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Does anyone know how to go about getting a page name on Facebook of less than 5 characters?  I saw Moz was able to claim facebook.com/moz (BTW, congrats on the redesign!), and many other brands also have claimed page names under 5 characters.  Has anyone else had success claiming a short page name?  Do you have to know the right person at Facebook, or are there other requirements?  We have around 35K likes on our page, and our site gets a pretty good amount of traffic.  My boss doesn't like any of my ideas that are 5+ characters... she really wants the short URL.

If anyone has any insights on what I need to do (or who I need to talk to at Facebook), I'd really appreciate it!

Yeah, this page should return a 404 status code as a 404 page, not a 200.  Otherwise search bots (like Googlebot and Roger) will think this is a regular page on your site, and as such this page could appear in search results.

Go to your Keywords tab, and select that single keyword, Go to the Keyword details tab, and select "Auction Insights".  This will give you a bunch of useful information:

• Impression share: How often you ad shows up
• Avg. position: The average position of your ad when it does show up
• Overlap rate: You can see how often your ad appears vs. other advertisers
• Position above rate: How often you're ranking above other advertisers.
• Top of page rate: How often you're at the top of the page (vs. the side).

So if your average position is already between 1-2, and your impression share is high, raising the bid probably won't do much.  However, if you're not at the top of the page much, or your impression share is lower, you might be able to get more clicks by raising the bid.

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!

• barn2.co.uk
• www.ziddidirect.com
• www.tiptopweddingshop.co.uk
• results.cheaphotelflightdeals.com
• www.greensupplements.co.uk
• www.tweakmusicmixing.com

I do this in the homeschooling niche.  The only precaution I take is to allow them to write whatever they want, and to not specify the anchor text they use when they link to me.  That way the links look natural, and they're lower risk for triggering any over-optimization penalties.

Not that a search engine can read intent (yet), but I don't do this for rankings; I do this for the traffic that comes from the post.  Since we're an education site, and lots of homeschoolers write about us anyway, so the relevancy of our site to the blog is high.  Also, a few sponsored posts don't look unnatural when there are also many natural posts and links about.

These blogs often have other sponsored posts and reviews, and a lot of them also do giveaways that I've participated in.  I haven't had any issues myself <knock on="" wood="">.  However, you never know when there could be another animal being released from the Google zoo!</knock>

Click over to the Keywords tab.  You're currently on the "Ad group ideas (beta)" tab, which is what it defaults to these days.

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.

I wouldn't do that. rel=canonical is supposed to point between truly or near-truly duplicate pages, usually when things like URL parameters are on URLs but don't do anything to the content.  These are completely different pages, category pages on your site, vs. ones on your blog.  I would not recommend it.  Chances are Google will just ignore your rel=canonical.  It would likely not do any damage to your rankings, but who knows down the line... you never know when they'll release a Google aardvark or some other animal from the Google zoo.

Note my work firewall blocked the blog URL so I was looking at a cached version on Google.  If the pages are truly duplicate (which they didn't appear to be), go for it.

Could have been, I tried searching other SEO blogs but came up with a blank on those as well.  I could have sworn it was on the Seomoz blog.  Oh well; thanks for looking!

I thought I remembered reading a post on the Seomoz blog awhile back about how someone worked on the Pimsleur community and grew it through adding content and reviews to their site.  However, I can't seem track it down now, despite my best attempts to Google it.

Does this article exist, or am I taking crazy pills?

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.

No problem Ashley!

It sounds like that would fall under cloaking, albeit pretty benign as far as cloaking goes.  There's some more info here.  The Matt Cutts video on that page has a lot of good information.  Apparently any cloaking is against Google's guidelines.  I would suspect you could get away with it, but I'd be worried everyday about a Google penalty getting handed down.

My sense from what you told me is that canonicals should be working in your case.  What you're trying to use them for is what they're intended to do.  You're sure the syntax is correct, and they're in the of the page or being set in the HTTP header?

Google does set it up so you can sniff out Googlebot and return different content (see here), but that would be unusual to do given the circumstances.  I doubt you'd get penalized for cloaking for redirecting parameterized URLs to canonical ones for only Googlebot, but I'd still be nervous about doing it.

Just curious, is Bing respecting the canonicals?

