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Hmm, I just tried to click on a listing in Google but I was served a popup which required that I enter in my contact information before I could access the site http://luxuryhomehunt.com/view-property/40096215. Did you just add this pop up? Since there is no way for users to opt out of entering in contact information to view a listing, then it may be possible that the search engines are being blocked as well.

I also tried crawling the site with Screaming Frog SEO Spider and Xenu, but my connection was refused... not sure if my IP was blocked or if the site is blocking crawlers, but my guess is the search engines may be having some trouble accessing all of the pages on your site.

At the very least, I'd recommend removing that popup since it's bad for user experience and may be causing problems with the search engines.

EDIT - I did some more digging and looked the Google cache for one of your listings - http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:L6LzTqj9gQUJ:luxuryhomehunt.com/view-property/40445850+&cd=6&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a. On this page, you have the rel="canonical" tag set to http://luxuryhomehunt.com/view-property so that tells the search engines that all of your property listing pages should use that canonical URL, which explains why most of your pages are "Not Selected" per Google -

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2642366

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139066

I'd recommend using both "keyword" and "keyword nyc" to see how they perform against each other. If you find that "keyword nyc" is performing well, the Quality Score of that keyword may be higher than if you were simply bidding on just "keyword", which means the cost-per-click may be lower as well. Then you could also change the ad copy to focus more on "keyword nyc" instead of just "keyword" and hopefully increase click-throughs and conversions.

I usually recommend using a combination of keywords and match types in order to target the most specific/relevant phrases as possible (without making them too specific where Google determines a keyword's search volume is so low that your ads won't be shown).

I use several tools for rank tracking:

1. CuteRank - Simple and easy to use keyword rank checker and best of all, it's free. http://cuterank.net/

2. Market Samurai - Great software for keyword research and includes a keyword rank checker. http://www.marketsamurai.com/

3. SEMRush.com - I don't really use this site for keeping track of my keyword rankings over time, but it is invaluable for discovering new keyword opportunities since you can see all the keywords your site and your competitors' sites rank for. One way it helped me is that on one of my sites, I discovered that a random PDF was ranking #1 for a popular keyword but since I was only using Google Analytics to track my website visitors, I had no idea the PDF was getting any traffic. So I redirected the PDF to an actual page with the GA tracking code, website navigation and a contact form in order to convert some of those visitors in potential customers.

I'm assuming you are referring to using the pipe symbol in Title tags, correct? If that's the case, Google does not care about pipes or dashes in the Title tag. Here is a video from Matt Cutts explaining this - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2_7PTio3Qc

You may run into problems if you are using pipes in your URLs, so in that case, you should use hyphens instead. - http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/023052.html

If you can rewrite the text on each page, then that's what I would do. But if the site has thousands of pages and it's not possible to rewrite the content on every single page, then I'd suggest either moving each section of text to its own dedicated page (like History would be its own page with its own link in the navigation) OR if you think the content is important enough to be seen on every page, then you could try putting the text as an image...

Your site won't necessarily be penalized for having the same text on every page but you certainly won't benefit from it since the key is to make every single page as unique and high quality as possible.

Hope that helps!

What did the ads say? And the landing pages? There are tons of AdWords advertisers that bid on SEO-related keywords, so this is the first time I've ever heard of anything like this.

Hi Adam,

I am a big fan of Long Tail Pro for keyword competition research. It allows you to add as many of your own keyword phrases and check the competitiveness, but I find it more useful by putting in 5-10 keyword phrases and then it will use the Google AdWords Keyword Tool to come up with literally thousands of related phrases to analyze by competition and search volume. Click on an individual keyword phrase and you will get a more detailed competitive analysis of the top 10 results in Google. I'm pretty sure there is a free trial but I found it to be one of the most useful SEO tools I have come across in years so it is money well spent.

Here is their site - http://www.longtailpro.com/long-tail-pro-software/

I've redirected tons of sites and sometimes there is a temporary decline in rankings/traffic as a result of the search engines having to crawl the old site, follow the 301s and replace the old rankings with the new pages. But usually the decline isn't too drastic and only lasts for a week or two, if that. It may be different with a site with thousands of pages though. How long has it been since you added the 301 redirects? If you'd like, feel free to PM me your URLs and I can take a look.

Do you know how the spam posts were published on your site? Just make sure the vulnerability is fixed so it doesn't happen again. Once the spam posts you found have been deleted from your site, you shouldn't have to do anything more since they will fall out of Google's index. Keep an eye on Google Webmaster Tools though to see if you notice any more spam pages pop up on Google's radar and then manually remove them.

Here is Google's official answer - http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=164734

When a page is updated or removed, it will automatically fall out of our search results. You don’t need to do anything to make this happen.

However, if you urgently need to remove content from Google's search results (for example, if you’ve already removed, updated, or blocked a page accidentally displaying confidential information like credit card numbers), you can request expedited removal of those URLs.

Our removal tools are intended for pages that urgently need to be removed—for example, if they contain confidential data that was accidentally exposed. Using the tools for other purposes may cause problems for your site.

Another Google resource if your site was actually hacked or compromised - http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1269119

To take your site "offline" after being hacked. If your site was hacked and you want to get rid of bad URLs that got indexed, use the URL removal tool to remove any new URLs that the hacker created—for example, http://www.example.com/buy-cheap-cialis-skq3w598.html. But we don't recommend removing your entire site, or removing URLs that you'll eventually want indexed. Instead, clean up the hacking and let us recrawl your site.

