [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^(.*)/index.html$ /$1/ [R=301,L]

And yes, Google will treat them as 301 redirects so your juice will be transferred and consolidated.

You can use the Google AdWords Traffic Estimator to get a rough idea of a recommended budget and estimated CPC - https://adwords.google.com/o/TrafficEstimator

I did a search in Google to see the pages from your site that are indexed, and I discovered there are several pages with pharmaceutical drugs on them, which likely means your site was compromised.

For example, site:www.pokeronamac.com returns this URL - www.pokeronamac.com/somas/ which redirects to some online pharmacy.

So basically your site has been hijacked and pages are being redirected to an online pharmacy, so that explains the drop in traffic.

I'm not exactly sure how the hackers were able to gain access to your site, but it's relatively common with WordPress sites. Check out http://codex.wordpress.org/FAQ_My_site_was_hacked for some answers.

If you are using an Apache server, you should be able to redirect the index.php file to the root by editing the .htaccess file with the following lines -

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^./index.php RewriteRule ^(.)index.php$ http://www.mydomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

If you are using WordPress, there are several plugins available which will allow you to configure this automatically so you don't have to mess with the .htaccess file manually.

I would suggest installing WordPress SEO by Yoast. It allows you to choose which pages you want to index. I usually index Categories and block Tags, but you can try one or the other.

(not set) keywords are usually visits from a Google AdWords campaign where the Google AdWords account is not correctly linked to the Google Analytics account. http://support.google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2820717 and http://support.google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1714454

(not provided) keywords are organic searches from Google but are being hidden from your website since Google is encrypting searches from users who are logged into Google or otherwise using the secure version of Google.

The good news is that you should be able to fix the (not set) issue but unfortunately you won't be able to do much regarding the (not provided) keywords.

EDIT - (not set) could also mean visits from all other traffic sources, such as Direct or Referral sites, which inherently are not coming from keyword searches and that is why (not set) is showing up in Google Analytics if you try to look up the keyword used by either of those mediums.

Here are a few quick words of advice for starting a brand new AdWords campaign -

1. Select only "Search Network" and don't bother with the "Display Network" for the time being.

2. Only use Exact Match keywords, meaning your ad will only show up if the exact phrase you are bidding on is searched by the user. You can designate Exact Match keywords by putting [brackets] around the keyword.

3. Start out with a small budget, like 5-10 bucks a day and keep a close eye on the performance. Gradually increase the budget once you get an idea for which keywords are performing well.

Here are some of my favorite PPC resources -

Google AdWords Help Center - http://support.google.com/adwords/?hl=en

Inside AdWords blog - http://adwords.blogspot.com/

PPC Hero - http://www.ppchero.com

I'd suggest using absolute (full) URLs whenever possible just to ensure you don't accidentally miss any relative URLs if you happen to move content/pages around. Yoast actually has a great blog post about why it makes sense to use full URLs whenever possible - http://yoast.com/relative-urls-issues/

I get this question a lot from my clients. If the domains are brand new and they've never resolved to a site before, then there won't be any kind of impact for SEO, positive or negative. Just make sure the domain names 301 redirect to the primary URL instead of pointing them/setting them up as aliases.

The only time there could be a positive impact is if a domain name used to resolve to a website and that site ranked in the search engines and links were pointed to it. Then you could 301 redirect those domain names to a new URL to transfer at least some of the link juice.

Just curious, are you purposely intending to target "personnal" rather than "personal" which is the correct spelling of the word? Either way, I am assuming your target market is likely confined to a specific geographical area, so I would suggest using a city name in the URL such as -

personaltrainingdallas.com

personaltrainersnyc.com

miamipersonaltrainer.com

Did you change domains when you did a site redesign? I noticed your sitemap has URLs from a completely different domain name so that may have something to do with it - http://www.truebluelifeinsurance.com/sitemap.xml. I'd make sure to change the sitemap and then set your preferred domain name in Google Webmaster Tools.

Simply using the same domain name with a different extension won't make a difference since they are two completely different sites, despite the .com being a link farm, spam site, poor quality, etc. That being said, most people prefer .com, .net or .org over extensions such as .info, .biz, .ws, etc. simply because they are more popular and have been around longer. The extension itself won't affect your SEO one way or another, but I could see some issues with users seeing the site with the .info extension in the search rankings and not clicking on it simply because they prefer .com, .net or .org.

While likely effective in the short term, I think buying links from Fiverr is definitely risky and I would advise against it.