If these duplicate pages have URLs that are appearing in search results, then the canonicals aren't working or Google just hasn't tried to reindex those pages yet.  If the pages are duplicates, and you've set the canonical correctly, and entered them in Google Webmaster Tools, over time those pages should drop out of the index as Google reindexes them.  You could try submitting a few of these URLs with parameters to Google to reindex manually in Google Webmaster Tools, and see if afterward they disappear from the results pages.  If they do, then it's just a matter of waiting for Googlebot to find them all.

If that doesn't work, you could try something tricky like adding meta noindex tags to the pages with URL parameters, wait until they fall out of the index, and then add canonical tags back on, and see if those pages come back into the SERPs.  If they do, then Google is ignoring your canonical tags.  I hate to temporarily noindex any pages like this... but if they're all appearing separately in the SERPs anyhow, then they're not pooling their link juice properly anyway.

You're doing the right thing by adding canonicals to those pages.  You can also go into Google Webmaster Tools and let them know that those URL parameters don't change the content of the pages.  This really is the bread and butter of canonical tags.  This is the problem they're supposed to solve.

I wouldn't sniff out Googlebot just to 301 those URLs with parameters to the canonical versions.  The canonicals should be sufficient.  If you do want to sniff out Googlebot, Google's directions are here.  You don't do it by user agent, you do a reverse DNS lookup.  Again, I would not do this in your case.

Sure, 10,000 people is enough to run a retargeting campaign.

You might try bringing up the bid to get some more impressions and see how it goes.  100 impressions isn't enough to tell much of anything.  Retargeting does tend to have the highest ROI of any display advertising if you target it properly.  Since the users in your retargeting list are more likely to convert on your site since they've been there before, you can tolerate a higher CPC with retargeting as compared to other display campaigns.

Are you segmenting your retargeting lists into many smaller lists?  You can split your lists into users that have made it further down your conversion funnel, and bid higher the further they've made it down the funnel already (e.g. visited a subscription page and left, or added items to a shopping cart and abandoned it).  If you're using Adwords and Google Analytics, you can do this easily with Google Analytics Remarketing, and retarget any visitors on your site based on things like time on site, pages they've visited, and custom events and goals they've accomplished (or not accomplished).

This is a great point.  You could even implement this simultaneously by adjusting the bid with an Adwords Experiment and not risk any weirdness in the results by running one after the other.

I work on Adwords for an educational subscription-based site, and for us, being #1 is really hard for a lot of searches if there's no purchase intent in the query.  Lots of people seem to do a search and click on the top result, even if it's an ad.

So yes, you can get a lot more clickthroughs as the #1 ad, but at the same time, your conversion rate can suffer.

The other enterprise PPC management companies I usually hear about alongside Acquisio are Marin Software, Kenshoo, and DoubleClick.  I don't have experience with any of these, but I know that Marin just IPO'ed.  DoubleClick is its owned by Google, but their search platform is relatively young compared to the other two I mentioned here.

Some people do subdomains (like you've outlined above), and some do directories, i.e. mysite.com/en/, mysite.com/de/, mysite.com/fr/.  It used to be recommended that you do directories, as they keep your domain authority pooled better, since subdomains each have their own concept of domain authority.  That seems to be less true today, so I'd do whatever is easier for you to set up.  All else equal, I'd opt for the directory structure.

If they're all served under the same URL, the search bots aren't going to be able to differentiate between the different versions of the pages.  Googlebot primarily indexes from the US, so it's only going to see the English version of the site.  You can't even set up a sitemap or something with the different pages since they're under the same URLs.

The better way to do this is to have distinct URLs for each as you suggested.  You can let Google know these pages are i18n versions of each other using the rel alternate hreflang markup, described here.  With this, you can either set meta tags on each page, telling Google about all of the alternate pages, or describe them in your sitemap.  Google then can swap out the versions of the pages in Google search results to give the user the correct page for their language.

No problem!  Happy to help.

I'm taking this as comparing Adroll vs. Adwords as an advertiser... if you mean as a publisher, then ignore my answer.

First, Adwords has all sorts of different display advertising, Adroll is all retargeting Advertising.  I prefer Adwords because it's completely self-service, and I can see all the data and statistics for my placements.  You can see a lot of stats in Adroll, but they don't display conversion stats in the interface for your specific placements.  Also, with Remarketing Lists in Google Analytics, I can get pin-point remarketing based on custom events and goals within Google Analytics.  You can duplicate a lot of this within Adroll, but it requires communicating everything with your reps.

