Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Has anyone used easysubmits.com and what's your experience with it?  Any other directory submission or link building tools that help automate and manage the process like easysubmits.com says they can do?

I'm just looking at it currenlty and wanted to hear others thoughts before I get taken in by some black hat method that hurts my websites instead.

The .htaccess file is in placing directing www to non www, so I don't see what else I could do with that.  I forgot to mention the website was recently overhauled by someone else, and they are having me help with SEO.  Not sure if that has anything to do with it.  It looks like the .htaccess should be reversed so the non www points to the www which has more value.  Someone else designed this site and they are having me do the SEO on it for them.

I ran the SEO web crawler and it finished already.  Successfully crawled all pages.  I still have to wait for another week to get the main campaign updated and see results there, but I believe it may work too now.

I guess I solved my own problem after being directed to robots.txt by Jim.  I found that the Wordpress plugin for SEO xml sitemap creator was the problem because it created a virtual robots.txt file which sent me on a wild goose chase looking for a robots.txt file which didn't exist.  Creating a robots.txt file allowing all seems to be the solultion, incase anyone else has this same problem.

I was able to update my sitemap.xml with Google webmaster tools no problem.  I'm not 100% confident though that means the entire site is searchable by the spiders.  I guess I'll know for sure in a few days tops.

I've done some more looking into it and seems to be a problem when Wordpress uses the XML site generator plugin.  It creates a virtual robot.txt file, which is why I couldn't find the robot.txt file.  Apparently the only fix is to replace it with an actual robot.txt file forcing it to allow all.

I just replaced the robots.txt file with a real one allowing all.  SEOmoz estimates a few days to test site crawl and it's another 7 days before the next scheduled crawl.  I'd kinda like to find out sooner if it's not going to work.  There must be a faster test.  I don't need a detailed test, just a basic test that says, YEP, we can see this many pages or something like that.

OK, I'm a little frustred here.  I've waited a week for the next weekly index to take place after changing the privacy setting in a wordpress website so Google can index, but I still got the same problem.  Blocked by meta-robots, no index, no follow.  But I do not see a robot file anywhere and the privacy setting in this Wordpress site is set to allow search engines to index this site.  Website is www.marketalert.ca

What am I missing here?  Why can't I index the rest of the website and is there a faster way to test this rather than wait another week just to find out it didn't work again?

Awesome!  By adding the following code to my .htaccess file, and placing it in my public directory it works.  Didn't work from the root directory which I figured out later.  I think related concerns are solved now.  Now to see how the results show on the next crawl. 

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} /index.html?$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)index.html?$ "/$1" [NC,R=301,NE,L]

Thanks.  I was trying a mobile version of the website also at some point.  I will just delete that one for now.

I can try your idea but is forwarding from the page itself still good for SEO?

Well, I tried taking out the 2nd instance of RewriteEngine on but i Just get a 500 error now.  I put it back how it was for now.

Any other ideas?

Thanks.  Sorry I meant to say index.htm.  Thanks you both for making this very clear.  I've already created a .htaccess file to fix my twin domain issue, now I just have to modify the .htaccess file to include this code.

The code unfortunately doesn't seem to work when I upload it.  meaning, when I type in my website address including index.htm the display still says index.htm rather than removing that part.  Am I doing something wrong?  Here's what I have currently in my htaccess file.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^(www|blog|askdaniel).
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [R=301,L]

RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^./index.htm?\ HTTP/ RewriteRule ^(.)index.htm?$ "/$1" [R=301,L]

Thanks.  You answered my main question.  One other question then from that.  How can I remove the index.html file from the website but still have the main website load?  I believe the index.html file has to be located somewhere for the main page to know where to look.  Right?  I believe if you go to www.twinbytes.ca which is my website, it really looks at www.twinbytes.ca/index.html anyway to get the information to display.  Would I be correct in saying so?  I understand 90% of this, but this whole index.html for the home page thing is a bit confusing.

I thought I saw this somewhere on SEOmoz before but I was so busy by the time I got around to work on my SEO on my site, I realized I have this happening and can't recall if it is a problem which takes away from my ranking.

If my www.website.com is ranking well but I have internal menu links pointing to www.website.com/index.html instead of www.website.com will that take away from my www.website.com rankings?

Should I change all my menu links that point to /index.html to the full website url path www.website.com ?

This is great information, however I have a  rather unique problem.  My website has multiple subdomains (add on domains) and if I do the .htaccess trick, not only does it work for redirecting my main site, but it redirects all my domains!  Noooo!  Not sure what I can do about that, but if anyone has any suggestions on how to handle that particlar situation, that would be great!