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Indeed. I tried to explain this truth to my employer once. He didn't get it. Now he's not my employer, and their site's traffic plummeted to 30% of what it was when I "spent half my day farting around".

Farting around isn't. It's accessing inspiration. It's competitive research. It's market research. It's natural link-building. It's accessing actionable information. It's expanding your mind to think outside the box of your perceptions. It's relationship-building. It's really important, even though it's difficult to forecast the ROI of such "R&D"

It appears that you have a sub-subdomain of the domain uk.com; not a unique domain.

Thus, your data reports that uk.com has 24 million links; but this data does not reflect links to your little subdomain of that bigger domain.

You may have meant to buy the domain http://www.ard.co.uk

{  www.ard. <-- the subdomain(s) } { uk <-- the domain } {.com <-- the TLD }

vs. { www. <-- the subdomain } { ard <-- the domain } { .co.uk <-- the TLD )

It's possible that your site has been penalized, though I don't see too many reasons why it would be in reviewing your OSE report. From a cursory investigation, I'd say you've done a great job earning the links pointing to your site... though if any trickery was involved, you may be penalized, so you may want to investigate how to get out of that trap.

I suggest you investigate the link profiles of the competitors who rank for almost all of your targeted terms. If your on-page SEO is truly better than there's, it's likely that their external link profile is earning them the rankings you desire. Learn from their strategy.

Your initial high rankings could have been related to QDF.

Mad props for replying --

This screenshot is from Google Analytics. My server logs, and other analytics software (clicky) don't report the same discrepancy. Since the owners of this website only check GA, I just wanted to figure this out so I can answer their question if they ever ask).

The code is installed correctly. It hurt a little to even consider that theory - though I did review the site firsthand and check....thanks for keeping me humble, tho! This site's bounce rate is about 12%, so I'm pretty sure it's not because of the visitor pressing the backbutton before the page loads (pageload lasts 2 seconds on average, and 95%+ of visitors spend over 10 seconds).

Still unresolved.... and this question is one of the few that seems to stick with me, since this one bizarre example makes all of GA seem less trustworthy. Lemme know if any other ideas spring up ---- Until then, I'll be like the attached images. 
Thanks again --

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I totally agree with you, Noah's Dad -- well put -- this isn't a game changing update for sites delivering keyword-rich relevant content.

More than anything else, it seems this KG update will do two things: improve the relevance of search results by better grouping useful information, and add an effect of "serendipity" to the results pages -- a vital characteristic missing from earlier SERPs.

Thanks Steve!

You got me thinking about a related issue -- if links that sent referral traffic were VALUED more than links that didn't, one could easily game the system by sending mechanical turk traffic through a link, or something similar... so if that's a factor, it's likely an irrelevant one.

Kind regards!

As long as there's a reference to the XML sitemap, in either configuration, you should be fine with the one sitemap.

If a link exists, and nobody clicks on it, could it still be valuable for SEO?

Say I have 1000 links on 500 sites with Domain Authority ranging from 35 to 80. Let's pretend that 900 of those links generate referral traffic. Let's assume that the remaining 100 links are spread between 10 domains of the 500, but nobody ever clicks on them. Are they still valuable? Should an SEO seek to earn more links like those, even though they don't earn referral traffic?

Does Google take referral data into account in evaluating links?

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**How to develop your ****_1-true-keyword _**into a topical theme:

• Determine your primary keyword(s) - 1-10 terms that you think describe your site well.

• List acronyms & jargon related to your primary keyword(s).

• List synonyms, plurals, and related phrases.

• Start adding modifiers to the set of words you've grown.

• Repeat the process with each "categorical topical theme" your site is about.

• Now you've developed a long list of targets, and it's time to prioritize.

• Do your research. Get data on the search volume for each keyword in your list. Determine searcher intent.

• Figure out if you have existing resources available to serve up for each keyword in your list.

• Go Pro at SEOmoz, and record each keyword's keyword difficulty score.

• Average out the ranking domain and page authority of the top 3-5 sites for each term you're targeting to better understand your playing field.

With this data, you can now make educated decisions about which keywords from your set to target first. You can evaluate which keywords might be the least difficult to rank for, and which might be the most rewarding to rank for, and make decisions that will truly optimize your search engine marketing efforts.

_ http://www.quora.com/Is-it-better-to-target-one-keyword-at-a-time-for-SEO-or-two+_

If you're localizing your keyword list, you can use a spreadsheet program like Excel or OpenOffice, or use online tools to append local terms (like area codes and city names) to your primary keywords list:

• Local Marketing Source developed this useful local keyword research tool which appends local search terms to your list of primary keywords.
• 5Minutes has a very useful tool for generating and appending local search terms to your targeted general keyword list as well.

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Sounds like you're doing it right!

You want your URLs to end in a trailing slash, and for the URLs that don't, you want a training slash added. If that's what's showing up in your reports and in your spot checks, you're doing great!

You may want to write a code that does this automatically -- e.g. that adds a trailing slash to any URL that doesn't have one, if that url doesn't inclue a filetype (to exclude bad things like /image.png becoming /image.png/)

Note: If you're on Wordpress, you might try a plugin like http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/smart-404/ to catch any bad urls that might rear their heads later -- it or something like it (if you're not on WordPress) would also likely take care of the redirection issue you're having altogether.