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I was just wondering this too... is there anyway to look back more than 3 pages in Google Analytics?  Or are there other analytics providers that do this sort of thing better?

Your best bet is to place a meta noindex tag on each secure page.  If it's only a few pages, you could just add it by hand.  If it's many, you should be able to access each pages protocol with whatever server-side language you're using, and dynamically add it on all secure pages.

If you use robots.txt to exclude the pages, Google can still show them in search results, with the description below them that reads, "A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt – learn more."  Personally, I don't care for that.

Can you try wrapping only the message about Javascript with the googleoff/googleon comments, and see what happens?  It you don't have to put it around everything in the

<noscript>. I would agree that it sounds like the structure of your site is not ideal, but I'd try that first and see if it solves the problem.</p></noscript>

I had a similar problem, Google was picking up

<noscript>text and using it as the description for our pages in some SERPs.  We didn't want to remove them, so we tried using "googleoff" and "googleon" tags, which are just HTML comments that Googlebot can read.  You can read their documentation <a href="https://developers.google.com/search-appliance/documentation/68/admin_crawl/Preparing#pagepart" target="_blank">here</a>.  We wrapped the text in the <noscript> with these comments, and it worked like a charm, so it does look like Google respects these tags.</p> <p>If I were you, I'd go ahead and add the syntax if it's easy for you to do (i.e. only have to add it a few places in the code, not in thousands).  It's probably not great for your SEO that Google thinks your site is about Javascript.  Or you can do what Frederico says and remove it.  Only you know your user base, but he's probably right.  Almost everyone for the most part everyone has Javascript enabled these days.</p> <p>I originally read about this in the Quora thread <a href="http://www.quora.com/Quora/Why-hasnt-Google-banned-Quora-for-hiding-answers-from-search-engine-visitors" target="_blank">here</a>.  Quora Uses it to control what text Googlebot can index on their pages.  If you want to see an example of it on my site, you can view one of our skills <a href="http://www.ixl.com/math/pre-k/identify-circles-squares-and-triangles" target="_blank">here</a>.</p></noscript>

You can actually look this up in Google Display Planner.  Log into your Adwords account and go to Tools and Analysis > Display Planner.  Select the topic for World Localities>San Antonio under the Individual targeting ideas tab.  "Texas > San Antonio" should show up in the box in the upper right.  Now, select The Placements subtab, and Sites.  this will give you a list of sites Google thinks is relevant to this topic.  The top ten are <a class="sMDB" title="sanantonio.com">sanantonio.com, </a><a class="sMDB" title="kens5.com (MojoPages.com, Multiple locations)">kens5.com, </a><a class="sMDB" title="beaumontenterprise.com">beaumontenterprise.com, </a><a class="sMDB" title="thesanantonioriverwalk.com">thesanantonioriverwalk.com, </a><a class="sMDB" title="tubetexas.com">tubetexas.com, </a><a class="sMDB" title="mywesttexas.com">mywesttexas.com, </a><a class="sMDB" title="riverwalkguide.com">riverwalkguide.com, </a><a class="sMDB" title="hillcountrycurrent.com">hillcountrycurrent.com, </a><a class="sMDB" title="zacktravel.com">zacktravel.com, </a><a class="sMDB" title="corsicanadailysun.com">corsicanadailysun.com.</a>

Of all Google's targeting options, I've had the least success with Topics.  I'd recommend picking sites from the list that appears, and target them directly via Placements, or pages within those sites if they're not all about San Antonio.  Topic targeting is specific to every page, so if you use it, your ads won't appear across all the domains above, but only on pages deemed by Google to be relevant to this topic.  I just think it doesn't work that well yet.  I've used it with success with other targeting options like interest categories.  For example, you could pick an interest category for Travel, and then combine it with this topic to hit travelers reading about San Antonio.  Pretty cool, right?

Also, be aware that the default location settings for Adwords will show ads to people around the world looking for San Antonio, as opposed to people specifically located in San Antonio.  If that's important to you, make sure to expand the Advanced location settings in the campaign settings, and correct that.

