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Yeah weird. It's also having it's way with your description (in case you hadn't noticed). Only time I've ever seen this is when the site was changed and it took a little while for Google to recognize the change.

I'm assuming your page hasn't changed recently though so I'm not sure what to tell you..

What do you mean you had no other choice? What forced you to add these tags to your client's site?! Because they were updating it?

...uhh.. This thread is bizarre. Anyway sounds like all of it was a non-issue. Mark is absolutely correct about your real issue though. Get some redirects in there asap.

Well it's definitely not based on your anchor text profile for that keyword. Here's a screenshot showing why I say this. You will see that your number one anchor phrase is for your website by a large margin:

http://gyazo.com/ee24420ec14c9c8141169804d3d5ac23.png

I'm honestly not sure what to say. Is the page being updated or rebuilt, or is anything happening to coincide with these dips and peaks?

I can't think of what would cause it otherwise. If it were me, I'd keep building links and content and monitoring any edits I make to see what changes they have in my SERPs. Sorry I can't be more help right now..

Why do you think that canonical tags won't work?

That's what I would suggest.. Those tags simply tell Google which is the authoritative site of the duplicates. If you are preserving the original domain, canonical to that one and when you make the switch nothing will change. Do keep in mind if any of your directories or file structures are altered you will want to put in redirects but it sounds like your web team knows what they're doing here.

Well gee it looks like you're rankings have improved more recently and are sticking around up there.. Did they fall again since this screenshot? A true penalty wouldn't allow you to regain ranking like that without it being lifted. I'm assuming you haven't received any notices in Google's Webmaster Tools, correct?

As always, it would probably behoove you to provide the domain for folks here to take a peak at. Although I can't guarantee anyone will be able to provide an answer other than "keep on building SEO for your site!"

Are you targeting other keywords as well that aren't fluctuating? For example "55 gallon trash bags" or "buy trash bags online" or something? (if you aren't targeting those, get on it!) Just trying to get a full picture of the problem.

You do want to vary your anchor text. We understand that is your business and what you sell, but that doesn't mean you can't make your link read "Check out our awesome deal on trash bags by clicking here!" Or "We got trash bags over at http://www.trashbagstore.com" or something along those lines.

That's about all the advice I know to offer at this time. Keep adding more info and I'm sure this community can help you get to the answer. Good luck!

This is a great topic and I hope it gets some love. I am ashamed to admit I know very little about Google Plus. I consider myself very savvy when it comes to technology and social media, but this one has me slightly intimidated. I'm not sure why, but the format just seems confusing to me. Granted I'm sure if I sat down and spent a couple days on it I'd be off and running, but still I'd like to see some responses to this topic to give G+ noobs a little encouragement.

Tag!

I'm not sure about all those fancy instructions in that link there... This is how I would do it, in a nutshell (correct me if I've missed a step as I do not have access to our IIS server at this time to retrace the steps, this is from memory)

1. Open IIS in Explorer and navigate to your site. Right click on the file or folder you wish to redirect and select Properties. (this will allow you to do it per directory, per page, etc)

2. In the file tab, select "A redirection to a URL" - (i may have missed a step here. i also know that depending on which IIS version you are running the location of this changes. I believe this is for IIS 7. Either way there will be an option somewhere in the called "A redirection to a URL")

3. Enter the url to redirect to

4. Determine whether you want to do the optional checkboxes (probably will want to check "A permanent redirection for this resource")

5. Click OK

   Hope this helps!

Have you ever tried using a web-based sitemap generator? Not sure how it would respond to your site but at least it would be running on someone else's server, right?

Not sure what else to say honestly.

That is simply untrue, though. In the quote you provided the SEOmoz stance even says "it does appear to provide some slight value." Yet you then said it does not add value... This post is contradictory at best.

Now what IS debatable is HOW relevant the H1 tag is and exactly how powerful it is in terms of optimization. What I know for certain is that it won't hurt to include your target keywords in your H1 tag and this can be done anywhere on your page, not necessarily at the very top in a title format.

Now of course this doesn't mean overusing the tag by any means. Never would I suggest such a thing. I use one H1 tag per page, period. No exceptions. But I always make sure my primary targeted keyword sits in that tag.

