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We are seeing some of the same stuff. Often if you compare rates of what you can see you can have a good idea of what keywords the majority of those visits came through... never the less a pain.

The best advice I can give is to ask goal oriented questions whenever possible. Questions that help you tackle and issue, not necessarily a symptom.

I don't think (most) of the questions that are asked on here are bad, I just think the tactical questions are on a different level that the strategic questions that could be asked.

The more KPI related the questions get, the more subjective answers will become, too.

Man, sounds like I had it better than what I thought!

As you probably know SEOmoz had some hosting and server issues recently, and this came at a terrible time for me... We are in the middle of battling some duplicate content and crawl errors and need to get a fresh crawl of some sites to test things out before we are hit with the big one?

Before I get a million thumbs downs- I love and will continue to use SEOmoz, just need something to get me through this week ( or until Roger is back! )!

This is exactly what we do as well, or if the product is obsolete always keep the page and use it to suggest relevant products.

There shouldn't be a problem since this is internal linking. Just watch out for having too many links per page.

In general, 301 aren't bad unless you have a whole string of them. For instance if a 301 redirected to another 301, then another, etc... If 301's are shallow they usually do not present a problem.

I'm sure what Robert meant to say is that it would depend on the environmental changes on your site as well as of the sites that are now beating you?

Have they initiated a linking program so that they have higher Authority? Did they change their on-page strategies? Has your page been mistakenly linked to by a bunch of low quality sites?

It is also possible that Google did tweak their algo, even if it wasn't a "Panda" tweak. Google themselves admit to changing the algo up to once a day.

If everything has stayed the same on your page as well as competitors, then it was probably a Google update...

Ryan is right. However I believe PERFECT on-page can still overcome links to some extent. I see it happen everyday, however the root domains I work with have some authority built up which helps to some degree.

Salmen is right... I'll add that not only is a link from a spammy site bad, but reciprocal linking can also downgrade the value of a link since it seems forced, which it is.

I hate to sound so cliche, but if you can come up with content people will link to and share without having to trade links with them, then you will get the most SEO benefit.

However, you are definitely headed in the right direction and if linking to your friends is helpful to your audience... do it!

Adding it as an image would help, actually. Otherwise you need to either remove the text, alter the text to be unique for each page or product, or add enough unique content to each page so that the page becomes unique enough to not be rated as duplicate content. Best practice would be to write completely unique content and get rid of the block text (or make it an image)... although this is time consuming it would be very beneficial.

Be sure that the page does have enough content on it if you remove the block text. If all that changes between product pages is just a couple words and a picture it may still be considered duplicate...

I don't think this would come across as cloaking at all. It's a fairly common practice.

Definitely. Use good consistent anchor text! Helps determine relevancy and importance of the product page!

We actually have a followed link and several no-follows from Linkedin?

I'm not sure of any but would really like to find one, however by adding a geographic modifier you can get a good idea. Unless you are really swinging for the fences for a generic international KW, this is probably how people are searching anyway.

It is indeed duplicate content! You might want to consider doing a redirect. I also noticed that you haven't done a redirect from the non www. domain either!

Bounce rates are tricky. Sometimes the better the landing page, the higher the bounce rate. What you guys have been touching on is that is is near impossible to come up with a real relevant benchmark for the web as a whole. ... But if you/your clients are better than average it makes a nice sales piece...

For what it's worth I think it happens relatively quickly. We 301'd a site recently and saw rankings boost shortly thereafter. I will concur that the SEOmoz toolbar is immensely useful for things like this.

Which feature? You should have reports available in Pro as well as the ability to monitor mentions and add keyword columns to track?

Monitoring or Management? Hootsuite is a good one for both monitoring and management. Google has several tools for listening. search.twitter.com can help you track specific mentions and phrases in real time...

In some situations a higher bounce rate could be a good thing. This could be a sign of very relevant landing pages. Of course this all depends on the goal of your site...

Really need more info! Good trending though!

Sub directories/folders used to be the definite way to go for the most SEO value however things have evened out for the most part. I think sub directories are more user friendly... we are used to the slash... extra periods can get tricky.

If it makes sense to participate in these spaces, do it. Don't worry if they are follow or nofollow.

This would be ideal but only if you have the resources to effectively maintain that many social media accounts...

This would be ideal but only if you have the resources to effectively maintain that many social media accounts...

Unless policy changes 301 should continue to work indefinitely. I've never seen (noticed) this depreciating or expiring over time.

If the sites that are coming from are authoritative, relevant, and trusted... yes.

Consider targeting a little more broad version of the keyword on the homepage? And a little more specific on the product category page?

I agree with both of these guys. I would say there is less "risk" in pointing old links to the new domain than there is hoping the "juice" is passed through a redirect.

I'd be more inclined to put the time and resources into optimizing your main site. Build some links, make sure your on page is flawless.

I was just about to add a reply to my previous post to say the same thing. You are always so articulate, EGOL, it's truly impressive.

Actually a 301 (permanent) redirect does pass the "link juice" along to the new site. I've done it several times and it always works.

Do you have Google Analytics installed?

I agree. Here's a link: http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html It looks a little shady but it actually does a decent job.

Life is easier with FF 3.6.

True. I've even seem some instances of anchor text being used in descriptions.

Both very good answers, the best answer is... it depends. A lot of it has to do with your product. Take SEOmoz. A good follower for them could be someone who has 3 followers but converts to a member or a follower with 1000 (quality) followers that has never visited the site but RT's SEOmoz.

This is not what you are going to want to hear but we had a similar problem... All we could do was delete and re-submit the pending pages. Ended up going quicker that way. Best of luck!

Can't do it much better than that.

I'll be on vacation (not to be confused with MOZcation). I'm making a point of going to one of the SEOmoz functions soon!

That shouldn't be the case. Local efforts should only help local, not necessarily hurt national. It also depends on if you and/or visitors are logged in at the time of search.

Be careful here. This can look very shady to users! Users first! (I swear I'm not a Google fanboy)

Sometimes common sense should prevail over the KW search volume tool. I've run in to local search terms I KNOW people are searching but aren't being registered.

I agree. Find a way to use no.1 and make it not spammy.

I like the Hybrid approach. Much more dynamic.

As far as which is better specifically for Google rankings, twitter seems to help most there, but Google actually uses signals from up to 7 or 8 social networks. Facebook and Twitter should and will be the most prominent for the near future.

So true. Buy up all that you can afford as quickly as possible.