I can't speak for Universal GA, but in standard Google Analytics you can use one tracking script across multiple domains with no problem (Google documentation on that).  You can then set up a GA profiles for each of the three domains in your example, and a profile to aggregate them, so you can track how each site is doing on its own, and how all three are doing in aggregate.  You can do this with both subdomains or top-level domains.

I've used both sedo.com and escrow.com in the past to buy domains with no issues.  Through either, there's an escrow process to ensure the domain is transferred properly, so no one gets ripped off.

Yes, users could see any number of your Facebook ads from any of your campaigns that they match the targeting for. Facebook doesn't currently offer any frequency capping as far as I know.

I'm not 100% sure what you mean when you say you can't integrate the codes.  One tool that would make it easier to include these scripts is Google Tag Manager.  With that, you include one script on all your pages, and use that script to deploy Google Analytics, Adwords scripts, and any other tracking pixels you may use.

You can set up remarketing lists from within Google Analytics by making one tweak to your GA code.  You can read more about that here. If you want to track conversions within Adwords, you'll still need to set up the conversion within Google Adwords, and add a special code to the goal success page.  No matter what scripts you install from Google Adwords and Google Analytics, they shouldn't interact poorly.

If the page which appears after someone signs up has a unique URL, it's easy to set that URL up as a goal in Google Analytics.  Here's some info about setting that up.  The report I like to track goals is Conversions > Multi-channel funnels > Top conversion paths report.  I usually view it by Source/Medium, and if you use utm parameters on your URLs, then adding Campaign path as a secondary dimension will break those down by campaign.

I've been migrating to using Google Analytics for our remarketing lists (see here) to keep all these Adwords pixels from hanging around on my site.  Unless you're using these for doing remarketing on the search network... the Google Analytics segments aren't supported for that yet, but I was told by my reps to expect that soon.

As Remus said, there's absolutely no problem with having multiple Adwords remarketing pixels on one page.

Google's guide for AJAX crawling is here.  This is a considerable amount of work though, and honestly I wouldn't recommend it.  Google is getting better everyday at crawling JavaScript content.  You can try to test whether it's indexing this content by doing some very specific Google searches for things only rendered by JavaScript, and seeing if your pages rank for those searches.  If they do, there's a good chance that Google is reading and rendering your JavaScript properly.  Even if they don't now, it's likely only a matter of time before they do.

I don't imagine that Rogerbot has an army of engineers at Moz trying to figure out how to render JavaScript outside of a browser, so I wouldn't expect this to come to Moz crawls anytime soon.  I also doubt that Rogerbot would understand what's going on in Google's guide either, as I wouldn't expect many sites to have actually gone through this process.

Why is most of your main content generated by JavaScript?  It sounds like you should be rendering some of this on the page in good ol fashioned HTML.  A lot of times this doesn't require an entire redo of a website. It could just be a matter of loading some default HTML with the page, and then updating it with JavaScript, instead of rendering all of it with JavaScript.  It would be easier to see if you share the site (if not, I understand).

Assuming you've verified your site in Google Webmaster Tools, you can go in there and to go Crawl > Fetch as Googlebot.  Put that page, and have Googlebot fetch it.  Once it's done, you can click on the "Success" link, and this will show you exactly what Googlebot fetched with regards to that page.  Make sure the source code you're seeing here is what you expect.

He's got the right idea, you shouldn't be serving these pages (unless you have a specific reason to).  The problem is these index pages are returning with a status code of 200 OK, so Google assumes it's fine to index them.  These pages should either come back with a 404 or a 403 (forbidden), and users then wouldn't be able to browse your site with these directory pages.

Disallowing in robots.txt may not immediately remove these from search results, you may get that lovely description underneath the results that says, "A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt".

Sure thing!  If you have more questions, don't hesitate to ask.  I think this is the right way to go... at least try this first and see how it goes before duplicating campaigns.

Still working on getting ours, but our Google rep (for Adwords) said we first needed to fill this form out, and get our page verified.