Instead, I would suggest the following

1. Add the site to Google Webmaster Tools and submitting a sitemap (if you haven't already done so).

2. Post links to the site/pages on Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites.

3. Try pinging services such as http://pingler.com/ and http://freebacklinktool.com/

Usually this will be all it takes for a new site to start being indexed in Google.

There's several possible ways the search engines could have come across both versions of that page. If I had to guess, it's because somewhere on the web or even on your own website there are links to both URLs. It's a pretty common issue but one that is easily resolved with the rel="canonical" tag.

Simply put the following code in the header of that page -

This tells the search engines to use your designated URL anytime they access that page.

It doesn't do any harm and in fact, I would recommend using canonical tags just in case some people access your site via a link that has parameters in the URL, such as www.yoursite.com/?utm_campaign=twitter, etc. The canonical tag will ensure that the search engines are always aware about indexing the correct URL.

Also, it's important to note that the proper syntax is rel="canonical" and not ref="canonical".

I was looking for a way to subscribe to the SEOmoz Q&A posts so I could keep an eye on any new questions that I felt I could provide adequate answers to, but apparently there is no RSS feed available. So I made my own Twitter account to automatically post the new questions and felt like sharing it here in case anyone else would be interested in following - http://twitter.com/SEOQA.

Additional info -

1. It only updates once an hour since I didn't want to constantly hammer the SEOmoz servers every minute checking for new questions. Which means the Twitter account will post how ever many questions there are once every hour, so sometimes it can get a little annoying seeing your feed bombarded with 6 tweets in a row from the same account.

2. Some question titles contain more characters than Twitter allows in addition to the URL, so some of them get cut off. Not sure how to fix that but it rarely happens so I don't tend to mind it.

3. It simply posts any new questions asked in any category since I'm not sure of a way to choose a certain category. It would be awesome if SEOmoz provided RSS feeds/Twitter accounts to follow for a particular category.

4. I'm not affiliated with SEOmoz (other than being a PRO member) and I'm not making any money off this so I hope it's okay that I set this up!

Let me know if anybody has any comments or questions or suggestions for how to make it better.

Hmm, this is the first time I've ever noticed it since I rarely view the web based version of Twitter. I did some searching and came across this thread which says that it is not yet available to the general public - https://dev.twitter.com/discussions/6139. Turns out other Verified Accounts like https://twitter.com/CocaCola and https://twitter.com/McDonalds have this banner as well.

So my guess is that it has to do with SEOmoz being a Verified Account and that us commonfolk will eventually have this feature available to us sometime down the road.

Hi there,

We had a client with the same issue. They could use Google Analytics to track which traffic sources generated leads, but there was no way to track which lead came from which traffic source.

So we created a tool called Convertable (http://convertable.com) that does just this. It emails you the lead information with full analytics data attached to it. Then you can update the status of the lead in the online dashboard so you can enter in how much revenue, how many shirts, etc. were generated by each individual lead. This will enable you to tie the amount of revenue generated back to the original traffic source in order to determine the true ROI of online marketing campaigns. Convertable is still in free beta mode but we will soon be launching premium plans with more features. Feel free to check it out and let me know if you have any questions or suggestions for how to improve it!

• Patrick (co-founder of Convertable)

The first thing I would suggest is setting your canonical tag to tell the search engines which version of the URL is the preferred URL. Here is more info - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html.

You can also exclude parameters within Google Webmaster Tools, but in this scenario you should be good to go with the canonical tags as long as they are set up correctly.

1. You won't be penalized, they are just ignored as a ranking factor and thus it's just recommended not to waste your time adding them in the first place. Another reason to remove a Meta Keywords tag is that it provides an easy way for your competition to quickly see the keywords you are trying to target (any competent SEO could likely figure this out by analyzing other elements on your site but don't make their job any easier!)

2. So your site currently has the Meta Keywords tag but you are trying to remove them, correct? If you are using Magento, you should be able to remove them either through the dashboard or by manually editing the template files.

SEMRush.com is exactly the tool you are looking for. One of my favorites.

Agency for client work while running some of my own personal projects on the side.

If you don't have similar pages to redirect to, I would do one of the following -

1. Keep the pages up but add some text that says "This is an archive so some of this content may be outdated" and then possibly link to other authoritative sites which do have updated content. This way your pages will likely still rank well in the search engines and the users will find what they are looking for, either in your archive or on the external sites.