While it may not be the most powerful optimization technique, it is a piece of the puzzle and the SEO world is made up of a billion tiny edits that build one giant glorious page-1-search-ranking.

Voila.

Well my first thought is "who's domain is that and why don't you have your own domain name?"

So I'd start there.

One more note - I see you have a blank robots file. Not necessary. If it were my site I'd remove that unless I were trying to disallow a directory or file.

Anyway carry on.

Okay so this is a FANTASTIC example of why you should always include your domain when asking questions here at the SEOmoz forums. While I enjoyed my little debate with Mike, it was completely irrelevant to the actual issue at hand which would have been instantly evident had we seen your site.

In about 30 seconds after looking at your site's source I discovered this:

NAME="SEOMOZ" CONTENT="NOINDEX" />

Yep. Sitting there in your header for some reason. Did you add that tag or did your client? ...strange. Anyway goes to show - always check your source code and always provide your domain.

TL;DR - Take out that tag specifically designed to prevent OSE from indexing your site and it will index your site. Enjoy.

In a world where on-page optimization is more and more deminished it's hard to say exactly how much weight an html tag carries. Perhaps my "lot of weight" statement was a bit overboard, but it definitely is worth using and not just as a way of "letting the user know they've arrived." Because that is ridiculous. The user doesn't know what's tagged with an H1 and what's not. Again, formatting is all up to you and your CSS. I can have an H8 tag let the user know where they are, or just a straight up font tag. It's all in the styling.

H1 tags do register importance, just as bolded or alt text do. My suggestion of how you could technically bury it in a sentence was just to illustrate the point that you don't have to have some giant bold text at the top of your page to utilize the H1 tag. It can be stylized however you want. This is all I was trying to say and is certainly not a spammy suggestion.

I would personally focus on your main site's blog. This way, if you build awesome content that people want to feature and/or share then you are building backlinks organically and link juice is passing to your blog.

That said, it's okay to have a blog on the side as well. Especially if you want to target certain niches with it. Problem is your CTR is going to be diminished and you won't get as much traffic to your primary domain which I'm assuming is where you want to build presence/traffic/SERPs.

Having another blog though separate from your main site also opens up the possibility for guest blog sharing which can be quite beneficial. Problem is it may not be worth developing as you will need an established blog to be able to trade with the types of bloggers you'd like to trade with.

I wouldn't. I just flat-out wouldn't. I'd hire a marketing/SEO person to build content first.

Yeah Streamline is correct. Nothing is blocking, your site simply has no/very few links. ahrefs.com shows it having 2 backlinks. 2. So... time to build some links!! (*I'm jealous, how I'd love to be handed a fresh domain to build from.)

Good luck!

If the keyword "doesn't sound good to the user" then why would they type said keyword into Google?

That's my first question. To answer your question H1 tags are definitely important and carry a lot of weight for on-page optimization. Do you realize you can format your H1 tag using CSS or HTML to look however you want? You could, by all rights, drop an H1 tag into the middle of a sentence and the user would be none the wiser... just a hint.

cough cough yes it does.

"Oh Hey! It looks like that URL redirects to www.harborcompliance.com/. Would you like to see data for <a class="clickable redirects">that URL instead</a>?"

did you try the google one?

Anyway, seriously TC I think you're issue is the domain does not redirect. At least that's what it sounds like from the limited information we have. If you'd like to share the domain we'd be happy to look into it further.

Good luck everybody!

I personally avoid iframes like the plague. They will be indexed, but indexed as a separate page from wherever you are embedding them.

I am curious - what makes you think that having an iFrame will make people want to link to you?

if you got different results for the www and the non-www it is because the site does not have a redirect setup. This should be rectified immediately from an SEO standpoint.

There's honestly no debate: OSE follows redirects. That is a fact and is plain to see. So if OSE is giving you two different link profiles, your site isn't redirecting.

To confirm: try going to http://yoursite.com and then to http://www.yoursite.com

If after going to both, neither url changes in the browser then there you have it. Always redirect one to the other or Google will see it as two different sites and index them both.