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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:
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:
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.
They don't have an advantage in quality score solely because of their big brand names. They might have an advantage though for a few reasons:
By targeting niche items and queries, your ad text will likely be more specific to users queries than theirs, and hopefully you'll see a higher CTR (and quality score) that way. Also, make sure you're taking advantage of all the different types of targeting and ad extensions that Adwords offers!
We have a similar set up on our site. I set up GA profiles for each subdomain, a profile for the overall domain, and another profile for the overall domain that includes hostnames in the URLs (the set up for this particular profile is somewhat complicated but if you're interested I can guide you through it).
Thankfully you only need 1 Google Analytics script, but you'll need to set up filters for each subdomain profile. Find attached an image of the set up for one of our subdomains, which should help you get set up.
I like lowercase because when I type URLs by hand, I don't think to capitalize things. If you capitalize things, you have to get the casing right to make the URL valid (unless you're setting up all sorts of fancy redirects), otherwise you a 404 and are left scratching your head. Also, I agree with Dan that it looks better.
Hyphens vs. underscores is a classic question; Matt Cutts says to go with hyphens: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3SFVfDIS5k. I like that better too.
#1 Fix the misspelling on your home page title! "Pacakages"
#2 Reading the descriptions on the Google results page, the Student City one sounds a lot more interesting to me: "Epic events, celebs, DJs, parties & staff. StudentCity delivers the ultimate _spring break _experience! Want the best week of your life?" vs. yours: "Hanover, Maryland tour operator highlights worldwide travel packages. Photo gallery, company profile and information request forms available."
This is Google rebranding the hybid campaigns, and updating their algorithms for when you opt into both search and display in one campaign. I asked my Adwords rep about it, and he said we definitely do not want to try this having already set up campaign structures with Search and Display campaigns separately. Adwords best practices is still to run your Search and Display campaigns separately. Just thinking of having both in one campaign gives me a headache, because they're completely different animals. I'd set up a search campaign, clone it, and set the clone to display. This will make it 100x easier to tell what's going on at a glance in the campaigns.
I don't think a display campaign on its own would perform differently from the display generated from a Display Select campaign, although I haven't tested it so I can't be sure.
301 redirect chains are bad. If it's important to you to get the link juice to get from page A to page D, you should change it to just one redirect from A --> D. Matt Cutts talked to Rand about it on a whiteboard Friday http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-interview-googles-matt-cutts-on-redirects-trust-more:
Is It a Bad Idea to Chain Redirects (e.g. 301-->301-->301)?
"It is, yeah."
Matt was very clear that Google can and usually will deal with one or two redirects in a series, but three is pushing it and anything beyond that probably won't be followed. He also reiterated that 302s should only be used for temporary redirects...but you already knew that, right?
Sounds scammy to me, especially their "rapid backlinks" program. Many of the users on http://www.trustpilot.co.uk/review/clicksubmit.co.uk list their domains in their testimonials, so you should be able to see some of their work. Take a look at their backlink profiles and see what kinds of links they're getting. I listed the ones I came across before. I'd do it myself but I have pressing dinner plans I don't want to be late for!
From Google Webmaster Blog, April 9th, 2010 http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/04/using-site-speed-in-web-search-ranking.html:
While site speed is a new signal, it doesn't carry as much weight as the relevance of a page. Currently, fewer than 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed signal in our implementation and the signal for site speed only applies for visitors searching in English on Google.com at this point. We launched this change a few weeks back after rigorous testing. If you haven't seen much change to your site rankings, then this site speed change possibly did not impact your site.
Google doesn't frown on them, but I would really question their value at this point. You could probably put your money somewhere more useful. I really like EGOLs answer to http://www.seomoz.org/q/how-would-you-use-500-to-improve-your-site-s-visibility.
If you do want to buy a link, a good one is the Better Business Bureau. Here's a post about it. You can get a followed high PR link that way. There's also the SEOMoz directory list.
In Google Webmaster Tools, you can go in, and go to Diagnostics > Fetch as Googlebot. Once Googlebot fetches the page, you can click the "Submit to index" link.
In Bing Webmaster Central, go to Index > Submit URLs, and you can submit the page to be re-indexed there.