Hmmm, I still don't know why your account would have gotten flagged simply for "being about SEO" so something is definitely up... I would suggest submitting your story to the big SEO/PPC news sites like searchenginewatch.com, searchengineland.com, searchenginejournal.com, etc. because people need to be aware of this and then maybe you will get a more detailed response from Google.

I'm going to answer your second question first. I am a HUGE fan of www.longtailpro.com to come up with keyword ideas. You simply enter in 4 or 5 base keywords and it automatically generates thousands of other relevant keywords using the Google AdWords keyword tool. The best thing about LTP is that it also determines organic search volume and competitiveness as well as the SEOmoz API to determine keyword difficulty so you can uncover keywords with decent search volume and low competition to instantly rank well and start getting traffic from. I've praised LTP many times before in this forum but I feel like it still hasn't really caught on in the mainstream SEO community, probably because I think the webpage looks kinda spammy. But I promise it's legit so it's certainly worth checking out.

I also want to recommend checking out http://www.hittail.com/ which analyzes your current organic traffic and uncovers long tail keywords that you could rank higher for if you create more content to target a particular keyword.

Here are some content strategy resources I have found useful

http://overit.com/blog/content-strategy

http://www.slideshare.net/randfish/the-content-marketing-manifesto (the above article also links to this)

http://www.problogger.net/archives/2010/07/31/blog-content-strategy-101/

http://thecouponproject.com/2011/02/blogging-series-five-ideas-for-hooking-your-readers.html

There's nothing wrong with your robots.txt file as far as I can see. It is likely that Google tried accessing the robots.txt file when your server was slow/down for a split second and that's why you are seeing the error. Are you sure that the site hasn't been crawled in 10 days? Have you checked your server log files to verify that? Regardless, once Googlebot does eventually come back, it should read the robots.txt file correctly and then you should be good to go.

A 404 error means the page is not found/it doesn't exist. My guess is that you accidentally linked to exampleX.com somewhere on your page with this URL http://www.example.com/www.example.com/exampleX.html. Simply change that to http://www.example.com/exampleX.html. Otherwise, it's hard to tell specifically without seeing the actual link/page so please provide the actual links here or you can PM me if you don't want them to be made public.

I absolutely agree with WordPress. Wouldn't use anything else if given the choice.

For a brand new site, I would start out with targeting the less competitive keywords as your top priority so you will hopefully see some progress rather quickly. If you start out focusing on the highly competitive keywords, you might get discouraged since it is awfully hard to rank for competitive keywords with a brand new site. I would suggest gradually moving onto the harder and harder keywords as your site grows and establishes itself as an authority down the road. If it is not feasible to target some of your phrases with individual product pages, then I highly recommend adding a blog to the site to target these keywords. Good luck!

Hi there,

I am doing a crawl on the site listed in your profile (www.abdserotec.com) using Screaming Frog SEO Spider using Googlebot as the User Agent, and I am seeing many more URLs than the 14,000 pages you have. The bulk majority of these excess pages are the Search Results pages (such as http://www.abdserotec.com/search.html?searchType=BASIC&searchTerm=STEM CELL FACTOR&cat=&Filter2Name=GO&Filter2Value=germ-cell development&filterCount=2&type=&filter1name=Spec&filter1value=STEM CELL FACTOR). While these URLs are not showing up in the Google Index when you try searching your site with the site: command, Google is still definitely accessing them and crawling them. As Tuzzell just suggested, I also highly recommend configuring the parameters within GWT.

Does www.example.com/house/ have any content? Just curious since ideally it should, but that's not what you are asking. Anyways, to answer your question, yes, you can no-index a particular page with the following Meta Tag -

The search engines will still crawl that page and follow the links so www.example.com/house/kitchen should still be indexable.

I prefer putting the blog in a subdirectory rather than a subdomain for SEO. The search engines treat subdomains as a completely separate site so any backlinks you get pointed to blog.domain.com will not benefit www.domain.com's SEO whereas links pointing to www.domain.com/blog will.

Here is a great blog post for more details - http://www.agent-seo.com/blogging/seo-subdomain-vs-subdirectory/,

I've pasted a few highlights below -

**Subdirectory **

This situation for me is the most ideal from an SEO standpoint. I prefer to use a subdirectory (or “subfolder”) over a subdomain or external site any day.

Matt Cutts agrees with me:

“My personal preference on subdomains vs. subdirectories is that I usually prefer the convenience of subdirectories for most of my content. A subdomain can be useful to separate out content that is completely different. Google uses subdomains for distinct products such news.google.com or maps.google.com, for example. If you’re a newer webmaster or SEO, I’d recommend using subdirectories until you start to feel pretty confident with the architecture of your site. At that point, you’ll be better equipped to make the right decision for your own site.”

Rand Fishkin agrees with me too, but does go on to detail compelling usage examples for subdomains:

“Starting a blog? I almost always recommend yoursite.com/blog over blog.yoursite.com.”

**Subdomain **

This is the second best option in my opinion for SEO. A subdomain is basically a separate or third-tier website that just so happens to be residing off of the root domain. Search engines typically view them as wholly separate entities. I would only use this if the blog was completely separate to your services (or if your site infrastructure does not allow you to add blogging software to the root domain).

Definitely Long Tail Pro. It uses the GAKT to pull in keyword data but it is much more powerful than just using the GAKT for organic keyword research. You can enter in 4 or 5 base keywords and it will automatically generate thousands of related keywords, which you can then filter and sort by a number of metrics, including organic competition which uses the SEOmoz Keyword Difficulty API. It's by far my current favorite organic keyword research tool.

Are all of the problematic URLs variations of the SendPassword page? Otherwise, if you are getting long URLs for other pages, just make sure you are using rel=canonical tags to tell the search engines the correct URL to use for each page.