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You don't want to do this in robots.txt.  If you serve pages with these parameters, people will inevitably link to them, and even if they're disallowed in your robots.txt file, Google maybe still index them, according to this: "While Google won't crawl or index the content of pages blocked by robots.txt, we may still index the URLs if we find them on other pages on the web."

This is what the rel=canonical tag is designed for.  You should use that to tell Google the page is duplicate content of another page on your site, and that it should refer to that other page.  You can read (and watch a video) about that here.

I had a similar problem going through my search query reports.  If you're already familiar with VB you could do this with a Microsoft Access database rather than setting up a MySQL one w/PHP.  I've been working on creating an Access database that I can import my data into, and have it spit out all sorts of useful info (for example negative keywords and placements), but it's only in its early stages right now.

If you just want to see it for a few terms and don't mind doing it one at a time, in the past I've filtered data like this in Excel without VB using advanced filters.  I found that using advanced filters rather than VB sped up the process quite a bit; I'd imagine because it's an innate Excel function. Using 4 filters you can match whole words in the queries.  For example, to find queries with "blah", you'd set a filter for "blah", "* blah", "blah " and " blah *".  Then you can use the Subtotal command to do calculations over the visible rows and calculate the data.

More about advanced filters: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel-help/filter-by-using-advanced-criteria-HP005200178.aspx

Yeah, it's your personalized results.  If you go to http://www.google.com/search?q=mixtapes&pws=0 (the &pws=0 removes personalization), you won't find it on the first page, or in the first several pages of results.

I agree 100% with EGOL to look at your quality scores.  If your scores are low for particular keywords, but the keywords look like they should be well-targeted, you might want to change your match type for those keywords.  Google has several: broad, modified broad, phrase, and exact.  If a broad match keywords isn't doing that well, you might want to change it to phrase, or exact.  The broad matching might be matching queries that aren't a good fit.  Here's what Google says about their match types.

There are a lot of features and targeting options that Adwords offers that you might not be taking advantage of.  Do you have sitelinks for your search campaigns?  Does it make sense to show ads on Google Image search?  If appropriate for your site, have you tried a remarketing campaign?  Have you tried YouTube advertising?  Do you run display ads with Banners/Rich media ads and text ads?  Have you tried targeting the display network with topics and audiences?  Are there sites and pages you always want to advertise on in the display network?  Most people start with keyword-driven campaigns for search and display, but there's a lot more too it.  Some of our best converting campaigns aren't keyword driven.

In my case, Enhanced CPC never really did any better than regular CPC, and conversion optimizer has consistently shown an improvement over regular CPC bidding.  I've heard other people say that conversion optimizer didn't do much for them.  The only way to know is to try it out and see how it goes and compare it to the history when you were CPC bidding.

You need to 301 redirect all these old URLs to their new counterparts.  If you just block them, people who have linked to these pages across the web will be getting 404 pages, so you'll be losing potential customers.  Also, you won't be passing the Pagerank along.

I'm not sure about your HTML sitemap; I don't think HTML sitemaps are a supported format for you to submit to Google (I don't see them on sitemaps.org).  You just need Google to crawl this page, and all the pages it links to?  There is a plain text format (see here) that is allowed for sitemaps.  You could probably change your HTML sitemap pretty easily to that format.

I'm pretty sure you're allowed to submit multiple sitemaps, but I can't find anything concrete saying you can or can't.  The Google Webmaster Tools UI seems to support it, so my guess is that it would be fine.  Try it and see if it works?  You could also create a sitemap index file that references both these sitemaps.

You can read more about sitemaps on sitemaps.org.  According to the Google help doc here, they adhere to these standards.

The ^ character makes it so your expression only matches the beginning of the request URIs.  If you remove it, all URLs with /japan-english will get picked up.  That sounds like it should work for you.

If you really just want those two instances, you can include both and separate them with a | which acts as "or" in regular expressions.

There's a nice guide for using regular expressions in GA at http://www.ppchero.com/analytics-regular-expression-characters/ if you want to read more about them.

This doesn't sound ideal.  So only the home page is under URL B, and the rest of the pages are hosted under URL A?  That would seem really strange to me as a user if I entered through URL B, went to another page, and the domain changed completely.