With Adroll you'll get some reps who will help you optimize your campaigns, and with Adwords, if you don't already have reps, you'll be on your own.  Adroll has a further reach than the Google Display Network, so your ads can reach other display networks, as well as Facebook.

Where I work, we use both to maximize our reach!

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.

It does give a lot of power to Google and their algorithms, but at the same time, if it works, it works!  It's hard to argue with more conversion volume at a lower CPA.  Historically, it's worked very well for me.

If you have only 1 ad group, does that mean you're just retargeting people that came to your site? Or you're using all those retargeting segments within one ad group?  Break each of those into their own ad groups, so you can customize your bids and ad copy based on those segments.

Try out Conversion Optimizer and see how it compares.  Conversion Optimizer has the benefit of being able to make adjustments to bids at auction-time, which none of these platforms have access to.  For some people, this benefit is enormous.  For others, it's not very important, in which case the platform may win out.  The only way to know is to try it!

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.

Google doesn't use them at all.  Bing uses them, but mostly as a spam signal (see here).  I wouldn't bother with them.

First, I agree with Francisco and Takeshi, I seriously doubt Google uses this data against you in any way.

If you're really worried about privacy, you can keep your analytics data to yourself by using an open source web analytics package.  A few I've come across are Piwik and Open Web Analytics.  Neither of these are as well developed as Google Analytics, but at least they'll give you most of the data you're looking for.

If some of those pages have some good external links pointing at them, I'd take the time to redirect those.  If they don't have much in the way of links, then I probably wouldn't bother.  Also, do you need to link them to specific new pages?  If they're mostly similar, and are generated in some consistent way, you could mass redirect them to one or more of your newer pages?

I'd just leave those links be.  Google knows what contact and privacy policies look like.  Nofollows don't conserve more link juice for other pages that page links to, it just prevents it from passing to the pages you nofollow the link to.

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.

Every banner you display is the result of an ad auction taking place on Google for that particular placement.  Since you're targeting your ad to people, those people will visit different sites, some of which the bids for ad placements are low, so the CPC can vary quite a bit.

If they're permanent redirects, they should be done on your server so it shouldn't matter what browser the user is using.  You're not doing the redirects with JavaScript, are you?

I'm not exactly sure what the problem you're having with IE9 is from the description, but all modern browsers are allowed to cache 301 redirects, not just IE9.  301 redirects are permanent redirects.  If you set up a URL to 301 redirect to another URL, you should never change that redirect to point to another page.  People who have been through the redirect before may cache it and the browser will put them through the redirect next time without hitting your server for the new page (after all, you told the browser it was a permanent redirect).

It looks like in IE9 it may be complicated to clear the 301 from the browser's memory (beyond just clearing the browser cache), so beware!  Here's an article I found about that.  And here's an article about undoing 301 redirect mistakes.

It would depend on exactly how you're doing this, but to me this doesn't sound like a situation for a permanent redirects.  Permanent redirects will be cached by browsers, meaning if someone goes to a profile page, gets the message, logs in, and goes back to that profile page URL, they may still get redirected to the log in page.  I'd be very careful with this.

This sounds like an ideal situation for temporary 302 redirects.  Having 301s pass whatever link juice these profile pages have to a log in page doesn't sound very substantial to me.  You're probably not trying to get the log in page to rank in Google, and I doubt these profile pages that can only be accessed when a user is logged in are getting a ton of links?

You've got it right.  The example is a bit simplistic as not all links on a page are going to pass the same amount of link juice, but otherwise it sounds like you get it.

Nofollows burn link juice.  If you nofollow a link, it won't pass link juice to that page, but as a result it doesn't pass more link juice to other pages linked to from that page.

Here's an example.  Suppose on your resources page, you have 6 units of link juice to pass to other pages.  You have 3 outbound links with no nofollows.  Each page receives 2 units of link juice.  Now suppose you nofollow one of the links.  The page that links to now gets no link juice as you'd expect.  However, the other two pages linked to still only receive 2 units of link juice.  If the 6 units total were divided between the two links, then each would receive 3, but that's not how nofollow works now.

Without a really good reason, I wouldn't nofollow internal links, and use nofollows for situations like keeping link spam down in user generated content.