If you meta noindex, follow these pages, they won't appear on search result pages, but they'll still pass link juice. It won't increase the amount of link juice any of your indexed pages are getting however, so I'm not sure why you'd want to do that unless you want those pages removed from search engine indexes.
The search engines have gotten rid of link juice sculpting. Your next question might be whether or not you should start nofollowing links to your own pages to try to pass more link juice to important pages. That won't work either, as that only serves to burn the link juice the links would pass, it doesn't cause the followed links to pass more.
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.
The robots.txt (at http://adoptionconnection.org/robots.txt) is disallowing all bots from reading the site. Change it from:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
to:
User-agent: *
Disallow:
People will see your ads, and then go to your site, or search for it to find more information. In Adwords, for display campaigns, Google will show you "view-through conversions", which occur when someone sees your ad and didn't click it, but went to your site and converted. This happens (at least for us) more often that I would have expected. For some of our campaigns, almost 1/3 of our conversions are view-through conversions. Google doesn't track this for search ads, but yes, just having your name out there on ads will get people to look at your site, or remember it and search for it later.
It's not getting a boost from the search engine just because you buy their ads... it's because people will remember seeing your ads and then go and search for your site.
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.
You can have a page canonical to itself, so if you just add the canonical tags to all the pages, they'll appear on all of masked domains as well.
Thomas is right; if your goal is to get any of the vanity domains on search result pages, the canonical tags will prevent that. A better set up might be to have the home pages be different (with the reps name and information), and then have the rest of the pages on the site be duplicate content with canonical tags. To say the sites do not exist isn't really accurate... it just means you haven't set them up yet. 
Ryan, spot on as always.
One other thing, it sounds like some of the canonicals you're placing on pages would be better suited to 301 redirects, like correcting a URL for not having a trailing slash or not. If you can avoid using canonicals and use 301 redirects instead, that's the preferred method for resolving duplicate content issues. Canonicals are more for when there are parameters on the URLs, and you can't get away from serving the pages with those parameters.
From what I've read, they're indexing Facebook and Disqus comments on blogs. On the site I work on, on certain pages we load the main page contents via AJAX, and Google is reading and indexing that content.
I'd be wary of taking the time to put together HTML snapshots, as Google is getting better and better at this. You could set up a prototype of your AJAX solution and wait and see if Googlebot can index the AJAX loaded content.
Sounds like you need canonical tags on these pages, if you need those URLs to have those parameters on them (so you can't redirect them). There was just another question in the forum about putting canonical tags on aspx pages here.
If you have no idea what a canonical tag is, read these first:
If you turn Google instant search off, and then add "&pws=0" to the end of the URL after you perform a search and resubmit the URL, it should depersonalize and delocalize your search. Google takes almost everything it can into account in terms of browsing data, location, history, whether you're logged into a Google account, and more. So these searches won't take your location or user data into account, so they're the most general searches you can perform.
Check out http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-personalized-search for more info.
rel=canonical is more for when there are parameters on your URLs that you can't really do anything about. When you know one URL is being served, but should be another, you should use a 301 redirect. So in this case, you should pick which URL you like better, either with or without the trailing slash, and redirect one to the other. Google treats both of these as two completely separate pages, which is why you're seeing views on one and not the other. If you can't configure the redirect, then you could resort to rel=canonical.
If you have pages with similar content but not a lot of views, then 301 redirecting that page to another page with more views would be fine. That'll pass it's pagerank along, and good for people who find that original URL later, because they'll go to an actual page instead of your 404 page.
It's not considered cloaking when you're giving the same information in two different ways, an improved version for users, and a different version for the search bots which they can read. If you look at http://code.google.com/web/ajaxcrawling/docs/getting-started.html, the HTML snapshot method they're recommending is serving the bot an HTML snapshot of a page, rather than using AJAX to render it (or parts of it). This sounds similar to what you're doing.
If you're going to do it in phases, I'd do it as follows:
As long as there isn't a lot of lag between steps 1 & 2 I wouldn't worry too much about duplicate content, as there won't be links pointing to your blog under domain.com/blog, so Google likely won't even find it.