Ideally, you should 301 redirect everything under URL A to URL B rather than using rel=canonical for them.  There's no reason to host two identical sites like this.  It's fine for multiple sites to be hosted under the same IP.  Here's a really good SEOMoz blog post about using 301 redirects vs.canonical tags.

The A/B testing provider I prefer is Optimizely. You can do this all within their interface. Their support is fantastic so if you have issues they can help you resolve them quickly, even if it's just help on how to set up a particular test.

They also have a 30-day trial and you can test out their editor on the spot without installing anything to see how it works, just by entering your URL on their home page.

A few other things to note for having parameters in URLs:

• In Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Tools, you can instruct the search engines to ignore certain parameters, so that they'll treat domain.com/topic?keyword and domain.com/topic as the same page (if ?keyword doesn't change the page content)
• You can also place the rel=canonical element on pages.  So you could set domain.com/topic?keyword to rel canonical to domain.com/topic to pass its pagerank along.

I would definitely do this.  Since you have so many profiles, you'll want to have one main sitemaps linking to smaller sitemaps with the profile URLs.  One of the sites I work on has several million activities created by users that we put into sitemaps.  We automatically generate our sitemaps files frequently and add the new activities created.  We include a last modified date for each activity as well so the search bot will know if anything has changed since the last time it's indexed it.

I would create a sitemap system where all of your profiles could be found, and by including the last modified date, you can leave it up to the searchbot as to whether or not a profile has been updated and needs to be re-indexed.  There are a couple other properties you could use listed on http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.php as well.

When looking at conversions I usually look at my Conversions > Multi-Channel Funnels > Top Conversion Paths report.  Here, if you select a Primary dimension of "Source/Medium", a Secondary dimension of "Keyword Path", and set an advanced filter for Source/Medium containing "organic", you should see all the conversion paths that involve an organic keyword.

These are duplicate pages.  I'm not seeing a redirect from http://www.federalnational.com/About/tabid/82/Default.aspx to http://www.federalnational.com/about.aspx, nor is there a canonical tag telling the bot that http://www.federalnational.com/about.aspx is the canonical version.

Ideally, the platform could 301 redirect the first URL to the second.  Failing that, you could place a canonical tag in the header of the page to point to the /about.aspx page.

Not relevant to the question but I also noticed in the automatically created version of the page, the active class isn't getting set on the <a>for "About" properly so it's not getting highlighted in the header.</a>

So... if you have these set up as separate profiles, and have a profile that's just for the www.example.com subdomain, and have set up the scehdule a service action as a goal, you should be able to see this in your conversion paths report.  Go to Conversions > Multi-Channel Funnels > Top Conversion Paths.  Select "Source/Medium Path" as the Primary Dimension.  Now, if you filter by "example.com", this should show conversions that involve referrals from your subdomains (that aren't a part of that GA profile).  If you have many goals and only are interested in the schedule a service goal, then select only that goal at the top.

As is the case many times in Google Analytics, there's more than one way to skin a cat, but hopefully this works for you.

ref=nofollow is incorrect (according to this).  If it's ignored, it will pass all of its link juice.

If you think people may link to these landing pages, you'd be better off putting them on your main domain, so these pages help contribute to your main domains rank.  Generally it's better to put quality pages on your domain, instead of putting landing pages on these extra domains, and pointing them to your site.  It doesn't sound like your extra domains will have much pagerank to pass to your main domain.

Also, more importantly (for me at least), it would be strange to arrive at a landing page, and click a nav link, and arrive at a completely different domain that uses the same nav/header/footer.  I'd feel like there was some spoofing going on...

I'd just set up these extra domains to 301 redirect to my main domain, and leave it at that.

Head match means your goal URL has to match everything after your domain, not just the end of it.  In other words, you should be using /index.php/individuals/enroll-careplus-thank-you/ as your goal URL.

I'm not sure why Google's results would depend on how many results you're showing, but if either setting shows a URL, then it must be indexed, right?

Also of note, if you're interested in getting indexed in Bing too, I'd recommend setting up their webmaster tools as you can submit 10 URLs a day, and up to 50 URLs a month, to be indexed if Bing hasn't indexed your site yet.

Anytime!  Happy to help.

