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Here's what your meta information looks like:

Change your markup to:

That's all you need to do. Should be a quick and easy fix :).

Hey Dan,

Here's the answer from Adam at SEOmoz on 3/19/2012.

"Supporting https is definitely in the plans, but it's a big project (following some other big projects) for the Linkscape team. Our current plan is to address this in during the last quarter of this year. I apologize for the wait."

3NQ66

Thanks for providing some more detail Holly. I definitely think it's applicable to leave here and I'm happy to help.

Some people like to prevent search engines from crawling category pages out of a fear of duplicate content. For example, say you have a post that's at this URL:

site.com/blog/chocolate-milk-is-great.html

and it's also the only post in the category "milk" with this url:

site.com/blog/category/milk

then search engines see the same exact content (your blog post) on two different URLs. Since duplicate content is a big no-no, many people choose to prevent the engines from crawling category pages. Although, in my experience, it's really up to you. Do you feel like your category pages will provide value to users? Would you like them to show up in search results? If so, then make sure you let Google crawl them.

If you DON'T want category pages to be indexed by Google, then I think there's a better choice than using robots.txt. Your best bet is applying the noindex, follow tag to these pages. This tag tells the engines NOT to index this page, but to follow all of the links on it. This is better than robots.txt because robots.txt won't always prevent your site from showing up in search results (that's another long story), but the noindex tag will.

If I'm not making sense at all then please just let me know :).

Lastly, from what I can see on your site and blog, it doesn't look like the category pages for your blog are actually in your robots.txt file. Have someone do a double check.

To check this myself, I just did a google search for this URL:

http://blog.squarespace.com/blog/?category=Roadmap

And it showed up in Google right away. Looks like something isn't going according to plan. Don't worry though, that happens all of the time and it should be an easy fix.

The nofollow attribute and robots.txt file serve different purposes.

Nofollow Attribute

This attribute is used to tell search engines, "Don't follow this link", or even "Don't follow any links on this page." It doesn't prevent pages from being indexed, just prevents the search engines from following that link from that particular page.

Robots.txt

This file contains a list of pages that the search engine should not access and should not index.

To read more about robots.txt check out this page: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/01/controlling-how-search-engines-access.html

For more on Nofollow, check out this page: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=96569

Hope this helps!

More action is definitely required :).

There currently is no redirect set up. When I visit http://accuposretail.com/ I receive a status of 200. If there was a redirect then I'd be able to see either a 301 or 302 redirect.

This is definitely a BIG duplicate content issue that you'll want to jump on fast. Have them 301 redirect the old domain to the new.

Best of luck!

Unfortunately, I don't think it's as simple as qualifying folks by their years of experience. There will be some brilliant SEOs with only one year of experience, and some awful SEOs with 10 years of experience. The same goes for just about every industry.

I'd recommend having someone do this job on a contract basis. For example, have them send you a keyword research report for $500. Then, if you love the report, you might look into signing them up for an hourly contract to keep doing your SEO going forward, or set them up with a monthly retainer. This way if you find someone great you can have them do more work for you, and if you find a "stinker" then you're only out a few hundred bucks.

In my opinion, the best possible thing to do is download the data from Open Site Explorer, and then use LinkDetective.com to analyze it. All of this is completely free and breaks down the links of your competitors into different types. For example, you'll be able to see if your competitor has a ton of guest posting links, comment links, directory links, etc. Once you have this information, then you can easily copy the strategy of your competitors, or (better yet) improve upon it!

Here's a link to a video that will walk you through the entire process: Video Link

Hi Rich,

Why have two different sites with the exact same content? If I could understand a bit more about the reasoning and the specifics then I should be able to provide a half decent answer :).

Phil

Hi Nick,

Welcome to the SEOmoz community! It's great to have you :).

I'll give you the short answer, followed by a much longer (and probably more helpful) version.

Short answer: Follow your heart.

Long answer: All things being equal (which will never actually be the case) Google has no preference toward .com or .me. So, that means you ought to take some time to think about the people visiting your site, and the people linking to your site.

Which version is going to have more credibility, be easier to remember, AND be easier to link to? I'm pretty sure the answer to all three of these is the .com domain, although, like I said earlier, follow your heart.

Regardless of what you choose, I suggest securing both domains, and 301 redirecting one to the other.

Hope this helps!

Phil

Oh wow. When you said "non-existent" I didn't know you meant literally. That's crazy. Sorry I couldn't be more help.

Well, I have good news and bad news.

The bad news is that I can't be TOO much help. The good news is that you're not alone.

Just last week I wrote a post on the SEOmoz blog about this exact issue. You can check it out here.

If you can figure out exactly why it happened then definitely let me know and I'll give you a big high five.

You could also share it on Google+. I plus oned a site of mine yesterday, and today it's indexred. It doesn't have any other links pointing to it.

Although needs is definitely a strong word, I'd say that this is something that you ought to fix, especially since it will be so easy.

Based on your description of the issue, it sounds like the quick fix is to add the noindex tag to the thank you and contact page:

However, this assumes that the contact and thank you pages shouldn't show up in the SERPs. I figure that's a safe assumption because I don't know when I'd ever like to see those pages.

The risk of keeping all that duplicate content around is that one day Google might penalize you for it and reduce all of your rankings. Is this likely? Who knows. But I'd rather not take the chance.