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I'm with Alick300, using an event on the onclick event on the link is the way to go.  If you run jQuery on your pages, it should be pretty easy to select all the links going to tripadvisor.com and attach the goal tracking event code after the page has loaded.  It'll be 1 line of jQuery code... you shouldn't need to go through and add this to thousands of links by hand.

I think all the implementations work just about the same.  We chose to do it in our sitemaps because that was the easiest for our developer to implement.  You should choose one or the other, there's no need to do multiple implementations.

You should be able to can control the rate at which the bot accesses you pages by adding a crawl delay in your robots.txt file. Robots.txt and crawl delay is discussed here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots_exclusion_standard, and Slurp bot here: https://help.yahoo.com/kb/SLN22600.html.

Should look like this in your robots.txt file:

User-agent: Slurp

Crawl-delay: 30

The crawl delay is the number of seconds the bot should wait between pageview (ask your IT guys what's appropriate for you).  I stuck 30 in there, meaning the Slurp bot would only be able to access up to 2 pages a minute.

If you're trying to include this script in the Optimizely editor, it wouldn't work because the code in the editor is already Javascript, so it's like you're trying to next a

(This is all speculation as I've never done this before.  There are probably people in the forum that have)

Be aware you're switching from a ccTLD to a gTLD.  Is the clinic primarily for Canadian residents?  In the simplest terms, switching from a .ca to a .clinic may hurt your Canadian rankings, and help your rankings everywhere else.  If you want your site to continue targeting Canadians specifically, you can set that in your Google Webmaster Tools, although I think having the .ca domain itself is a stronger indicator to Google that your site is geared towards Canadians.

Keri has it right, you can include or exclude users based on pages they've visited or actions they've taken on your site.  So you can target people who visited a certain page (or did something like added an item to their cart), and then exclude those who have checked out.

There's a bunch of remarketing features within Adwords, like Dynamic remarketing for retailers, remarketing lists for search ads, & Google Analytics remarketing.  Beyond Adwords, there's Facebook, Twitter, and partners to get remarketing ads on placements outside of the Google Display Network, like Adroll and Doubleclick.

Have you tried any of Google's bidding algorithms, like Conversion Optimizer, ROAS bidding, or enhanced CPC?  Google will take device (or at least browser) into account when adjusting bids with these, so you should see your tablet spend drop off if you're using one of these algorithms.

This is sort of a random aside, but I read about someone trying to only use Adwords geared towards a certain browser by reading the user agent of the browser after someone clicked an ad, and only including a conversion script on landing page when the user was using the right browser.  Then you could set Conversion Optimizer to using a CPA equivalent to the CPC you're looking for, and Google will stop showing ads to those other browsers since they're not converting.  Pretty clever, but I've never done anything like that myself.

Adwords will attribute the conversion to the last click, provided it happened within the last 30 days.

Some examples may help clarify this:

• If someone 2 weeks ago clicked an ad, and later clicks a remarketing banner and converts, the remarketing campaign will get the credit for it, and the search campaign will not see a conversion.
• If someone clicked an ad 6 weeks ago, and comes back directly to your site and converts, no Adwords campaign would get a conversion.
• If someone clicks an ad, and then viewed a remarketing banner, and remembered to go back and buy from your site without clicking the ad, then the original ad would get credit for the conversion, and the remarketing campaign would not show a view-through conversion, since the conversion is being attributed to another campaign on your site.
• If someone visited your site organically, and then viewed a remarketing banner, and remembered to go back and buy from your site without clicking the ad, you'll see a view-through conversion for the remarketing campaign.
• If someone clicks an ad 6 weeks ago, and then sees a remarketing banner, and remembered to go back and buy from your site without clicking the ad, then you'd see a view-through conversion for the remarketing campaign (since it's outside of the 30 day conversion window).

You can see the different conversion paths within Google Analytics.  My favorite report is the Conversions > Multi-Channel Funnels > Top Conversions Paths report.  I usually view it with a primary dimension of Source/Medium Path, and add a secondary dimension of Campaign Path (make sure at the top Path Length is set to "All", and you have the appropriate types of conversions selected).  This will show the conversion paths for all of your conversions.

Hope this helps!

You should try A/B testing this change, so you know which is better!  The best A/B testing provider out there is Optimizely.  I can't speak more highly of their software and support.  If you don't want to pay, Google Analytics has a built in testing tool called Experiments.  Back when it was Google Website Optimizer, it was a far cry from Optimizely in terms of setting up and deploying experiments.

You have this right, more or less.  For display remarketing, they only require 100 people to be cookied to start serving ads, according to this.  People will cycle in and out of the list based on when they were cookied, like you outlined in your question.  So the list will increase for 60 days, and then likely will steady out if your traffic is relatively steady as new visitors arrive and non-recent visitors are removed from the list.

If you get Adwords remarketing up and running and it's working well, try it out on more pages or flows on your site.  If you want to try it out based on events on your site, you try Google Analytics Remarketing without adding more code to your site (note that this type of remarketing is not supported for search remarketing).  When it's time to branch out, there are a few more larger platforms you can try out remarketing on:

• Remarketing outside of GDN (we use and like Adroll for this)
• Twitter
• Facebook

Add it to your site.  You want people to know the blog is part of the site, and you want people to be able to get from your site to the blog and vice versa easily.  Also, you want your site's rankings to benefit from the traffic you bring in via the blog, and vice versa.

To make it be treated as part of your site, you should set it up under a URL like mysite.com/blog, vs. blog.mysite.com.  The subdomain approach will get your blog treated like a new site.

Setting pages to 404 should be enough to remove them after Google indexes your page enough times.  Google has to be careful about this, because when many sites crash or have site maintenance, they return 404 instead of 503, so Google wouldn't want to remove pages from their index until they're sure the page is gone.

