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Hi Francis, I hope you've had more than one page crawled by now. If not, check out the help desk article about what to do if only one page is being crawled. http://seomoz.zendesk.com/entries/409821-why-isn-t-my-site-being-crawled-you-only-crawled-one-page. If that doesn't fix things, it's time to email the help desk at help@seomoz.org.

well, we'll just have to try that

Yeah, Google generally will come across just about all of the parameters while indexing your site, but you can add parameters as well.  When you log into Google Webmaster Tools, you should see a list of parameters when you go to the Site configuration > URL parameters page.  They've given more options now that you can change for each parameters, beyond whether or not Google should ignore them.  If you click Edit for a parameter, now you can set: Does this parameter change page content seen by the user? (Yes, No) How does this parameter affect page content? (Sorts, Narrows, Specifies, Translates, Paginates, Other) Which URLs with this parameter should Googlebot crawl? (Let Googlebot decide, Every URL, Only URLs with value ___, No URLs) It will also show you sample URLs with the parameter to make it easier to figure out when these parameters appear, which is very useful, as sometimes you don't which pages have which parameters. Google's help file for this can be found here.

Changing the URL as you've done should help, but if it is still a search results page, Google won't want to show it, even though they don't put a lot into identifying internal search landing pages. So you should be fine with what you've done. If you feel these pages are really helpful and you'd like to land users on them, an improvement might be to create navigation to http://www.mysite.com/travelguide/attraction-guide.html and similar pages and redirect internal searches for relevant keywords to that page. This way the page is more than a search results page.

Agreed.  There are also a ton of other local directories out there that will help build your citation (if your going for local) authority & credibility.

Are directories still a relevant way to start with link building after the latest google changes?

Hello, I've got a site that's product based but it's custom countertops so nothing that has a model number. I've added schema (hopefully in the correct fashion) to mark up my gallery pages which are made up of thumbnails that then lead to a single product page. I would love it if someone would take a quick look and let me know if this is the correct way to use it. Here is the code for the <ul itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/ImageGallery" id="image-gallery-thumbnails" title="Iroko Countertops and Butcher Block Island Photographs"> <li> <a itemprop="thumbnailUrl" href="[iroko-countertop-pictures/iroko-countertop-1.html](view-source:http://www.jaaronwoodcountertops.com/wood-countertop-gallery/iroko-countertop-pictures/iroko-countertop-1.html)"><img src="[../images/photographs-of-wood-countertops/thumbnails/wood-kitchen-island-top-6.jpg](view-source:http://www.jaaronwoodcountertops.com/images/photographs-of-wood-countertops/thumbnails/wood-kitchen-island-top-6.jpg)" width="80" alt="Distressed edge grain iroko butcher block kitchen island">a> li> <li> <a itemprop="thumbnailUrl" href="[iroko-countertop-pictures/iroko-countertop-2.html](view-source:http://www.jaaronwoodcountertops.com/wood-countertop-gallery/iroko-countertop-pictures/iroko-countertop-2.html)"><img src="[../images/photographs-of-wood-countertops/thumbnails/wood-kitchen-island-top-7.jpg](view-source:http://www.jaaronwoodcountertops.com/images/photographs-of-wood-countertops/thumbnails/wood-kitchen-island-top-7.jpg)" width="80" alt="Detail of butcher block kitchen island made from iroko wood">a> li> <li> <a itemprop="thumbnailUrl" href="[iroko-countertop-pictures/iroko-countertop-3.html](view-source:http://www.jaaronwoodcountertops.com/wood-countertop-gallery/iroko-countertop-pictures/iroko-countertop-3.html)"><img src="[../images/photographs-of-wood-countertops/thumbnails/wood-kitchen-island-top-8.jpg](view-source:http://www.jaaronwoodcountertops.com/images/photographs-of-wood-countertops/thumbnails/wood-kitchen-island-top-8.jpg)" width="80" alt="Wide plank iroko kitchen island">a> li> <li> <a itemprop="thumbnailUrl" href="[iroko-countertop-pictures/iroko-countertop-4.html](view-source:http://www.jaaronwoodcountertops.com/wood-countertop-gallery/iroko-countertop-pictures/iroko-countertop-4.html)"><img src="[../images/photographs-of-wood-countertops/thumbnails/raised-kitchen-bar-top-1.jpg](view-source:http://www.jaaronwoodcountertops.com/images/photographs-of-wood-countertops/thumbnails/raised-kitchen-bar-top-1.jpg)" width="80" alt="Iroko raised wood bar top">a> li> <li> <a itemprop="thumbnailUrl" href="[iroko-countertop-pictures/iroko-countertop-5.html](view-source:http://www.jaaronwoodcountertops.com/wood-countertop-gallery/iroko-countertop-pictures/iroko-countertop-5.html)"><img src="[../images/photographs-of-wood-countertops/thumbnails/raised-kitchen-bar-top-2.jpg](view-source:http://www.jaaronwoodcountertops.com/images/photographs-of-wood-countertops/thumbnails/raised-kitchen-bar-top-2.jpg)" width="80" alt="Iroko bar top for a kitchen island">a> li> <li style="display:block; height:30px;">li> ul> Thanks, Josh

Hi Fellows, Thanks for the thoughts Mike, Charles & Kieran. All good ideas! Best...Mike

A bit of a related question: How often should you be pinging on sites like Ping-O-Matic if your content is being updated everyday, Mon-Fri?

Sorry for the vague graph. Good answer.... We are actually working on improving the blog side and  make our social media presence stronger.

Hi Jeff, If you could mark this question as answered and/or add a comment when you've found someone, that would be great. Thanks!

That would be bad for SEO, and search engines would not likely index the content. It's possible, but not likely. I am working with a site that has done this exact thing, and the content is not indexed.

And forget about the Meta Keywords tag, it's useless

Do not request for Google to remove the URL. It would mean the page would be de-indexed for 90 days. The cleanup will depend on the root cause. If there is an issue on the site right now then you cannot resolve the problem until it is fixed. Report the issue to your host and ask they run a security scan. Meanwhile run your own scans and upgrade the site to 1.7. Change all passwords then check the site again.