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Remove it. 301 will take care of it, but it should nmot be there. also it is worth mentioning, that sitemaps that are incorrect will get ignored by SE's, I knw that this is true with Bing buy talking with duane forrester, it the updates dates dont add up, the links give 401''s and the lot, they will start to distrust it

Does it matter that this site has a DA of 72 with 5K plus domains linking in, and the majority of advertisers have big advertising budgets?  We're much smaller than most advertisers on the site, but all the advertisers are real sites that sell real products with healthy volume. That said, I understand the purpose of the Google policy.  It's just a shame in cases like this, because we are linked from their home page and that link juice just vanishes into the ether. Best, Christopher

all links. 1st is best and descreses as you go along The position of the link also counts. SEOMoz did some tests on this, (i think it was SEOMoz) footer does not give much juice, sides a bit better, head and body were the best.

Thanks! This was causing a major problem. All my pages except my home page had a good page rank. Now I know why. Best, Christopher

Thanks for the quick responses.  I will add the redirect of index.php to domain.com/, but I don't know where the 301 of domain.com/ to index.php is coming from.  It's not in .htaccess.  Is that just a generic rule somewhere in the Apache server so that doman.com/ will default to an actual page? Best, Christopher EDIT: I think I found the problem. The site was originally created using .html pages and later converted to .php pages.  There was a 301 for index.html to index.php.  I changed to to Redirect 301 /index.html http://www.domain.com/ and also added Redirect 301 /index.php http://www.domain.com/

Yes, it was OnlineSuperSeller for us too.  I sent a notice to Sears at seller_support@searshc.com requesting removal of our products.  They responded within an hour.  OnlineSuperSeller responded soon after that. A related problem is all the YoutTube spam.  Spammers are using our product images to make the most hideous slide show videos with a link to our products on Amazon.  I'm beginning to think Amazon Merchant is far more branding and SEO headache than it is worth. Best, Christopher

"... and following one of your links, which isn't a bad thing." Thanks, I did not know that.  So, if they visit one page and return to Google, that's a bounce, but if they visit one page and click through, that's not a bounce, right?  How far does that go?  Does Google know if I sent someone to a useful site vs a spammy site?  Is it partly a timing issue?  In other words, if they visit my site and then don't return to Google for a while vs returning immediately, is that one of their metrics? Best, Christopher

Hi Christopher, It is perfectly fine to use the keyword Chevy on multiple pages because it is creating variations of the keyword phrase. For example if your home page focuses on the keyword phrase "Miami Chevy" and you also have a page that focuses on  "Miami Chevy Learning Center", that would count as different keyword phrases. Google will serve a different set of results if you type in "Miami Chevy" or "Miami Chevy Learning Center" so you will not be cannibalizing your search traffic significantly by using these different variations. SEOMoz uses "SEO Software" on their homepage and "SEO Tools" on a different page. It is a best practice to focus on different variations of your top keyword phrases on different pages, but it is usually a bad idea to have two pages that both focus on the exact same phrase like "Miami Chevy Learning Center".

It's great to have a link to your site from a national newspaper, what an exposure! It is expected for the newspaper to mark your link no follow as they cannot vouch for your content however there is much value in the link being present. It is still a backlink which is counted and surely has a value somewhere in Google's complex algorithms. It is also a great 'natural' link to your site. As more weight is given to link profiles it would seem quite unnatural to have no nofollow links. In all, it's a great link to have - well done!