Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I will look in to this. But it sounds like its a simple matter of spammy comments / and or BOTS linking to your site.

Thanks for the link, however, it only brings me to some XML page. A trackback is generally this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trackback. Its used by blogs to give a mechanism with which to allocate responsibility as it relates to people linking to your blog. Could you let me know which CMS you are using please?

trackback errors? Could you elaborate a little, is it a wordpress site? Are you using a CMS to manage the content? Drill down a little bit and hopefully I (or any of the multitude of talented SEO's) can help.

Cheers,

TODD

any other help you need give me a shout!

It might have been covered but it does seem that google is ignoring iframes in relation to commets code posted on sites.for instance: our text cached version.: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:8IZ95GICp7AJ:gaveltek.com/seoblog/&hl=en&gl=us&strip=1

compare the page title to (use headers it easier)

www.gaveltek.com/seoblog the list "comments" and despite there being some the are  not posted. However, I do believe general wordpress comments hold some weight. That is not to sayt that facebook comments do not, its just done via different metrics, like social, and trust, and egngagement.

Cheers

TODD

I am pretty familiar with the challenges with machine learned list generation. There are so many quality indicators that can be faked.  headed up some similar projects to make these exact things viable. I feel your pain. I appreciate the one on one. Dont be a stranger. exchanges like this are what make seo what is.

P.s. one thing we did is look for any directory, scrape its categories based on their listings, rank them based on PR, and multiple other strength indicators. Then filter through the list by seeing who charges, who doesnt, and who exists

and the amount of outbound links on pages with less than 100 links, are they blog rolls, are they etc...

todd.

I wish you the best.

TODD

Rand,

Well thought out reply. I am very sensitive to time constraints when apportioning time to give attention to the step children of our projects.  Pehaps leveraging some of your existing clientele with a value added proposition(free time, part time contract, t-shirt), would take that task of your hands and give someone a little extra moz pride, without sounding needy of course It would certainly not make anyone feel that the product they pay for is only going to be updated if they do it themselves. The double win is super valuable as it clears up the time constraints for you and really steps up a a simple, but valuable product, and updated and frequently.

Thanks Rand.

TODD

HI!
I am generally not a fan of saying "one is better than the other"  so in the tradition of my style of communication I offer you this:

http://code.google.com/mobile/analytics/docs/#highend

Google goes on to say "You can use Google Analytics to track traffic to your regular website that comes from high-end mobile devices like iPhones, Android devices, and the Palm Pre. All traffic from high-end mobile devices can be viewed by device or carrier under the 'Visitors' section in the 'Mobile' tab of your Analytics account, or in he 'Mobile advanced' section."

Suffice to say (while i am sure there are other methods) the majority of the heavy lifting can be done directly through the vanilla old analytics.  Here is a brief overview of what you are trying to do.

http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/beginners-guide-to-mobile-seo-11793

Here are a list of 3rd party analytics provider: (I put not stock in their offering, nor do I endorse it)
http://www.flurry.com/product/analytics/index.html

And one last piece of GREAT data from our friends at google about setting up exactly what you need:

http://www.project83.com/blog/installing-google-analytics-on-a-mobile-website/

At the end of they day it depends on what you are most comfortable working. For me, its whats best for the type of data we are looking for. I really hope this helps. I can understand you have a lot to read, but ultimately its which suite offers you exactly what you need. in m y experience google analytics is by fare the most customizable by far. Please let me know if I can help, or you would like to drill deeper into some of the subjects covered. it can be overwhelming at least. Happy Thanksgiving!
TODD

Great post, appreciate it.  However, I was surprised by your request / recommendation that those paying for this service ( i believe its listed as a perk) should be responsible for policing it. The fact is the list needs constant updating as sites like these come and go so quickly. I am hoping to shed light on that fact, not just to simply bandaid the problem. Furthermore a lot of the directories listed do not correspond with the best practices espoused by those involved in this organization... paid links, bad neighborhoods, etc... etc...

Thought it was noteworthy.

Cheers

There are a lot of levels here, but I will address only the URL format. It is accepted practice and generally considered more effective to:
http://www.blahblahblah.com/blah as opposed to a subdomain(blah.blah.com).

the part that will be up for debate is the sitetowndirectory.com questions. I feel its a great idea for you to build a brand around whatever name you choose. This takes a lot of good old fashioned SEO but with the help of the community here you will be just fine. At the end of the day its up to you to make your domain work for you. There is some benefit to keyword rich domains, but these days we see a real trend towards brand, brand recognition and brand trust.