As a user, when I hover over those links, I'm going to think it's strange and annoying when that title text keeps appearing for every link. I doubt you're going to be fooling Google with that. It's blatant keyword stuffing. As for whether it's worth penalizing, I don' t know. I don't think Google takes the title attribute into account very much for rankings anyway...
I'd get rid of it them, or make the title text match the links it appears for.
I looked a bit more. If I had to guess why you're being penalized it's because your site doesn't have much in the way of original content. For example, go to a product page, like this one for a Brother ribbon cartridge. The description reads "Brother Black Ribbon Cartridge. This brand new Brother 1230 black ribbon cartridge is manufactured by Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM). 100% Manufacturer Guaranteed." If you stick that in Google, you'll see that you, along with every other printer site uses basically the same description, like printert.com, 123cheapink.com, inkcircus.com, etc.
You need to provide original content on your site that doesn't appear as duplicate content to Google. The blog is a good start. Having customer reviews, testimonials, and articles custom to your site are also good.
You might try taking a look at your competitors that are doing well in searches, and see what they're doing in terms of original content on their sites.
Google doesn't use them at all. Bing uses them, but mostly as a spam signal (see here). I wouldn't bother with them.
The disallow in robots.txt will prevent the bots from crawling that page, but will not prevent the page from appearing on SERPs. If a page with a lot of links to it is disallowed in the robots.txt, it may still appear on SERPs. I've seen this on a few of my own pages... and Google picks a weird title for the page...
If you put the meta noindex tag, Google will actively remove that page from their search results when they re-index that page.
Here was one webmaster central thread I found about it.
If you're adding and removing publisher tags and pixels all the time, it can make life easier. Especially if you don't have access to the source files generating the site and can't check in code yourself. If you're not editing or changing tags or pixels so much, I wouldn't bother. It won't help your rankings.
I've seen promotions where if you like a company, you can get a discount on your next purchase. Or let people know you'll be running promotions through your page, so they have an incentive to like you.
You can also run Facebook ads to get people to like you. They offer a lot of demographic and interest targeting, so you could target the right audience. Once you get a few likes, you can target these ads to people who have friends who like you, which makes it more likely for that person to add you, since they can see their friend already likes you.
Everything David said is great. A few other thoughts:
Remarketing lists with Google Analytics is pretty amazing. It'll let you create segments based on custom events and goals you have in your account.
If you're not happy with the performance and you have a good performing demographic for your site, try adding demographic targeting to your ad groups.
If you have Google reps, there are some exciting remarketing-related betas you can get into.
First, in answer to your questions:
If your sales are pretty steady, you can run a test to see if running a branded campaign bidding on your own name is worthwhile. Your organic traffic will go down a bit, but since people are looking for your company, your keyword quality scores will be very high, and you should be winning the auctions with relatively cheap bids. If anyone else is bidding on your brand keywords, it's almost always a good idea for you to be in there as well. Otherwise, it's worth testing to see if it has a positive ROI.
Your examples are a bit flawed... a query like "Nallys used cars" is going to trigger for all broad and phrase keywords targeting "used cars", which many companies are going to target. Also "la jolla cosmetic surgery centre" has "cosmetic surgery" which lots of people are bidding on.
Also, I saw ads for all of your examples above which you didn't see ads for (Best Buy, Victoria's Secret, and Office Depot).
URLs are case sensitive after the TLD, so these would appear to Google to be duplicate content. Theoretically, those could be two different pages. Ideally, you could 301 redirect all of one to the other. So if you're using lower case /category across your site, you would want to 301 all the /Category URLs to /category.
Some sites correct for capitalization in URLs, and some don't. Do you have internal links using both forms of "category"? If so, you should correct those to one form, as 301's don't pass all your link juice, so you'd create a bit of a leak.
You should be fine if the main content of the page is very similar. You can use canonicals across different domains, so different subdomains won't be a problem. You can use the tool here to check to compare two pages: http://www.webconfs.com/similar-page-checker.php.
With Google Analytics, you can set up multiple profiles to be driven from one GA tracking code. Just make sure you've set the tracking code to to track one domain with multiple subdomains. You can create additional profiles with filters on them, so you can have on profile for the www domain, one for the premium subdomain, and one with both.