2. Simply 301 redirect these pages to the homepage to preserve any link juice/link equity. You will likely see a drop in organic traffic for any terms these pages are currently receiving but it's a much better option than simply removing the pages and serving 404 errors, which is bad for both search engines and users alike.

It's hard to say exactly what the cause is without knowing what the site/keywords are, but I'd recommend checking if these are all New Visits and/or Unique Visitors and where they are geographically located. I've seen huge spikes in traffic by the same group of people/computers in foreign countries before who were hitting my site over and over for some unknown reason. Also, check which search engine is sending the traffic, which landing pages they visited first, etc.

And of course, this spike could be legit, especially if your site ranks for keywords related to a particular topic that happened to get a lot of searches yesterday (breaking news, a controversial report debunking commonly held belief, viral video, etc).

I'd recommend re-purposing the pages with expired listings. I imagine a lot of those pages rank pretty well for longtail phrases (for example something like "part-time dump truck driving job in rome, georgia") which are highly targeted and likely have minimal competition. Even if the job opening is no longer available, there is still value in keeping that page alive for the sake of ranking in the search engines. A couple of suggestions -

1. Set up a contact form/email opt-in for users to fill out to "let me know when jobs like this become available." This enables you to capture useful contact information from your users which you can use as you see fit.

2. Provide links to similar job listings that are available. For example, put on the page "this job listing has expired but check out other jobs in Rome, Georgia or dump truck driving jobs within 50 miles", etc. This way you keep the user on your site instead of them going to a competitor's site.

Otherwise, if you decide to delete a lot of these pages then you'll lose any existing rankings/traffic as a result.

I would also love to find an accurate way to instantly measure competition for a bulk list of keywords. Unfortunately, I think it's the inherent nature of this request that the tool is either going to be quick and inaccurate/outdated OR accurate and slow because keyword difficulty is determined by organic competition which requires querying a search engine's organic listings for each keyword to grab a list of URLs, then analyzing the on-page factors, then analyzing inbound links for each of those URLs, and then comparing all of these against each other to determine how competitive each phrase is.

And considering most users want to find out difficult a keyword is to rank for in Google then that means most tools will need to query Google's rankings/API in real-time for every single keyword to get the most accurate results, but that also means this process is going to take some time, especially since Google actively tries to prevent tools from automatically grabbing/scraping their results (as Raven, WordStream and SEOmoz all found out just recently).

Anyways, I realize I'm not answering your question so I want to offer some suggestions, even if they are not exactly perfect -

1. Long Tail Pro - My favorite keyword research tool as of late, and they actually just released a new feature which allows you to import keyword lists up to 10,000 of your own keywords to check competition. However, since it queries Google, it's not going to be instant... however it does seem to be more robust and faster than my next suggestion.

2. Market Samurai - great for keyword research/competitive analysis but it can be somewhat slow. Their newest update features more competition metrics which look pretty useful.

I'm not sure if I understand this correctly but I'll give it a shot. You say the competition is using the same GA account on two sites, but how does your friend know what the competition's traffic numbers are? Does he have access to their Google Analytics account? And where does the competition "show its high traffic"?

Google Analytics simply tracks how many visits are coming to a website(s) and it doesn't have anything to do with impacting any actual traffic. One way to see if the competition is fudging its traffic numbers by saying all of the GA visits are for one site only when the traffic is really for two websites, then tell them to provide a GA report showing that all of the visitors are using the same Hostname.

You can see the Hostname by going into Google Analytics and clicking on Custom Reporting. Choose "Unique Visitors" as the metric and "Hostname" as the dimension.

Yes, the canonical tag is the best route to take in this scenario.

I would suggest running the report card for each individual page for that page's targeted keywords rather than testing the homepage for all of your site's keywords.

I highly recommend using this plugin to scan your site for malware/exploits and automatically fix them for you - http://wordpress.org/plugins/gotmls/

Then once the site is confirmed to be clean, submit your site to Google within GWT to get them to review your site and remove any malware warnings from the SERPs.

I would recommend optimizing the URL structure and 301ing the old URLs to the new ones. The amount of link equity lost (which is quite minimal) by 301ing the ugly URLs to the new URLs will be outweighed by the benefits of using a better URL structure in the long term.

I just did a search for site:http://www.tidy-books.com/ on Google and am seeing 3,220 pages from your site in the Google index, so perhaps it's just an issue with GWT taking longer to update.

