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I've definitely seen ranking bumps due to fixing this sort of redirect-canonical paradox. XML Sitemap that is inconsistent just adds insult to injury.

Your redirects, canonical tags, and XML sitemap should be completely consistent in terms of URL structure, protocol used (http vs https), etc. I highly suggest 'canonicalizing' all of these - agree on one protocol for whole site or for different sections of the site (http vs https), one sub-domain format (www vs non-www), and one method of accessing each piece of content (filter out unnecessary parameters, etc).

I find that when you can really consolidate and get rid of diluted dupe-URLs ("index bloat") than you can reach your full potential in terms of rankings.

But in short - if URL A has a canonical tag that points to URL B which then redirects back to URL A - it can be extremely confusing to the search engines. Best case - they ignore your canonicals. Worst case - index bloat and serious confusion.

Hope that helps!

This seems to be a concerted effort on Google's part to start revoking Adwords API access to SEO specific toolsets. First Raven, now SEOMoz. This is a statement, ... a declaration of war even...not a coincidence. It will be interesting to see if tools whose userbase are more disproportionately using the API to alter campaigns (PPC users) will be left alone.

Totally agree with you Jamie regarding it being a game changer. Branded terms where competitors were trying to rank organically are now seriously pushed down due to jumbo sitelinks. For local businesses, Google is also embeddeding local place page snippets - it ends up taking up half of the SERP real estate!

I imagine it will get harder for SERP trackers to scrape - needing to differentiate between large sitelinks and actual organic listings.

the destination URL should 100% be absolute!

The best way to do this is with Google Analytics Event Tracking (not a virtual pageview as was suggested previously). So you may need a developer to do this - but during the same process by which the chat is initiated, trigger a javascript command like the following:

_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'Chat', 'Proactive', 'SuccessfulStart']);

You can change the names of those variables to whatever you want. You can do this on any click / button on the site as well with different variables (use the onclick='' part of the <a>link code to do this). </a>

<a>Happy to help further

Here is further documentation: https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/gajs/eventTrackerGuide</a>

Perhaps.. but I think this is really connected to being 'good for the user' - as cliche as it sounds. If Google sees clickstream abnormally 'high' for position 1 for brand terms, then they are sure this is what the user wants.. so why not expand those site-links to allow for better landing pages for the user. When searching for 'Gap' why not already have the options for 'mens', 'womens', 'baby', etc. And when searching for 'nordstroms shoes' - why not already have the option for 'boots', 'sandals', 'pumps', etc.

Personally I think its a good thing for people to find what they want faster.

I'd bet 95% of people would not be happy landing on an affiliate site when they meant to find the brand site..

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