I think the point of the article was that you can serve the actual Facebook comments you get from this script on the page when GoogleBot crawls it, so the actual comments will be on the page and you can get the SEO benefits from the comments. Excerpt:

I was amazed by the simplicity of the code and that no authentication is needed. If you'll examine the code you'll also see that the comments can be styled easily to fit any site's layout. So basically you can now use Facebook Comments Box on your site and serve GoogleBot (or any other crawler/browser agent) with the comments to have them crawled & indexed. Obviously this won't be considered as cloaking as you're serving Google exactly what the users see (just like creating an HTML version for a Flash website).

A few things I noticed... on my way out of the office so this is all I got:

• Some canonicalization issues.  Both /search-engine-optimisation/best-seo-tools/ (trailing slash) and /search-engine-optimisation/best-seo-tools (no trailing slash) serve pages.  It looks like you go with trailing slashes, so the version without should 301 redirect to the version with.  Also with your home page, you use http://www.onlinemediadirect.co.uk/, but http://www.onlinemediadirect.co.uk/index.php also returns your home page.
• Your 404 page is kind of unfriendly.  It's better when you return your 404 page within the shell of your site, so it's easy to get back to where you meant to go.

Non-SEO stuff:

• The compass on your home page looks like Apple's Safari compass to me (http://www.apple.com/safari/).  That's the first thing I thought of when I saw the home page.
• I don't care for the dark text, and the animation/delay on the highlight of your dropdown menus.  The text is a bit hard for me to read, and the delay feels strange.

What you're describing should only report one goal success according to this, unless they're going to the thank you page in different browsers/devices?  Is it all the same person for sure?  Or could someone have shared this URL?

Sorry, I'm a little confused as well.  Why would you want people linking to your RSS feed instead of your original posts?  Why would you even want the RSS feed to be indexed and returned in search results rather than the original posts?  Wouldn't Google want to link people to the original post vs. the RSS feed?  Aren't RSS feeds supposed to be a feed of content already on your site... so I don't see why Google would have much of an incentive to spider it or return it in search results?

You can set up the goals in the subdomains profiles if you want to view goals there.  That's entirely up to you.  Each profile is its own thing.  When I say "filter", I mean write "example.com" into the search box there, and search by it.  You can also click "advanced" next to the search box, and make the search more granular if needbe.

Matt Cutts posted a video regarding this question: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8eQgx-njk4.  The answer is that it's ok to do.

Your meta descriptions aren't very long at 60 characters.  You could write longer meta descriptions that include more info specific to that watch.  Like, for http://www.traxnyc.com/Mens-Diamond-Watches-G-Shock-Watches-Casio-G-shock-Atomic-Solar-Watch-GWM5600-1V-item25463.html, the meta description is "Mens G-Shock Watches White Stainless Steel Item Price : $120", but the product is "Casio G-shock Atomic Solar Watch GWM5600-1V".  When this page appears in the SERPs (when I search for the page title at least), the meta description is short so Google fills in a lot:

Mens G-Shock Watches White Stainless Steel Item Price : $120. ... TraxNYC is a leading retailer of Diamond Jewelry in the heart of New York's famous Diamond District .... Full Size Picture for Casio G-shock Atomic Solar Watch GWM5600-1V ...

One thing it could be... in my GA account, almost all advanced segments cause my report data to use sampled data.  If this happens, you'll see a yellow bar off to the right above the graph that says something like "This report is based on 119242 visits (1.16% of visits). Learn more".  As it's taking a sample of a small amount of data and then extrapolating the rest, the numbers it displays in the report here can vary a lot from the true numbers.

The keyword data listed in the Traffic Sources - Organic report when not using an advanced segment won't be sampled, that's the actual true data.

To find out if your site is splitting domains, try going to different pages and seeing if they're served.  For example, go to http://example.com, http://www.example.com, http://example.com/, http://www.example.com/.  These should all end up with the same URL at the top when the page loads.  If it doesn't, that means your server needs to be configured to do these canonical redirects.  Depending on what software you use, this can vary, but the Q&A forum has had a lot of answers related to configuring redirects, so look there, or try Googling it.

I'm not sure it'll make a huge different if you decide to use example.com or www.example.com, but whichever you do choose, be consistent throughout your site.