I'm a big fan of testing keywords in AdWords before choosing the ones you want to use for SEO. You can set up the AdWords campaign today and get actual data on the number of impressions (number of times the keyword is searched), CTR and conversions generated by each keyword in only a few hours. I'm not sure how familiar you are with AdWords but it is absolutely critical that the campaigns be set up correctly from the get-go, otherwise you will get inaccurate data and may drain your budget quite quickly.

Since your goal is to test the keywords for SEO, make sure you are only using [Exact Match] keywords. And it is probably wise to uncheck the option to "Include plurals, misspellings, and other close variants."

Also, make sure you are not opted into the Display Network but rather just the Search Network (ideally just Google, not the search partners as well).

Finally, I'd suggest using a tool called LongTailPro to instantly come up with thousands of long tail keywords that you might not have considered yet. You can sort/filter by CPC, advertiser competition, organic competition, keyword competitiveness, search volume, etc. It gets the keyword data from Google and also uses the Moz API to check organic competition. It's definitely my favorite keyword research tool and one that I don't ever really see talked about on Moz.

Relative URLs are not inherently bad for SEO, but they oftentimes trip up webmasters if less than 100% of the links on the site are valid. For example, using a link like "../blog" will tell the search engines to go to http://www.mysite.com/blog/blog and then http://www.mysite.com/blog/blog/blog and so on, causing the crawlers to get trapped in an endless loop which is obviously not ideal for SEO. So as long as you are on top of making sure the relative URLs are always valid, then you should be fine.

I would normally say "Alexa doesn't matter so don't worry about it" but it turns out a lot of advertisers and domain name buyers do consider it when determining the value of a site so there are definitely some benefits to having a decent Alexa ranking.

Anyways, to answer your question, in order to improve your Alexa ranking (without blatantly cheating), you basically need to increase the number of visitors to your website that have the Alexa toolbar installed. Here are some suggestions -

1. Most anti-spyware programs nowadays flag the Alexa toolbar as malware and remove it from the computer, so this means most Alexa toolbar users are not as computer savvy and don't even know how they got the toolbar installed in the first place, let alone how to remove it. Take this into consideration when creating content/targeting keywords specifically for this kind of audience (ie, likely the older generation).

2. Do keyword research to see what kind of searches are being made for "Alexa" related keywords such as "Alexa toolbar uninstall" or "remove Alexa toolbar." This is a dead giveaway that these users have the toolbar installed and are looking to remove it. You can get them to your site by ranking organically for those phrases or if you want these visitors quickly, start up an AdWords campaign and bid on "Alexa toolbar removal" related keywords. Sit back and watch your Alexa ranking take off.

3. My final suggestion is my least favorite since it's essentially peddling spyware to your user base but it's still effective. Offer your users the option to download and install the Alexa toolbar from your website in exchange for some kind of reward. Again, I wouldn't suggest going this route since you risk the chance that your users will abandon your site forever but nonetheless it's still an option.

Matt Cutts suggests that chaining 4-5 or more redirects in a row might start to be dangerous, but simply 301ing one page to another 301'd page should not cause any problems. http://www.searchenginejournal.com/matt-cutts-discusses-301-permanent-redirects-limits-on-websites/46611/

I would suggest setting the canonical tag on each of the GIF pages. So http://gifly.com/FoYi/ and http://gifly.com/FoYi/#blonde would not be considered duplicate content when Google encounters those URLs because Google knows that http://gifly.com/FoYi/ is the designated canonical URL that should be indexed regardless of any hashtags that happen to be appended to it.

I would also recommend setting up the category/hashtag pages as their own standalone pages. For example, all of the GIFs related to #blonde would be located on http://gifly.com/blonde/. Then once you click through to one of the individual GIF pages, they will link to http://gifly.com/FoYi/ or whatever the URL is. This way you can optimize the category pages for SEO, such as "Dumb Blonde GIFs" and put some original text on the page in addition to just the links to the individual GIFs.

Meta Keywords are worthless. None of the major search engines use them as a ranking factor anymore. If anything, their use can actually have a negative impact since you will be revealing your targeted keywords to your competitors. (Most competent SEOs can determine your targeted keywords by looking at your site anyways but no need to make their job that much easier!)

That being said, Meta Description is still important, even if they aren't necessarily considered a ranking factor, they allow you to have control over the snippet of text that shows up under your listing in the SERPs.

From my understanding, you don't necessarily need to have an active AdWords campaign to use the Google AdWords Keyword Planner (which is replacing GAKT). You will need an AdWords account but you should be able to sign up and never run a campaign but still have access to the Keyword Planner to do what you need to do. (At least I assume and hope this is going to be the case...)

