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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.

Duplicate content is never a good thing and can be handled a number of different ways.  In this case I would do a number of things to make sure you are not causing confusion and ultimately segmenting out the link profile between multiple url's.  I would

• 301 redirect /home.php to /
• Install a canonical tag on the home page
• If you don't already have your Google webmaster tools registered go do that, and then under site configuration use parameter handling tell Google to ignore the query string parameter ?cat= and set that to ignore.

Even though you are getting multiple versions of your home page ranked, are they for different keywords?  I believe that if you fixed the duplicate content issues you would retain your rankings with your consolidated home page.

Hello Kyle,

That's a good question.  To my knowledge, I don't believe there is a way to split test that type of tracking in Google Analytics.  What I would recommend to facilitate the test is by using something like Website Optimizer to do a traditional split test and look at the abandonment rate per page to see if there is a large difference.

Another helpful strategy I have used in the past when people ask me about name fields is not using First & Last, but using Full Name.  Granted, depending on if you're feeding a database and those variable presets may not be very accommodating to that strategy.  Hopefully that could help as well.

On page optimization is only one factor of achieving the organic results you are looking for.  The next thing I would ask is how authoritative the domain and individual pages are from a link perspective.  If you haven't run the OSE tool on your home page and individual stock pages you wish to rank then do that, because that will tell you how strong or weak your website is from a link perspective.  You'll want to look into a link building strategy and will work best for your business/website.  On page optimization can set the foundation for your SEO strategy but links is what will give you the lift.

We'll start with the standard response from an SEO guy that references the Google Site Guidelines that basically says don't buy links.  If you find local niche directories that apply to your industry then technically there is nothing wrong with links from those websites.  They are a lot of times deemed as low quality, but still not a bad idea if you pick the right ones.  Yahoo Dir is paid and Google still sees that as a highly recognized link source.  As to whether that's worth $299/year is another debate.  The way that directories get around this is that you are actually paying for "inclusion" which means they have a human who reviews these links and includes quality websites.  Technically if you're not paying for the actual link then it's not against Google's Site Guidelines.

If the price isn't bad and it's a relevant local niche directory that applies to your website and industry I don't see anything wrong with employing that as a link building strategy.

Do not rely on just this as a link building strategy though.  Think of it as a component.

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 am actually unsure if SEOMoz's crawl report does not necessarily take into account all the ways duplicate content can be fixed.  Another thing that will create a similar affect is when you use Google webmaster tools to handle parameter handling.  I don't think it's as big of an issue to just have these popup in your crawl report.  We use these crawl reports as indicators to help us identify these issues.  If you've fixed the issues with best practice and seen positive results in the search engines that's really what matters.

The other thing I find useful when there is puzzling links to our clients websites is scanning through Google Webmaster Tools.  Go into the links section and it will find show you the exact url the link is located on.  This does though assume that the link on cnn.com is crawlable, indexable and has been displayed.  If the scenario is happening that EGOL mentioned then this recommendation will not help.

These returning visitors are not necessarily coming from the same source.  These users may have come through organic, direct or referral sources.  Then on their 2nd+ visit they went through an Adwords Ad.  The same user may have also clicked on multiple Adwords Ads as long as they do it naturally and the click doesn't get filtered by Google's click fraud algo.

There are a couple different strategies I would mention here that may help you out.  As far as "tools" I believe they are best used to find link prospects, because there aren't really any tools that will just get links for you (at least quality ones).  I would use OSE, which has free and paid versions.  Another free one would be Yahoo's site explorer.  In each of these cases I would say do some competitive analysis to see what links your sites competitors have.  Then contact these websites to see if you could get a link on their site as well.  A paid tool I have used and would recommend to help find link prospects as well is Raven's SEO Tools.

Another free link building technique I would recommend is trying to find guest blogging opportunities.  If you haven't made an account on MyBlog Guest then there platform might help you out to find these opportunities.  I hope these strategies can apply to your business/website because it really depends on what is available on the web and what will work for your website.

Google and other search engines know about XML files.  The reason I don't necessarily say indexed is because you don't see them really popping up on a SERP page.  Robots know the difference between a straight xml file and an rss feed because of the technical markup and structure of the actual file.

For example a very common use for Google and xml files is sitemaps, which you can give them the sitemap feed in Webmaster tools so they will know about the file.  If you did a search for www.rootdomain.com + sitemap file you would never see an .xml file actually popup.  You would need to visit the url directly.

Rather than having 10 separate blogs, I agree that you should have only one blog but make each student an author. That way the content will be aggregated and consistent rather than having your efforts thinly sliced.

There isn't really anything you can do to impact this.  This is not a good strategy for your competitor, and I'm not even sure how much it could potentially be benefiting them.  Google will realize the duplicate content and then serve the page that has a higher authority as the result that actually matters.  If I do a search for bozeman chevroletand montana chevy I actually see the Montana Chevy website coming up for it's root domain search, but even when I search the exact match Bozeman Chevrolet it doesn't even come up on the first page.  This tells me that Google has established the origin of the content and higher authority domain as the Montana Chevy website.  In reality that may be true or false, but that's what Google has decided.  If you run OSE reports on both domains you'll see why Google has decided the Montana Chevy is of higher importance because of all the links that point to it.

I would just let your competitor go about doing this, because I don't believe it actually gives them any real benefit.

Yahoo use to be the only ones who really took this into account, but since last year when Bing started running the technical side of their engine as well this pretty much become insignificant across the board.  Bing tries to be more and more like Google every day so I believe that taking time to use the tag (even though it may only take a measly minute or so) after you know the target keywords for your piece of content I still think the disadvantage of also showing your competitors what terms you are trying to rank for outweighs the hypothetical pro of thinking people still take this into account.

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/" />