If you really want to learn to get into the nitty-gritty of web pages, the main tool I use to view web requests, http headers, source, etc is Firebug, a Firefox Add-on. Chrome has something similar, which I think came pre-installed (if you can right click something, and choose "Inspect element", you have it).  To learn it, play around with it a bit.  The HTML tab in Firebug (Elements tab in Chrome) will show you the source of where you're selecting in the page.  The other tab it sounds like you'll be interested in is the Net tab (Network tab in Chrome).  Here you can see all the different files the page is loading, and you can view their statuses, headers, and responses.

Another tool I use frequently in Firefox & Chrome is the Web Developer Toolbar.  It lets you enable/disable a lot of different things (caching, images, CSS, JavaScript), and clear your cache with a few clicks.

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

Most of the time in GWT you can see the page where the referring link is coming from.  The crawl errors in GWT are links to your site, so if people use an invalid URL to link to your site, it'll show up as a 404 error in GWT.

In my experience when this happens en masse, some spammy site goes a little nuts and tries to link to a bunch of pages, but goofs something up to make the URLs 404s, like putting a extra space which renders as a %20, in the href at the end of the URL.

If it's a common mistake, you might considering putting a rewrite rule in to 301 redirect those 404 URLs to valid pages on your site.  You could also contact the webmaster of that site to fix the URL or URLs that are invalid (especially if it would be a valuable link).  Lastly, you can do nothing and ignore the errors.

I agree with SEOConsult all the way.  It's all correlation.  In my experience, .us domains tend to be worse (bad content, more ads, less well put together, bad user experience, etc) than .com domains, so I would expect those sites to do worse in the SERPs.  It's not the .us domain that's making the sites worse in general.  If you put together a terrific .us site, it would do fine.

The main issue I have with .us vs .com and .org.uk vs .co.uk is that people have to remember to enter those extensions.  If you have the yourbrand.us domain, a lot of people are going to put yourbrand.com in when trying to get to your site.  They may give up there.

Also, I am more likely to trust a .com domain over a .us domain, and I'm more likely to click a .com in the SERPs over a .us domain.  Do you have many .us domains you ever visit?  I can't think of any off the top of my head.  Even del.icio.us migrated to delicious.com.

Completely tangential to your question, but since you're using both Adwords and Google Analytics together, this opens up the possibility of using Google Analytics Remarketing to you.  With one very small change to your GA script, you can use set up remarketing lists based on Google Analytics data (including your custom variables and goals).  It's very powerful.

It sounds to me like you need a sitemap?  If you want to create one dynamically, here's a thread with some info.

You should also set it up in Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Tools and set them explicitly to not ignore those product parameters in the URL.

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

You can get Facebook comments to be indexable by search engines!  There was an SEOMoz blog post about it not that long ago at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/make-facebook-comments-box-indexable-by-search-engines.  If that's the only thing holding you back, it sounds like you don't have much to lose in trying it out!

On one site I work on all of the content is loaded with AJAX.  I've seen evidence that Google is indexing this text, because if I search for this AJAX content, Google is returning those pages on my site for which it appears on. There aren't many backlinks to these pages, and none that I've found with those phrases as anchor text. So if Google is finding this text out from somewhere else, I can't figure it out.

I'd still rather have our content loaded normally, but I wasn't given a choice, so I'm glad to see it's working.  I'd think long and hard before setting up HTML snapshots as given here: https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling/, as doing so would be a considerable amount of work, especially considering how far Google has already come with indexing AJAX content.

FYI, if you do remarketing with Google Analytics in Google Adwords, you cannot yet upgrade to Universal Analytics.  Universal Analytics is not yet compatible with the doubleclick-hosted version of dc.js.  So beware of that!

I believe that is commonly done with the meta refresh tag.  From http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection:

Meta Refresh

Meta refreshes are a type of redirect that is executed on the page level rather than the server level (They are usually slower and not a recommended SEO technique). They are most commonly associated with a 5 second count down with text "If you are not redirected in 5 seconds, click here". Meta refreshes do pass some link juice but are not recommended as an SEO tactic due to usability and the loss of link juice passed.