Do you know when you added the noindex tags? Google will need to recrawl the pages to see the noindex tags before removing them. I just looked at one your category pages and it looks like it was cached by Google on December 1st, and there was no noindex tag on that page. Depending on how big your site is and how often your site is crawled will determine when they will be removed from the index. Here's Google's official explanation -

"When we see the noindex meta tag on a page, Google will completely drop the page from our search results, even if other pages link to it. Other search engines, however, may interpret this directive differently. As a result, a link to the page can still appear in their search results.

Note that because we have to crawl your page in order to see the noindex meta tag, there's a small chance that Googlebot won't see and respect the noindex meta tag. If your page is still appearing in results, it's probably because we haven't crawled your site since you added the tag. (Also, if you've used your robots.txt file to block this page, we won't be able to see the tag either.)

If the content is currently in our index, we will remove it after the next time we crawl it. To expedite removal, use the URL removal request tool in Google Webmaster Tools."

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=93710

I would recommend not repeating the name and location in the URL and instead use something like www.stjeromemitsubishi.ca/partsandservice/contact.aspx. There won't be any SEO benefit by simply repeating the name and location in the contact page URL.

If you had multiple locations, then I could see the point in doing something like www.stjeromemitsubishi.ca/partsandservice/seattle-dealership-contact.aspx

(ideally I would suggest structuring the URLs like this www.stjeromemitsubishi.ca/locations/seattle/contact.aspx but I am following your original example)

Since the "important pages" have been removed "by request" leads me to believe somebody with access to your GWT has manually requested to remove the site from Google via the URL removal tool.  You should be able to see who has access to your GWT and who removed the URLs within GWT. Just go to "Google Index" then "URL Removal" then click on the select box to the right to see the URLs that have been removed by others. You should be able to resubmit the site/URLs to Google afterwards.

I know you said you submitted a change of address to Google in Google Webmaster Tools, but did you add and verify coed.com as the specified domain name for both coedmagazine.com and coed.com? This is highlighted as an Important step on https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/83106?hl=en.

Assuming you do have both domain names verified in GWT, one suggestion would be to take a look at the Crawl Errors/Index Status for both domain names to see if there are any issues with Google not following the 301s correctly or somehow still accessing the site through the old domain name.

Also, make sure to check the robots.txt file within GWT to see if Google has any problems with it (I checked coed.com/robots.txt through http://tool.motoricerca.info/robots-checker.phtml and encountered some errors, but they may be too minor to affect Google).

I would just use a sitemap.xml file instead for Google, Bing and Yahoo. Then you can submit the sitemap.xml file within the Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Tools (includes Yahoo). You can easily create an XML sitemap at http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/

There's numerous ways Google could have found those pages and added them to the index, but there's really no way to determine exactly what caused it in the first place. All it takes is for one visit by Google for a page to be crawled and indexed.

If you don't want these pages indexed, then blocking those directories/pages in robots.txt would not be the solution because you would prevent Google from accessing those pages at all going forward. But the problem is that these pages are already in Google's index and by simply using the robots.txt file, you are just telling Google not to visit those pages from now on and thus your pages will remain in the index. A better solution would be to add the no-index, no-cache tags to those pages so the next time Google accesses those pages, they will know to remove those pages from the index.

And now that I've read through your post again, I am now realizing you are talking about file directories rather than normal webpages. What I've wrote above mainly still applies, but I think the quick and easy fix would be to turn off Directory Indexes all together (unless you need them for some reason?). All you have to do is add the following code to your .htaccess file -

Options -Indexes

This will turn off these directory listings so users/search engines can't access them and they should eventually fall out of the Google index.

I'd recommend using both "keyword" and "keyword nyc" to see how they perform against each other. If you find that "keyword nyc" is performing well, the Quality Score of that keyword may be higher than if you were simply bidding on just "keyword", which means the cost-per-click may be lower as well. Then you could also change the ad copy to focus more on "keyword nyc" instead of just "keyword" and hopefully increase click-throughs and conversions.

I usually recommend using a combination of keywords and match types in order to target the most specific/relevant phrases as possible (without making them too specific where Google determines a keyword's search volume is so low that your ads won't be shown).

I absolutely agree with WordPress. Wouldn't use anything else if given the choice.

Do you have any SEO plugins installed for VB? This plugin VBSEO should fix your problems - http://www.vbseo.com/