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If I'm understanding this right, you need to update your canonical tags with the pages the 301 is redirecting to.

There doesn't seem to be a real definitive answer to this question. back in 2008 Google talks about exploring new and improved ways to crawl pages including some HTML forms. It's been almost 5 years since then so I'm sure they're doing more than before. I would still however include some text links on pages if you're looking to send web crawlers there. Also make sure that you have a solid sitemap to help the crawlers find your content on these pages.

If your client wants to have an exact copy of the article on their blog without getting penalized by Google, all they need to add a rel=canonical tag to the header of the page that points to the original article on the Huffington Post blog.

This tag tells Google that the original content is elsewhere and to pass all "SEO credit" to that page instead of yours. It's also good practice to link to the original article at the bottom. Something like "View the original article at www.somedomain.com".

You can learn more about the rel=canonical tag here... http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394

Hope this helps!

• Matt

Your resubmission of the sitemaps for a new website is a perfect explanation for what you see in the graph.

It looks, however, like Google decided to exclude many pages of that spike soon after. If they are product pages that show different content based on query string values, you should tell Google that using the URL Parameters section of Webmaster Tools. This will help to ensure that Google knows these aren't all the same pages and should all be indexed.

Hope that helps!

Oh if webmaster tools is showing 404's for those pages that is most likely why Google has removed them from the index. It's hard to dig in without accessing your tools but here's what I would do.

1. Find out what urls are returning a 404. It could be an error in the sitemap due to a change in the website?
2. Set up 301 redirects for these broken links to point where the content actually is.

I wouldn't say that they are treated exactly like text but are close. Since web crawlers cannot understand what an image actually is, it's important to make sure that you include alt tags on all your images to help with your on page optimization.