First, in order to be listed on CitySearch you have to have an account and claim your business via another company called CityGrid.com – don’t ask me why. My business was already listed, but the address was incorrect. So I logged in, but the address fields were greyed out.

At the bottom of the page, there’s this place where you can send them an explanation of your changes to your CitySearch business listing. So I asked for them to unlock my address fields.

And I waited.

After a week, I tried again. And I waited.

So today, I actually called them (there’s a contact link at the very bottom of the page, and if you scroll down, you will see their phone number) – CitySearch that is.

I called them, got a person very quickly, explained my issue. They asked me for some personal info, and then explained that the address updating part of their website is broken, and so the nice person from CitySearch would push it through for me. Said it would take 3-5 days. I’ll update this post either way, if it works or it doesn’t.

It pays to be persistent. Especially when it appears that being in Local search directories may influence search engine rankings, or so I’m told.

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index\.php\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ http://www.yourwebsite.com/ [R=301,L]

Be warned, it’s totally addictive. I’ve managed to get my blog speed from 10-13 seconds down to 3 seconds. I’ve also loaded a new plugin “W3 Total Cache”. One odd thing though, I had to turn off page caching – because each time I made changes they wouldn’t show up. I thought I was going insane. I’d make a change, upload it, and refresh the page. Nothing. Restart the browser, nothing. So I turned it off.

I’ve got my blog to 3 seconds – but again, it’s a Saturday – will test again during a weekday when DreamHost is perhaps not so calm. Not sure if that makes any difference. But you have to seriously check out the PageSpeedTest – I love it.

Here’s what has worked for me:

RewriteEngine on

rewritecond %{http_host} ^coolexample.com [nc]

rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.coolexample.com/$1 [r=301,nc]

Create .htaccess (text) file and put at root directory level.

Now if someone leaves out the “www”, it will be put in, which is good for search engines. They don’t like to find the non-www and the www version, they want one or the other.

The answer for the credit goes to this article from Daft Logic: Decode / Recover Dreamweaver Password.

On this website, you export the website (from Dreamweaver) and it will come out as an .ste file. This is a text file you can open and read. The password is preceeded by something obvious like “pw”. But it’s encrypted. That’s why Daft Logic’s site is great, it will decode it for you.

Thank you to Daft Logic!

Here’s the link to the actual Google Webmaster Guidelines.

Here are some of the highlights that a small business owner could ask about:

1. Did you create a sitemap.xml and are you keeping it updated when pages are added, deleted, or their names change? Did you create a robots.txt file?

2. Did you redirect www to non-www or vice versa, so only one version gets indexed?

3. Does the navigation make all the pages easily accessible from all pages?

4. Is the content unique and contain appropriate keywords?

5. What are the title tag and description tag for each page?

6. Do all images have “alt” tags – what are they?

7. Has the HTML been verified to be correct? (try using W3C Validation Tool)

8. Make sure there are no broken links on your website

9. Make sure your pages load quickly

10. Make sure your web designer has NOT done any of the forbidden (black hat) things that try to trick search engines. There is a long list on the Webmaster Guideline website.

So I did what you’re supposed to do, and fix whatever you think is wrong and then submit a request for reconsideration.

I watched a video on this topic. The people from Google said they promise they actually read all of the requests, but it might take a few weeks. The most important thing, was to confess all of your SEO sins and fix them. But what if you are not really sure you have sinned? Fix something and tell them. That’s what I did.

So you want to know how long it took to get a response? Three (3) days.

Here’s what I got back:

“Dear site owner or webmaster of http://aldebaranwebdesign.com/, We received a request from a site owner to reconsider http://aldebaranwebdesign.com/ for compliance with Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. We reviewed your site and found no manual actions by the webspam team that might affect your site’s ranking in Google. There’s no need to file a reconsideration request for your site, because any ranking issues you may be experiencing are not related to a manual action taken by the webspam team. Of course, there may be other issues with your site that affect your site’s ranking. Google’s computers determine the order of our search results using a series of formulas known as algorithms. We make hundreds of changes to our search algorithms each year, and we employ more than 200 different signals when ranking pages. As our algorithms change and as the web (including your site) changes, some fluctuation in ranking can happen as we make updates to present the best results to our users. If you’ve experienced a change in ranking which you suspect may be more than a simple algorithm change, there are other things you may want to investigate as possible causes, such as a major change to your site’s content, content management system, or server architecture. For example, a site may not rank well if your server stops serving pages to Googlebot, or if you’ve changed the URLs for a large portion of your site’s pages. This article has a list of other potential reasons your site may not be doing well in search. If you’re still unable to resolve your issue, please see our Webmaster Help Forum for support. Sincerely, Google Search Quality Team”

Ironically, what was really wrong, was that my website had been marked as “parked” due to a bug. This bug had already been resolved by the time I got this reply. So I must have gotten a canned response, because they didn’t mention the bug at all in their reply.

But hey, at least I would have known I wasn’t under a penalty in 3 days. That’s pretty fast turnaround, don’t you think? Maybe if you are actually under a penalty it takes longer, I don’t know. If you’ve been penalized, how long did your response take?

So I assume I’m under some penalty. I go into Google Webmaster Tools, and fix every missing 404 page, make sure the sitemaps are all ok, I triple check everything, no warnings, nothing. I spent all day trying to understand what might have caused me to be in the horrid google penality.

Next I applied for reconsideration, because that’s what you are supposed to do. You confess your SEO crimes, and beg Google to let you back in. But I didn’t have any crimes to confess, so I simply told that what I had tried to fix, knowing they weren’t crimes. But it seemed folks were saying yes, you must be in a penalty.

Then I went into the famed Google Webmaster Forum, where while some of the folks were nice and tried to help, most were aggressive and assumed I was some low life spammer who deserved the penalty for something I did.

Then I waited. Next day, still not in Google. Visions of being forced into early retirement loomed before me. With no traffic and nothing to fix, what could I do?

So I emailed a friend of a friend of an ex – who worked at Google, explained everything. He said he would send it to the spam folks and to hold on.

The next day, he said my domain had been mislabeled as “parked” and to just hold on, they were working on it.

And sure enough, later that evening, my rankings came back.

But not all small business owners with a website know someone to actually contact at Google. Very scary experience. Google can totally kill a small businesses traffic with a single bug. Sleep well folks.

And I wasn’t the only one:

Search Engine Land’s Article

Search Engine Roundtable’s Article