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I do SEO in an agency and have many clients. I always get the question, "Will that hurt my SEO?". When it comes to Meta Title and even Meta Description Length, I understand Google will truncate it which may result in a lower CTR, but does it actually hurt your ranking? I see in many cases Google will find keywords within a long meta description and display those and then in other cases it will simply truncate it. Is Google doing whatever they want willy-nilly or is there data behind this?

Thank you!

We are in the process of launching a large ecommerce site, which is a rebuild.  Their old URL structure does not make it possible in our eyes to logically map every URL to it's corresponding new page.  We have done our best to properly and manually redirect all pages that were receiving any amount of organic traffic and have also covered all pages that had external links.

Our question is we will end up with potentially tens of thousands of 404 errors that will never fix themselves.  The manual work will need to stop at some point.  Would it be better to leave these 404's the way they are and just let them fall out of the index or should we take everything we cannot assign appropriately to a page like the products root or the home page?

I'm also open to hearing any suggestions about how others have solved massive nonsensical 301's.

Thanks in advance,

John,

Thanks for the feedback.  I know understand my flaw with the head match and regular expression is the solution I need.  I was thinking of head match as more of a "phrase" match with PPC.

Hello, I have what should be a simple question here but there is a small nuisance I am trying to make sure I have configured correctly.  We have a product based website w/ no e-commerce because they sell through a dealer network.  All these product pages have "Where to Buy" links and the URL after you click where to buy always uses the query string ?r=XXX.  Example:

www.mysite.com/product/category/subcategory/product-name?r=12345

I want to setup a goal in GA with a URL and configure head match on the "?r" but which of the following is exactly how it should be configured with the "Goal URL"

?r=

?r

r=

Does it matter, because I had it setup as "?r" and it was never registering any goals.  Do I need to leave off the "?" and just have it be r=

Thanks in advance for the respones.

It looks like your WP install is handling the canonical tag in a couple different ways because I see multiple canonical tags on multiple pages.

In WP for SEO I prefer to use Yoast to the All in One SEO.  Yoast has an advanced section in Meta that gives you an input to your canonical URL.

It appears that that one of your canonical tags is correct.  Example I found was on this page

rel="canonical" href="http://www.cisaz.com/blog/2011/facebook-offers-tutorial-businesses/" />

Short answer: Look at both.  Long Answer:The page authority is more important in my opinion because that is the page that would specifically be passing link authority to your site.  You may find a page you are trying to get a link from and it may be a really strong domain but at the same time it's a very large website and your link is 6 levels deep in the architecture and has a low page authority.  The link from this page with a low page authority would be a weak link, which is why I say page authority is more important.

Run the domains in Open Site Explorer to determine which has the higher domain & page authority.

The majority of their links could all be pointing to their home page and they may not have many deep links, which can explain why the page authority for their home page is higher than the domain authority.

If you have the same keyword targeting several pages, that is considered keyword cannibalization which you want to steer clear of.

Randfish explains more here... http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-solve-keyword-cannibalization

I've never heard of a commenting system described as "enterprise" but a couple that we have used in the past are Disquss and Facebook's commenting engine.  I'm also assuming you mean commenting system as applied to a blog?  The biggest thing for me when it comes to a commenting system for a blog is the crawl ability and user friendly.  From the usability side of things I think it's important that users are not required to make a new login on your system, which is why I recommend both of these because they work off of other systems where users can make accounts and use them all over.  Both of these systems offer some of your advantages, but do not offer the ability to customize the platform.  I see a lot of people who want this going proprietary.

Thorsten is correct about the GA analysis.  I thought I would add in a couple thoughts just in regards to these offline marketing landing pages that will hopefully help.  I would recommend in the future not choosing a url of /ad1 or /ad2.  I would try to come up with something that is easy to remember for users and has relevance to either the publication or what you are promotion.  For example /deal or /offer.  Another way to go would be to make something relevant to the publication like /grpress (Grand Rapids Press is a local newspaper where we're at)

The other comment would be to design this page as relevant to the ad, offer or just make it a true landing page and not do the redirection technique.  Make this page reference the ad and include a call to action related to what you may have placed in the printed publication.