The whole idea behind Google adding bid adjustments, mobile targeted ads, and mobile only parameters on destination URLs is to allow you to consolidate your desktop and mobile campaigns.  To view performance for a campaign by device, go to the "Segment" droplist in the web interface, and choose "Device".  This will break down your statistics between Computers, Mobile Devices with full browsers, and Tablets with full browsers.  If that's a pain for you (if you have lots of campaigns), then doing what you said and breaking them out into their own campaigns might be better for you.

We've been using Adroll for a few years now, and I can say we're very happy with them.  Their performance is on-par with Google Adwords.  We're now using them also to get our retargeting ads into Facebook (including in news feed ads), and we're seeing good results from those.  You can't set those up without an ad partner, so it was nice for us that that relationship already existed.

Adroll, vs. any other company I've worked for in the online advertising space, has the best reps I've ever worked with.  They get back to me the same day when I write to them, with detailed intelligent responses.  They take appropriate and timely actions to make optimizations in our account.

As far as I know, none of the retargeting platforms are completely self service which in general I strongly prefer.  With Adroll, I don't mind as much, as the reps are so responsive.

Also, I met with their head of product not too long ago, and they have some really cool things in their pipeline over there that I think will contribute even more to our success through their platform.

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?

If you want to do it yourself, I highly recommend Optimizely.  You can find a lot of resources around the web on tests to try, and with Optimizely, you can implement them yourself.  I use it everyday, and implementing and running tests is a breeze.

They also interviewed me and put me on their blog awhile back.

Yes, you could do this.  Googlebot almost always comes from the US (I've seen it come from Canada before), so Google will probably only see your US content, and use that in SERPs around the world.  An ideal set up for this would be doing geo-based redirects to distinct URLs depending on the locations. To keep from having duplicate content, you can set up rel=alternate hreflang.  With this set up, Google can find all your different international versions, and serve the right pages in international SERPs.  With this set up people in the UK who search will see your UK pages.

You can also sniff out Googlebot-Mobile and serve your mobile pages to it, so that Google uses your mobile pages in their mobile SERPs.

I think you could use a redirect plugin for this, for example this one here.  This way you don't have to manually edit .htaccess.  Just make sure the resulting URLs are using 301 redirects.  It looks like there are a lot of plugins for this, so try a few out and see which you like the best!

As you change your URLs, keep track of the old and new URL mappings, and add those redirects to the plugin.

If you're not tagging your destination URLs in Adwords, you will need to turn on auto-tagging so that Google Analytics can track clicks from Adwords.  When you log into Adwords, click on the "My Account" tab, and choose "Preferences".  If auto-tagging is not enabled, enable it.  What this will do is when someone clicks on an ad to your site, you'll see a parameter added, called gclid.  This parameter encodes all the data that you'd normally have in your utm parameters (if you build URLs like these from here), so that Google Analytics can properly track your ad campaigns.

Also, like Chris mentions, make sure in the admin settings in Google Analytics that your account is linked to that Adwords account.

(Using example.com instead of your domain in case you want anonymity later)

If you try to go to any of these m.example.com URLs on your desktop computer, you're redirected on the server to a www.example.com URL.  I'm guessing Googlebot and Googlebot-Mobile cannot access m. pages (unless you're sniffing out Googlebot-Mobile specifically to serve it m.example.com pages).  If you're looking at screen resolution for these redirects, you might not be catching Googlebot-Mobile, as I don't think Googlebot-Mobile gives a screen resolution in its user agent.  I believe you want Googlebot indexing your www. content, and Googlebot-Mobile indexing your m. content, so you'll need to sniff out Googlebot-Mobile's user agent (see here), and redirect it to m. content.

Also of note is that I think these should be 302 temporary redirects, and not 301 permanent redirects between your www. and m. versions, as they're not really permanent, just getting a given user to the right version of the site.  Also, you don't let me switch from the mobile version to the desktop version, which drives me bananas!  Let users choose after the initial redirect.  If you allow people to switch, but maintain 301 redirects, the browsers may cache some of the redirects which will lead to weird behavior if people hit a page that redirected before.

You don't have a robots.txt file at m.example.com/robots.txt, as that redirects to www.example.com/robots.txt even on my phone.  I don't think this is the root of the problem, but once you figure things out, you can set up a robots.txt file on your m. subdomain.