Google talks about removing pages from there index here.  The Google Webmaster Tools URL removal tool is only intended for pages that urgently need to be removed, so I wouldn't recommend that.  Google recommends:

• If the page no longer exists, make sure that the server returns a 404 (Not Found) or 410 (Gone) HTTP status code. This will tell Google that the page is gone and that it should no longer appear in search results.
• If the page still exists but you don't want it to appear in search results, use robots.txt to prevent Google from crawling it. Note that in general, even if a URL is disallowed by robots.txt we may still index the page if we find its URL on another site. However, Google won't index the page if it's blocked in robots.txt and there's an active removal request for the page.
• Alternatively, you can use a noindex meta tag. When we see this tag on a page, Google will completely drop the page from our search results, even if other pages link to it. This is a good solution if you don't have direct access to the site server. (You will need to be able to edit the HTML source of the page).

Is there a reason you are 404'ing these pages rather than redirecting them?  If these pages have new pages with similar content, you should do a 301 redirect to keep the link juice flowing and to take advantage of these pages being linked to.  If you do continue returning 404 for these pages (or even if you don't...), make sure your 404 page is a useful one, that helps users find the page they're looking for (Google help article).

Also, Ryan, I'd be interested in hearing the results of using the 410 status code.  I would imagine that status code would do the trick!  I'm surprised I haven't read about this more, or why it's not mentioned in the help file linked to above.

Nofollowing links doesn't sculpt link juice, it burns it.  Doing this to internal links is bad, as you're wasting your own link juice!  If I don't want a page on my site on the SERPs, I'd much rather set a meta noindex, follow tag on the page I don't want indexed rather than nofollow links to it.

To explain burning vs. sculpting, here's an example.  Say page A has 6 votes of link juice to pass, and links to 3 other pages, B, C, and D.  If all the links are followed, it'll pass 2 votes to each page.  However, if you nofollow the link to page D, it won't give 3 votes to B and C, it'll give the same 2 votes to B and C, and the 2 votes that should have gone to page D go nowhere.  They're burned.

If instead you set a meta tag on page D to noindex, follow, the link juice will flow in and out of page D, so that would be much preferred.

Add canonical tags to all the https pages that have a http counterpart pointing to the http version.  Here's the original Google Webmaster Blog post about canonical tags: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html

I do!  If you log into Bing Webmaster Tools, and go to the Crawl Settings, you'll see a new checkbox at the bottom, with the option "Configure your site to have bingbot crawl escaped fragmented URLs containing #!."  According to the Search Engine Land post here, "It appears as though this means Bing will crawl #! URLs according to the Google standard. The help information hasn’t been updated, so it’s hard to say for sure."

It sounds like this is the option you're looking for?

You used to be able to do this, but PageRank sculpting is no longer valid.  I wouldn't nofollow any internal links.  Nofollowing links burns the PageRank rather than sculpting it.  Here's an example:

Page A links to Page B, C and D.  Page A has 6 link juice "votes" to cast to these pages it links to.  Page A passes 2 votes to each page, B, C and D.

You nofollow the link to page D. Now page A passes 2 votes to page B and C, and no votes to page D.  2 votes are lost by the nofollow.  It doesn't pass 3 votes each to pages B and C.

It won't hurt the site.  You only need one if you want to disallow parts of your site to search engines, or disallow different search bots.  If you don't have any pages or directories to disallow, I wouldn't worry about it.

Adwords will attribute the conversion to the last click, provided it happened within the last 30 days.

Some examples may help clarify this:

• If someone 2 weeks ago clicked an ad, and later clicks a remarketing banner and converts, the remarketing campaign will get the credit for it, and the search campaign will not see a conversion.
• If someone clicked an ad 6 weeks ago, and comes back directly to your site and converts, no Adwords campaign would get a conversion.
• If someone clicks an ad, and then viewed a remarketing banner, and remembered to go back and buy from your site without clicking the ad, then the original ad would get credit for the conversion, and the remarketing campaign would not show a view-through conversion, since the conversion is being attributed to another campaign on your site.
• If someone visited your site organically, and then viewed a remarketing banner, and remembered to go back and buy from your site without clicking the ad, you'll see a view-through conversion for the remarketing campaign.
• If someone clicks an ad 6 weeks ago, and then sees a remarketing banner, and remembered to go back and buy from your site without clicking the ad, then you'd see a view-through conversion for the remarketing campaign (since it's outside of the 30 day conversion window).

You can see the different conversion paths within Google Analytics.  My favorite report is the Conversions > Multi-Channel Funnels > Top Conversions Paths report.  I usually view it with a primary dimension of Source/Medium Path, and add a secondary dimension of Campaign Path (make sure at the top Path Length is set to "All", and you have the appropriate types of conversions selected).  This will show the conversion paths for all of your conversions.

Hope this helps!

I believe that Googlebot doesn't look at anything in the URL after a #, so you should be fine.  Check out this from trusted Google engineer John Mu, or this.  You should be fine in terms of duplicate content, and I don't see why Google would associate this as an affiliate or paid link or anything like that.

Like and share are different.  Sharing will just give you the option to post something on your wall, but you won't "like" it.  Here's an article which should give you some info about implementing share buttons.  From what I've read, it looks like Facebook will be phasing out shares for likes at some point, so who knows how long share will be around.  Share is a little outdated, since when you like something, you also have the opportunity to share it on your wall.  If you're going to share something on your wall, don't you like it?

Huffington Post allows you to do both on their articles. For example, see here.

In response to your reply on Nicholas' answer, I think there is some control by site on how the additional text you can write on your wall when you "like" something.  Maybe there is some psychology involved, where if you click "share", you're more prone to adding a comment about what you're sharing, and with "like", you're less prone to adding text when you post it to your wall.