Dana is spot on with the Google URL builder. If you're tracking in Google Analytics, this is the way to go. My favorite report for this is the Conversions > Multi-Channel Funnels > Top Conversion Paths report. Select "Source/Medium" as your primary dimension, and you'll be able to how conversions are going by whatever utm_source and utm_medium parameters you put into your URLs. You can add a secondary dimension of Campaign path to see how things are going by utm_campaign. You can then search by any of those to see when campaigns are driving conversions. I do that all the time.
So for your banner campaign targeting different categories of sites, if they're all with one provider, I'd set a consistent utm_source and utm_medium, and vary the utm_campaign by the different campaigns you mentioned there as examples (sports, moms, entertainment, etc.). If you're doing banners through Adwords, you can turn on "auto-tagging" which will automatically tag your ad URLs for you. See here for more info on that.
The easiest thing to do for TV campaigns is just to have www.example.com/tv redirect to your landing page with the utm parameters on it. For example, have www.example.com/tv redirect to www.example.com/tvlandingpage?utm_source=tv&utm_medium=cpm&utm_campaign=hulu-ad or something along those lines. Since people coming from the TV are not being referred to you by another site, you shouldn't lose any referral data with the redirect.
Take a look at the following recent posts and Q&A thread about content creation in "boring" niches (not to say cheese is boring). They seem relevant to your question with regards to generating content:
You can't really avoid doing the math to figure out the probability that the better ad is actually besting the older ad. It's a function of both the impressions and clicks so it's not easy to eyeball. I threw together a little spreadsheet that should do the math for you if you put in the click and impression data. I checked it with some data and I think it's working. It'll calculate whether we're 90% sure, and 95% sure which is better. Just put in your ad numbers and you should be good to go! Usually, if the 90% variation matches up with my expectations, I go with it. Otherwise, you might wait for 95% just to be sure.
My worksheet: http://www.mediafire.com/?pmu2mc6n5f6vw5s
A/B testing people deal with confidence intervals all the time, so they know their stuff. Here's some reading about it if you're interested:
Hope this helps!
The new domains have no domain authority yet, as they are new and likely have few backlinks, so it makes sense they'd rank poorly to start. Now you'll have to build links to these new domains individually. The nice thing about your set up before is that all of your domains pooled all of their domain authority within one domain. Hopefully having the different ccTLDs will pay off for you down the line.
This is a good time to 301 redirect your old pages to their new counterparts. That should help your new domains because the link juice from those pages will flow to your new domain. If you weren't redirecting those pages to begin with, that could be the cause of your rankings being so poor. In that case though, I would imagine the old site would be outranking the new ones?
Getting any site off the ground is hard. You gotta pound the internet pavement (so to speak). What I would do is find where your potential customers or users are, and get them to engage with your site. This could mean forums, social networks (Facebook, Twitter, G+, Quora, Instagram, LinkedIn, etc), or possibly PPC. If you're not selling something, getting a good return on ad spending can be hard.
Do you guys have experience managing PPC? There's a lot you can do with display advertising these days (retargeting, custom lists in Google Analytics, similar users, managed placements, demographics, audiences, topics, and so on). You might consider tuning your budget down and only keep the highest ROI campaigns enabled, and devote the rest of your budget to other efforts.
So what the plus does is enforce the word is used in the users query. For example, if you had:
The first would enforce that both "buy" and "widgets" are in the query. This would match things like "buy cheap widgets", "buy widgets now", "i want to buy some widgets", etc.
The second would only enforce that "widgets" is in the query, and would allow Google to do broad matching against the word buy. The second could match the same queries as the first, but also additional queries like "purchase widgets", "get cheap widgets", "buying widgets", etc. Without the plus, Google can swap out the word "buy" for other similar words.
Make sure you're setting your location for your domain/subdomains/directories correctly in Google Webmaster Tools.
For Bing, you'll want to set the language and location targeting on your page, via meta tags or HTTP headers: http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/webmaster/archive/2011/03/01/how-to-tell-bing-your-website-s-country-and-language.aspx.
If you're going to have duplicate content across multiple languages, be sure to read: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/12/new-markup-for-multilingual-content.html.