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:

• People like to click links to big brand names, so their ads probably have a higher CTR than the equivalent ad without a big brand name.  Higher ad CTRs result in higher quality scores.  By no means would I expect all of their keyword quality scores to be a 10.
• They have resources to have a dedicated PPC team or agency, who should be well equipped to optimize their keywords, landing pages, ad text, etc.  Then again, I would imagine they're targeting a lot more queries than you are.

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!

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.

Anytime!  Happy to help.

EGOL as usual is spot on.  If you're interested in going forward, here are a few good types of campaigns to get started with that are generally high ROI:

• Remarketing (generally for display advertising, and now for search!).  This will allow you to show ads to people who visit your site, or add things to their shopping cart and don't check out.  You can link your Adwords account to Google Analytics to use your goals and events from there to make this even easier (see here).  Since they've been on your site before, you know there's some extra interest in your products.
• Product Listing Ads.  Many merchants see a good return on these if you can optimize your merchant feeds properly.  These are the ads that appear when you search for a specific product, with the tiny pictures on the search results page.
• Brand advertising.  For example, if your company Acme sells trail running shoes, if someone searches for "Acme trail running shoes", they're going to see ads above your organic listings, and you'll lose some clicks to them.  You can pretty easily get your ad to the top of the pile because your quality score will usually be a perfect 10 for these keywords.

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.

Since you're doing redirects already, I'd get rid of the .html.  They're not user friendly, and you're already doing a redirect anyways so why not.  Seeing them on URLs looks old to me, most sites don't have them anymore.

Trailing slashes I don't have a strong opinion on.  If these pages will never have pages after them, then I'd opt for no trailing slash, just because I think most sites do that now.

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.

Wish I could help you out more here, but I don't have much experience in this realm.  All of my work has only ever been on .coms.  Sorry!

.io gets used a lot around the world as a general TLD, so Google no longer assumes that it's a site targeted to the British Indian Ocean Territory (here is their help center file on this).  Your site will be treated similarly as any other gTLD.  This is probably true for Bing as well, but I couldn't find any documentation about it.

If you're not US-specific, I'd leave the country targeting blank in Google/Bing webmaster tools.  Either way I wouldn't expect it to make a huge difference.  Just know that Google doesn't think you're trying to target the British Indian Ocean Territory based on your TLD choice.  As CleverPhD pointed out, they use a bunch of other factors to help determine this as well.

Just be careful to keep clicking "Add 'AND' statement".  The "Add 'OR' statement" link always sits above it.  You can add multiple AND statements to an advanced segment.

I may be missing something in what you're saying... but you do see you can do "AND" statements in the advanced segment?  See the screenshot attached... in the lower left there is where you click to add an "AND".  So you can do include keyword matching RegExp AND exclude keyword matching RegExp?  Does that not work for you?

If not, if you know someone good at RegExp, you could build one RegExp to do all of what you're asking.

NUnWUli.png

I think you might need to set up more advanced segments to do this.  Create a new one for non-branded keywords excluding irrelevant keywords, set it up to use the conditions from your non-branded keywords segment, and use the conditions from the irrelevant keywords segment, but flip the "include/exclude" for each one, and you should be all set.

That's great!  As you come across more questions about Adwords or Analytics, post more questions!  I'm always on the lookout for the PPC questions on the Q&A forum here.

Google Adsense is for publishers to place Google display ads on their pages.  Google Adwords is about buying ad placements on Google searches, and Adsense publisher websites.  It sounds like you're looking for Google Adwords if you're looking to put your own ads out there.

Ads are not cheating!  Here, we bid on some keywords for things that we don't even have on our site, because the people doing those searches haven't realized yet what they should be looking for is our product.  Since those keywords aren't even on the site, we don't have the opportunity to rank for them organically.

Your whois privacy settings shouldn't do much in terms of rankings.  Beyond submitting your sitemap, you can also submit URLs of actual pages through Google and Bing with their Fetch as Googlebot and Fetch as Bingbot tools.  I'd do that for Bing, as it might help you get into their index faster.

Make sure you let Google and Bing know that your site exists!  Set up Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Tools.  Also, you can submit URLs in both to try and get your pages indexed faster.

