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Thank you!

Thanks Ryan

Thanks Chris! I did get the NSM Better Meta plugin installed and I really like it. So, I have a new sitemap with Google created. I love Wordpress as well, I just felt that all of my competitors were using it and I needed to stand out from everyone else Plus I wanted complete control over where and how my content is presented . It has been trickier even with good designers and developers, but I'm hoping in the end it will pay off. I was just pretty surprised at how fast Google broke up with me. I guess it's time for me to go back and wine and dine again for some G Love. Next time this situation occurs I will focus more on 301'ing each url before the switch. Thanks for the reply Chris!

actually, on second thoughts I think the view-all page solution with rel=canonical (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/view-all-in-search-results.html) might be the smarter choice.

I currently have a home page with a "select your area" link to the area pages. Are you saying that it would be better to create 36 links form the directory site Are you saying that it would be better to create 36 links pointing to the home page or make 36 links pointing to the individual area pages?

Good to hear. Hope your site doesn't bounce back out of the index again.

I am guessing you are looking for sites to use as examples so you can emulate your site after them? Each site is unique for various reasons. In general I would recommend wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Sudan  Things to notice: the URL is not technology dependent (i.e. no .php or .html after the page name) the URL matches the page's title the URL is a flat structure the page's title is a H1 tag and is the first content you see on the page on most wiki pages, the very first words of the wiki article is the page's title. You will also see the page's title repeated several times throughout the article, and in various forms. In this example you see "South Sudan", "Southern Sudan", etc. the wiki content uses consistent anchor text to link to other pages within the site. For example, anytime you see "landlocked country" in this wiki article, or any other one, it is a hyperlink to wiki's "landlocked country" page. There are no hidden secrets here. It is about taking all of the SEO basics found in the Beginner's Guide to SEO, then applying them consistently throughout your site, along with providing great content which is up-to-date. If you do that, you will find your website on page 1 of search results. I could also suggest the New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/, but you cannot copy them as their methods will probably not work for you. For example, they have over 400 links on their home page. They have a DA and PA of 100, which allows them to support that many links. If you were to copy them thinking "well NYT does it and they are successful" it would simply not work for you.

I realize the full impact is not expected to occur until May of 2012....just trying to start discussion among the community to see how we plan to tackle this from a compliance and SEO standpoint.

Chris, Thank so much for the great tips. I didn't quite understood how will I be able to create a new listing and have it up and runing in days with google having to mail us a postcard, etc. Can you please explain how should I do this? Also, regarding the domain email. Do you mean Mydomain@gmail.com as the account the listing is on? Or info@mydomain.com as the contact email on the listing?

Thanks for your answer. Want to further clarify that if we have cross linking between these two sub domains, will there be any change in the Google's view?

I used that link and wrote a post on one of my golf blogs.

The best solution is to do a 301 redirect to your preferred URL (likely the one without the index.html). That way people never see the index.html URL, never link to it, and all the juice goes to the other URL. To be able to give you instructions for this, it's best if you can tell us what type of server you are on (such as IIS or Apache), or if you can give us the URL we can figure it out from that. If you're not able to do a redirect, the canonical tag is the second best choice. Users will remain on the /index.html page, but at least Google then knows that it's the same page as /,

Do you  have any good results with any of them? Would you recommend any?

You don't want to do this in robots.txt.  If you serve pages with these parameters, people will inevitably link to them, and even if they're disallowed in your robots.txt file, Google maybe still index them, according to this: "While Google won't crawl or index the content of pages blocked by robots.txt, we may still index the URLs if we find them on other pages on the web." This is what the rel=canonical tag is designed for.  You should use that to tell Google the page is duplicate content of another page on your site, and that it should refer to that other page.  You can read (and watch a video) about that here.

Ya, I operate under that assumption about 301's, too. I also can see most every 301 that points to one of my sites on my SEO link tracking tools. However, I can not see links from LinkedIn on any of these. Check OpenSiteExplorer for your site, and see if it lists LinkedIn, and you'll see what I'm talking about. I'm pretty sure that the LinkedIn links are not treated like a 301. I am coming to believe that links on LinkedIn pass no link juice. Would you agree? How could we track/observe if my belief is correct or not?

Hey Andy, Thanks a ton - now all my URL's are appearing as the http version - one problem remains, however, and that is that I can still access the WWW version. Trying to 301 all URL's to the http version but now part of the problem is fixed. Thanks a ton!

Ditto. I am facing a competitor who is similarly succeeding by using comment spam tactics. It seems fairly certain to me that Google is giving some value to these links even though most of them are no-followed. I suspect that at some future date they may get better at devaluing them or penalizing for them, however, at present comment spamming seems to be an advantageous tactic.

Getting the location of a searcher from their IP would not really be accurate enough for this. The place Google 'thinks' I am when searching is usually some distance away from my actual location, and unless I bother to go in and change it manually or I'm searching from my phone with the benefits of GPS, it's incorrect. Google Insights for Search (http://www.google.com/insights/search) at least lets you specify 'England' as a sub-region of the UK, however.