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Hi there! The page you gave as an example seems to have been removed (or the link to it is broken.) Were you able to resolve this issue? I did take a peek at a couple of your other blog posts and noticed that they are using Rel Author to link to a Google+ brand page (vs. a personal Google+ account). Rel Author should always be linked to an author's individual Google+ account. Would love to help you sort this out. Cheers, Christy

I just did a site: search for your domain and looks like 1140 pages are indexed, so I'm assuming this got itself settled? Congrats! Marking as answered.

Thanks Miriam, that was my concern as I mentioned above.

If you don't wish to share your clients site URL publicly, mind dropping me a PM? I'd be quite interested to take a look for you.

That's an interesting question: have you created and published a page and then run it through the Rich Snippet / Structured Data Testing tool? http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets (Also, see: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/10/rich-snippets-guidelines.html ) Seems to me that the tool would show you which snippet Google is likely to showcase. If you've created a blog post with an embedded video, I think it is  likely that the Author snippet will be visible in Web SERPs; the byline + author avatar. The Video snippet would appear in Video SERPs without that byline.

You should do both. Implement the 301 to catch any link strength coming in from external pages and send it to your correct URL. Always link to your root URL in your internal navigation as linking to index.html and then relying on the 301 to redirect to the correct URL will leak a small amount of link juice every time.

No, I haven't. That was my suspicion as well. It is too strange.

Adding to what charles1 said, I have noticed that the 'old-fashioned' ping a blogpost/content to Google isn't really relevant anymore. Instead, if people are viewing your content - and getting to it from different sources (Twitter, Google+, Facebook, etc.), then it's more likely to be indexed sooner. The sooner someone interacts with your content, the sooner it's indexed!

Thin content is something penalized by Google's Panda, and to avoid it, definitely use James' suggestions depending on what you want from your site.

You are very welcome, John!

If I owned your site I would rewrite the text from scratch.  The more different you make it from the original the more traffic you will receive.  Also the more substance and length that you can include the more long tail traffic will be received. Syndicating your content creates competitors and now that you are not ranking the damage is obvious.  So you can spin the articles and stay in the doghouse or redo them properly and have a chance at recovery. I would be creating content that puts the syndicated copy to shame - higher quality, more substantive, broader coverage.

If all 15 comments are written by 15 different people the content would clearly be unique...and you are fortunate to have that sort of engagement. Perhaps you could create a page where you link all the answers in one place..maybe sort out the answers.. You have probably already seen this this http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/duplicate-content Good luck.

It's great news that you are getting 75 to 80 posts per week with a lot of it being very well written. Will this hurt your site if the posts link back to a site where a verbatim copy exists?  In my opinion you have three risks.... 1) linking to websites that are being heavily manipulated - a bad neighborhood.... .... 2) seeing your copy of the post filtered from the search engines because of duplicate content... and ..... 3) seeing your site or a client site be punished by panda for content farming. Here is what I would do...  1) Encourage all of your clients to post high quality original content.  Preach a strong sermon to them about the value. Limit the number of links within your site that lead to low quality content or content that is heavily syndicated. Develop a "library" on your site of very high quality, original, non-syndicated content and strongly encourage your clients to submit items for consideration.  Be strict with the rules.  However, any article accepted would be featured on your homepage, linked to from one of several highly visible category pages on your site that are featured in your persistent navigation.  Turn your content resource into a highly promoted asset.  Create a situation where clients will highly desire the premium attention.

The URLs on my site in WMT slowly migrated to the new domain.  My change was done in February and there is still a little activity in WMT for the old domain.  But new domain is very healthy.

I agree with EGOL, The specific page that link is directed to will acquire the most benefit or "linkjuice" value.  However your site will also get benefited as a whole which includes your root domain. Offcourse everyone's SEO strategy should focus on gaining a strong domain authority (strong root domain), and the best way this can be done is through deep inner links in your content pages.  Also good internal link structure to really pass the linkjuice from page to page.

After you make your changes, go into Google WM and re-submit your XML sitemap showing the new URLs. Make sure all old links (non-WWW) do point to the new pages as I think you have done. There will be a week or two of fluctuation. If your site if very popular, then the changes will happen quicker, if not, then slower.

Howdy JSOC. You can use regex in your .htaccess file. Here's a tutorial to get you started. I'm still trying to master this subject myself, but if you want to provide the specifics, I'll do my best the help you. And if all else fails, you can ask Casey Henderson @ SEOmoz, he'll definitely be able to help you out

The worst thing you can do is nothing. www.mysite.com www.mysite.com/ mysite.com mystic.com/ www.mysite.com/index.html Above is 5 examples of URLs which COULD all lead to the same page. There are numerous other possibilities as well. If you don't let Google know which version of the page is correct, then you will suffer the consequences of duplicate content. What happens is Google doesn't know which page is correct. They will pick one of the non-www versions because that is what your Google WMT is set up to do. Meanwhile other versions of the pages are being used. You are sending your link juice to a page, but it is a complete waste as it is not being considered by Google for SERP. You MUST resolve this issue if you care about SEO at all.