I think the ccTLD approach is better if you're going to build links to the new ccTLD domain.  It splits your domain authority between the two sites, but for many industries, UK people have a pretty good bias towards their own ccTLD.  The largest bias I've seen though is paying in British pounds vs. dollars.  In our experience, they really hate paying in dollars!

If you go the subdomain approach, you can do all the same geotargeting stuff.  You can even do it for subdirectories (e.g. domain.com/en/ & domain.com/es/).

When we get a review by giving our product to a reviewer and by extension link(s), I'm more interested in the leads that are going to be driven to us by the review, not increasing our search rank.  Technically you're exchanging something with them, so they could be considered paid links, but honestly I wouldn't worry about it too much.  This is a very common relationship between bloggers and companies.  As long as the blog isn't spammy and is relevant to your product (like TommyTan says), it should be fine.

It's best if you can localize the content as much as possible, and also put the rel alternate hreflang tags on your pages.  This way Google will know which pages are alternates of others, and return the right ccTLD pages in their search results.  Read more about that here.

Also, set your Google Webmaster Tools geotargeting (see here), and let Bing know what's up (see here).

If all the pages on the .hk domain 302 redirect to the .com domain, it won't rank the .hk site for Hong Kong searchers.  There's pretty much no value to doing that unless you're going to start to market the .hk domain.  The .hk domain won't be showing up in search results.

Yes, if you set up a /hk subfolder with the hreflang markup on its pages, and your regular pages, you should be fine.

If you have the resources to set up a /hk subfolder with the hreflang markup, for most sites it wouldn't be much more work to set up a new ccTLD domain with that same content.  Things that would throw a wrench into that would be dealing with secure pages and a new SSL certificate, or if you have specific logic tied to your site being on a .com.

Using rel="alternate" hreflang="x" and geotargeting should avoid all duplicate content issues.  You could set up the .hk site as a mirror of the .com site, make a few localization changes and add a few new pages, and put these tags on all pages that are on both sites so that Google knows which page to return in search results for different users.  You could do this with a /hk/ directory as well on the .com site as well, but using the .hk ccTLD tells search engines you're targeting people in Hong Kong more definitively than setting the geotargeting webmaster tools setting (and that will work for Bing too, otherwise you can do this). 302 redirecting between the two sites seems a bit strange to me... if I'm in Hong Kong browsing the .hk site, I'd be confused if I'm all of a sudden on the same site but .com.  I'd just mirror that page and use the hreflang markup.

The pros of using a directory like /hk/ is that it keeps everything together under one domain and one domain authority.  If you use the .hk ccTLD domain, that domain is starting from scratch, and you'll want to build some links to it to help it rank.  My guess would be that Hong Kong people are more likely to click results with .hk ccTLDs as compared to results with .com/hk, so that would be the benefit to doing this if you think you can get that domain to rank.

I'd do it just on the checkout pages.  If you use https over your entire site, every page will have to load all of its own resources as the browser won't be able to cache any files.  I'd prefer to keep your page load times down, and only use https on pages that need it.

If the pages are very similar or close to the same, you could rel=canonical them instead of noindexing them.  It probably won't make a huge difference in rankings if there aren't many links to them.

The markup should be on both versions.  What it does is when Google is going to return a page in search results, it'll know to switch out to alternate versions of pages based on the users location or language.

If you're not going to use the .com.au as a standalone domain, you can 301 it.  It might make for good display URLs for advertising?

You can't add it to the body of the page.  Otherwise, people could add these tags to blog comments and product reviews!  It has to be in the .  Since you don't have access to the , you can try adding the markup to your sitemap?  That's another option.

There will indeed be duplicate content with both solutions, but it's ok.  That guide is a bit outdated; one thing that's come about since then is the rel=alternate markup which is for this exact situation.  Read more about that here.  You'll put markup on your pages that tells Google what the alternate pages are, so Google can return the appropriate pages based on language and region.

EIther way, you'll also set your geographic target for the AU content in Google Webmaster Tools. You can also set your language and regions in Bing on your pages, either with meta tags or in your HTTP headers (Bing instructions).  That's more for if you decide to go with the subdomain solution, as Bingbot will know who your site is for with a .com.au TLD.

If you go with the .com.au site, it'll be starting from scratch and won't inherit any of the domain authority from your .com site.  However, Aussies would likely be more receptive to a .com.au site?