You're not alone.  Check the thread here: http://moz.com/community/q/moz-email-is-freezing-microsoft-outlook.  It looks like they're working on the problem.  peterli of the help team wrote:

Hi guys!

Thanks for all the heads up we have so far regarding this.  It looks like the Q&A emails has an image on their outlook tries to pull from our servers, that process can cause outlook to appear frozen/crash if your version of the outlook is queueing the the server (AWS) for the image.  Currently you could work around that by turning off images in your settings in outlook.  You can check out this thread on MS' support hub about blocking pictures on outlook: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook-help/turn-off-blocking-automatic-picture-downloads-HP007310739.aspx

Hope that helps, I have created a ticket for you on our end, so I look forward to talking to you!

Best,

Peter 
Moz Help Team.

If you don't use the word "Calgary" on the page, how would Google know your website is related to Calgary for it's location-based results?  They have a location option in the keyword tool so you can see how much traffic that term has in Calgary, as well as the average CPC in Calgary, if you're planning on running an advertising campaign in Adwords.

As an aside, for Adwords you no longer have to include "Calgary" in your keywords if your campaign targets the location Calgary.  For your "best shoe repair" example, Adwords default location setting would show ads for "best show repair" for people searching that in Calgary, but also people searching for "Calgary best show repair" around the world.  There is a sub-setting to make it target only people physically in Calgary if you only want locals seeing the ad.

Just my 2 cents, but if you're not going to tune the ad text by location, this is precisely why Google has spent so much time creating these new enhanced campaigns.  As the campaign runs, you can still see geographic-based reporting if your campaign targets different countries.  But instead of creating different campaigns, you'd set bid adjustments for different locations to adjust the CPCs by region.

This makes the reporting marginally harder (you can still see this data in the dimensions tab), but if you're not going to take advantage of ad text by region, I think this is easier.  Mainly because when you make changes to these campaigns (add/remove ad groups, keywords, ad text), you're going to have to remember to duplicate these changes across all the campaigns you've spawned.  Also, when you want to start adding demographic and remarketing lists to your search campaigns (coming soon - currently in beta), you'll have to set that up and manage those bid adjustments for each of these campaigns as well.

You can include or exclude locations in the campaign settings within Adwords.  If there's a significant lead volume from India, and want to tune ads directly to them, you could duplicate your campaign(s) and geotarget them to India specifically, to get higher CTRs from those ads.  If you've upgraded to enhanced campaigns, you can do bid adjustments by location too, to easily adjust your CPCs by location.

The Adwords help article is here.  We usually refer to it location targeting or geotargeting if you want to search for it.

Have you tried any paid search traffic?  That could have you ranking #1 by the end of the day.  If you know of some niche keywords you think would work well for you, you might try some paid search out first and see if the traffic converts well before embarking on an SEO campaign to rank for those terms.

Take a look at the Moz recommended companies here.  I'm sure you can find someone that'll help you out!

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.

These guys hit the nail on the head, but I thought I'd throw my 2 cents in here and recommend Google Analytics Remarketing.  We've seen an even better ROI on our retargeting users through Adwords using custom events and goals we set up in Google Analytics (also using it to exclude users has been valuable).

Right now, there are three ways to set up remarketing in Adwords:

1. Set an individual pixel on a page you want to retarget to users who have seen (the original way, still useful to include in emails)
2. Set an Adwords script on all your pages and then retarget based on pages they've hit.
3. Google Analytics Remarketing (no need to install additional scripts on your page, just a small tweak to your GA script)

Do you know which way you set it up?  That would make it easier to troubleshoot your issues.  I take it you've set up an ad group to target that audience?

Thanks for the answer!  I guess it depends on what a ton of money is... do you think $5K/mo is enough to qualify?  I'll submit the form and find out!

edit: If you've spent >$500 through their self-service platform in the last 30 days, you don't qualify for their 30-day starter program, where you'll get Facebook reps for 30 days.  The guy on the phone also explained to me that the shorter vanity URL process is above his pay grade, and there's nothing he can do to help me and no one he could get me in touch with.  Oh well!