If the new name is more than 5 characters, I think you can just go to https://www.facebook.com/username and submit the request.

if that doesn't work or it's less than 5 characters, I recently had success through the following channel, and believe me I've tried everything to get an email for a real person or a real person on the phone.  When you log into your Facebook account, there should be an "Email support" link in the left nav.  I picked "Other" and send in information for the request, and someone actually contacted me and they processed our request!  Note that we have ~35K likes, and do spend a bit on advertising ($1-5$K/mo).

I would suspect they'd redirect the old URL to the new URL so it shouldn't be a problem to change it, but you'll want to confirm that with Facebook.  https://www.facebook.com/seomoz goes to their new moz page URL, so that's one case confirming my suspicions.

In the SEOMoz 2011 rankings report, it shows that exact match .com domains are 0.22 correlated with higher rankings, whereas exact match domain names (with other domain suffixes, like .us) are only 0.17 correlated with higher rankings.  So, it still appears that .com is still the boss.

The proper way to handle this is with rel=alternate hreflang tags.  This will tell Google the content is the same, but in different languages.  See http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=189077 for more info.  You can place meta tags on each page, or do it in your sitemap.

Other things you can do to help search engines get it right is to set up a profile in Google Webmaster Tools for each of the directories (or at least for the Thai one), and set the geotargeting.  For Bing, they prefer you set the country and language on each page (see here).

If you block the pages with robots.txt or use canonical tags, you're telling Google not to include those pages in SERPs.  It sounds like you want the Thai pages to appear in Thai results, and the English pages in English SERPs, so I wouldn't do that.

Since the category, subcategories, and product names will vary, you should do a regular expression match, not a head match.  Head match means it'll match everything from after the domain to a fixed point later.  It's usually used to ignore parameters at the end of a goal URL.

Do a regular expression match with a goal URL of  ?r= and you should be good to go.  The first backslash is there is to escape the "?", so it means a question mark instead of its special meaning in regular expressions.  This goal will match anything with a "?r=" in the URL.

Of course you can.  Any domain suffix can rank (unless excluded from Google altogether). Overall, .com's tend to rank the best. Take a look at http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors#metrics.

If you can get an exact keyword match for a suffix like .ly, it might be worthwhile over getting a .com domain that doesn't match as well.

You can only target to fans of pages you're currently an admin for.  Assuming this isn't the case, there is no way for you to do this as easily as "Target fans of page [competitors name]".

There are lots of other targeting options available on Facebook.  If you can somehow figure out who your competitors fans are (i.e. e-mail address, phone number, or Facebook ID), you could reach them with a Facebook custom audience.

Google won't penalize you for their links to your site.  You have no control over who links to you, and there's little you could do to get them removed.  I see new links for my sites come up all the time, and some are from these spammy sites.  I've never seen a penalty accessed.

If they did penalize sites for this, people would set up even more link farm sites just to link to their competitors.

The Google Webmaster set up sounds right to me!

You should set the rel alternate on all pages that go back and forth, not just the English pages.  That way if Google wants to return a Thai page to an English searcher, it'll know to reference the English page.  This is the set up Google recommends in their help documentation.

Don't worry about a new sitemap for the /th/ pages.  Your current set up should be fine.

I think you have to participate in their new Google Offers program (their version of Groupon), as that "View offer" button goes to an Google offer page.  Read more about it here:

• http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2079346/New-Google-Ads-Expand-Offers-Arsenal
• http://www.searchmarketinggroup.com/blog/sem/ppc/google-adwords-testing-view-offer-button/

Matt Cutts talks about it here.  And here's some info from the Google Webmaster Blog.  What he's recommending is to serve your mobile pages to Googlebot Mobile, and your regular pages to Googlebot.

And here a relevant Q&A question with some good answers.

This is no longer allowed.  Notice when you do this from interests, it says "People who have expressed an interest in or like pages related to SEOmoz.org".  This isn't necessarily mean you'll reach people who like the SEOmoz page, but people Facebook thinks are similar to people who like their page.  To reach fans of a specific page, you have to be an admin of that page.

Twitter does the same thing for their targeting, you can't target people who follow a specific account, but you can target people like those that follow an account.

Even better, here is a Q&A post about it: http://www.seomoz.org/q/has-anyone-found-a-way-to-get-site-links-in-the-serps