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We are about to relaunch a site that gets a lot of Google News traffic.

We are not changing domain, but the site structure is changing greatly, with the URLs of both news index pages and articles being shaken up.

Obviously, we've 301-ed every page to its closest equivalent on the new site. We've also got a news sitemap.

As we are not changing domain, is there anything further we need to do to help protect our Google News traffic.

On a related note, does anyone have a relaible way of measuring traffic from Google News listings in universal search?

Does Facebook Open Graph tags have any benefit to SEO? e.g.

We get a lot of brand searches, but even if they come from unrecognised search engines you'd expect them to be registered as referrals not direct, wouldn't you?

Does anyone else think that a large chunk of traffic labelled as "Direct" in your analytics isn't direct at all. When you analyse traffic trends it seems that a large percentage could just be browsers with their referring URL hidden so it only appears direct. Here's the evidence:

1. When we've been affected by major search algorithm changes, we've seen big changes in direct traffic as well as organic, but not in referral traffic.

2. If direct traffic is just bookmarks, typed-in URLs, and people clicking through from emails why is direct traffic 85% new visitors? We don't do any offline advertising, so you'd expect genuine direct traffic to be returning visitors -- either our brand loyalists or subscribers to our email newsletters.

3. If you segment direct traffic into new and returning visitors and look at a major algo update as discussed in 1), you find all the drop in direct traffic is from New Direct visitors, with no drop at all in Returning Direct visitors.

Can anyone explain who these New, Direct visitors are if not simply mislabelled new, search visitors. Cookie deletion can't be the problem (ie: they can't be Returning, Direct really) because the traffic doesn't behave like returning, direct (that is, it varies too much).

I'd be really interest to hear theories, and whether anyone has any figures on the extent of HTTP referrer blocking.

Playing with the trial version of this and it works really well. My boss is notoriously tight though -- is there a cheaper or free alternative?

I've tried a few proxy tools to try to see how my site looks from other global locations, but haven't found one that works very well yet -- or a list of reliable proxies around the world.

I need to do this to test various geo-targetted ads and other optimizations.

Can anyone make a recommendation? Thanks!

When I perform a "site:" search on my domains (without specifying a keyword) the top ranked results seem to be a mixture of sensible top-level index pages plus some very random articles.

Is there any significance to what Google ranks highly in a site: search? There is some really unrepresentative content returned on page 1, including articles that get virtually no traffic. Is this seriously what Google considers our best or most typical content?