I would make sure to include anchor text links to related pieces of content or old blog posts that apply to the same subject matter in the body content of the post.  Users are more likely to click on a link in a blog content area then they are to click on other navigation elements.  If there were a desired page on your website you were trying to direct them to specifically then you could use an attractive graphical "call to action" but that doesn't necessarily mean they'll visit the rest of the website fully.

I would be more inclined to see what about that post makes it very popular and play on that again.  Is there a possible follow up post you could do or another post on a similar subject?  As more great content begins to expand on the website and users continue to come they will notice other areas of the website that may also apply to them.

I believe that canonical tags are going to be the answer for you.  This would be a per page thing you would need to add, but if you add http://www.kitchensolvers.com/services/"/> on the Services page even if a spider navigates through one of your franchisees sections of the website and this happens: http://www.kitchensolvers.com/RochesterHills/services/ then the canonical tag will tell the search engines that they really need to see this page as http://www.kitchensolvers.com/services/

Depending on how much resources you have you may be able to find a developer who could figure this out and do it dynamically or manually is another option if you don't have a developer available.

If you are going to continue to write new articles on an ongoing basis the best platform for this info would be a blog.  The only thing that would make me lean away from that is if you said you just had a number of articles and only wanted to put those up, but didn't plan on continuing to produce new content.  If you are going to keep posting on a regular basis the blog is by far the better option.

Most statistics will tell us that contact forms with less fields usually look less "scary" and usually have better conversion rates.  So taking the 2 name fields and consolidating them into 1 field gave us the ability to get rid of 1 field and we actually found before/after that users were giving us their full name.

Short answer: Look at both.  Long Answer:The page authority is more important in my opinion because that is the page that would specifically be passing link authority to your site.  You may find a page you are trying to get a link from and it may be a really strong domain but at the same time it's a very large website and your link is 6 levels deep in the architecture and has a low page authority.  The link from this page with a low page authority would be a weak link, which is why I say page authority is more important.

The whole thing is whether having a blog on a sub-domain or sub-folder makes a difference.  Well since sub-domains do not inherently get any page authority from their root domain I see the sub-domain as a worse option.  They are not correct that it's the same.  The most common example I have heard and used is people who launch blogs on Wordpress.com.  If the blog is launched in a sub-folder then it is seen as more of a part of the main website and thus authority will translate better back and forth for you.  If you wanted an example from someone smarter than myself I would just look at the way SEOMoz does it...lol.

The most common problem I have when talking to clients about this issue is the way the original website was built.  Sometimes the platform or CMS they chose is restricting to a degree to allow common blog platforms to handle url re-writing correctly and various other factors.

If you are given the option I would recommend a sub-folder setup.  It may be easier for developers to do the sub-domain, which I usually hear from web developers.  As far as downtime... just do the switch on a sat or sun night.  I usually don't see that as a big deal and when thinking about the long haul I would rather have it setup correctly.

Really the only way to get the links fixed is to contact the webmasters of the websites and have them removed.  Either that or remove the destination pages url, move the content and move let the destination 404.  That would only be if the links pointed to a sub page instead of the home page, because obviously no one wants their home page to 404.

The next thing to focus on in my opinion is how bad these links are hurting you.  There are 2 ways I look at bad/useless links.  Search engines can just say a certain website is pretty much crap and that all links don't pass any value and are basically null to a link profile.  Then there is the really bad stuff that actually can affect you negatively.  In my opinion, I believe most links that are bad end up just being null or useless to your link profile.

Since you're concerned about the bad links and you want to attempt to remove them, first, I would put your effort into a "white-hat" link building strategy and then once you've built up more links you could go through and start to try and correct old spammy links.  That way you wouldn't have really lost any rankings for losing a handful or more of links if your profile, since you're replacing them with new links.

Use advanced segmentation and setup a custom segment.  Set that segment up so that it includes data from all sources, but excludes users who trigger a page view on whatever that specific brick and mortar page is.

I say this as a solution to your direct question, but you also assume that users who visit these specific pages are not going to trigger an e-commerce sale, which they could.  I totally see where you are coming from here because in most cases you may be correct.  You know your audience better than me.

Hi Julian,

Here's an article, "The Tweet Effect",  I read awhile ago on the SEOMoz blog that sounds like it will help support you. It was an experiment on how social media (in this case Twitter) can impact rankings. Not necessarily a quote, but I think you will be pleased to read the results and could find a way to factor it into your presentation.