Feel free to shoot me a message if you need more specific information.

someone wrote a pretty good article discussing the use of javascript in navigations, here is the link:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/working-with-navigation-in-seo

There are a lot of levels here, but I will address only the URL format. It is accepted practice and generally considered more effective to:
http://www.blahblahblah.com/blah as opposed to a subdomain(blah.blah.com).

the part that will be up for debate is the sitetowndirectory.com questions. I feel its a great idea for you to build a brand around whatever name you choose. This takes a lot of good old fashioned SEO but with the help of the community here you will be just fine. At the end of the day its up to you to make your domain work for you. There is some benefit to keyword rich domains, but these days we see a real trend towards brand, brand recognition and brand trust.

Feel free to shoot me a message if you need more specific information.

This code you posted seems to be working wonderfully. The link you posted is a thread to a plugin we dont use, but I so very appreciate your time. I would say you are doing just fine (regarding your comment about you not being and "expert") Thanks again!

We do the same, however, I am looking for a third party (other the GA) specifically for facebook that is friendly with some serious reporting.

Thoughts?

NO problem! Was it helpful?

Hola!

google has this to say about submitting sitemaps "Submit a Sitemap to tell Google about pages on your site we might not otherwise discover." ala Webmaster tools. I stand firmly behind your inkling to create a good standard issue sitemap and submit. Last week we had a client (attorney) who did not have a sitemap at all for the three years her site was up, google had about 22 pages in its index, after sitemap, 432 pages in its index.  Be sure to submit to BIng webmaster tools as well, cover all bases!

so I say create right away, its not going to hurt anything, and can quite honestly help a lot! as a footnote to this answer, if you are using videos, etc... on the site be sure to build a video sitemap as well we have been seeing a lot successful indexing of our clients media.

Hope this helps!

The plain old simple fact about deleting twitter accounts is that you will lose followers and potential opportunity to shed some light on your brand and service (no to mention build some pretty solid links to great content). The idea in having foreign twitter accounts is to be able to adequately represent the locals in their own language, destroying the language barrier and bringing everyone a warm fuzzy. So take a good look at your referral sources, conversions from twitter vs the amount of time and energy your staff is taking to manage all these accounts. That equation should spit out a suitable response.

That being said my two companies have 1 twitter account each and employees are able to create their own and tweet as they wish (within reason) we have been able to get followers from most developed countries and tweet entirely in english, with a smattering of foreign words here and there.

in the end your analytics and referral data should be more than enough to answer any questions of effectiveness you might have.

Raven tools (and soon SEOmoz) has some potent Social Tracking / Social Mention features, maybe take a look at those as well.

You bring up a really interesting question. When you say dead links I assume they just lead to nowhere. Ideally you would 301 Redirect (which will pass most of its value to another page therefore keeping some of that SEO steam you have built up) to a page that allows the user to continue to search for similar or related products, keeps them on site with out scaring them away with a "File Not Found" error on their page, etc... I am not familiar with Shopify so I am not sure if its possible. Might be helpful if you were to post one of these links so that we can all take a look at it and work it out as a team.

In the past month have you done any of the following:

1. Employed a less than ethical link builder?
2. Written any new content
3. Switched hosts
4. Implemented any re-directs or any other DNS / Server Side coding?
5.  When you search are you turning off personalized search (&pws=0)
6. Tried searching from a different computer

**please list your URL and Ill see what I can tell from my end. Keep in mind that these things generally happen for either very good reasons, or for no reason at all.  **

HI!
I am generally not a fan of saying "one is better than the other"  so in the tradition of my style of communication I offer you this:

http://code.google.com/mobile/analytics/docs/#highend

Google goes on to say "You can use Google Analytics to track traffic to your regular website that comes from high-end mobile devices like iPhones, Android devices, and the Palm Pre. All traffic from high-end mobile devices can be viewed by device or carrier under the 'Visitors' section in the 'Mobile' tab of your Analytics account, or in he 'Mobile advanced' section."

Suffice to say (while i am sure there are other methods) the majority of the heavy lifting can be done directly through the vanilla old analytics.  Here is a brief overview of what you are trying to do.

http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/beginners-guide-to-mobile-seo-11793

Here are a list of 3rd party analytics provider: (I put not stock in their offering, nor do I endorse it)
http://www.flurry.com/product/analytics/index.html

And one last piece of GREAT data from our friends at google about setting up exactly what you need:

http://www.project83.com/blog/installing-google-analytics-on-a-mobile-website/

At the end of they day it depends on what you are most comfortable working. For me, its whats best for the type of data we are looking for. I really hope this helps. I can understand you have a lot to read, but ultimately its which suite offers you exactly what you need. in m y experience google analytics is by fare the most customizable by far. Please let me know if I can help, or you would like to drill deeper into some of the subjects covered. it can be overwhelming at least. Happy Thanksgiving!
TODD