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Are you serving the same page for both /MBA and /mba?  You should set up a 301 redirect from one to the other.

In Analytics, you can set a custom filter to make your URLs case insensitive, but I don't believe that'll fix the data currently in your account, it'll only fix them going forward.  That process is outlined here: http://support.google.com/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=90397.

My URLs are all lowercased so I can't actually find an example in my account to test, but when I do an advenced filter and select Include Page with the match type of "Matching RegExp" and try URLs with uppercase characters, Analytics appears to be making the query case insensitive.  So you can try that as well.

If the prior paragraph didn't work for you, you can do this on a URL by URL basis, by doing an advanced search by regular expression and substituting in "[M|m][B|b][A|a]" for "mba".

We're using Optimizely and we love it.  Their tool is incredibly easy to use, and very powerful.  It's powered by jQuery, but has a nice editor (which you can try out for free on any page on your site) where you can edit page elements simply by clicking and dragging, resizing, swapping, or deleting them.  For a lot of our tests, we handwrite JavaScript and jQuery to effect multiple elements on multiple pages, which was impossible for us to implement within Google Website Optimizer.

They also have all the reporting you'd expect and support multiple goals which is a must for us.  It's a very powerful full-featured tool.  We're very happy with it and have no regrets.

My ads that have fictitious display URLs that are specific to the keyword I'm targeting tend to have higher CTRs, so they get clicked more, which is good for keyword quality scores, so really you're rewarded for it, not penalized!

People don't visit those display URLs very often.  However, some of the fictitious display URLs pop up in Webmaster Tools from time to time... it looks like Google finds them on sites that scrape Adwords ads.

There is an agency that specializes in PPC advertising on Baidu called adSage.  Even if you're not looking for an agency, you could contact them and ask about the challenges of advertising in China.

Thanks for the quick Reply Dan!  I'll check those out.

Hi everyone!

What I need is a way in Wordpress for the author to select a category for their post, and then have a template come up with some fields in addition to just the large field where you write your post, where the author can add some additional information.  Then on the final post, have that information added to the top in some format that I (as the admin) can control.

What I'm doing is setting up an internal company blog so our employees can have more visibility across teams.  Some categories of posts will always include the same information, like release numbers, conference attendance, yes/no conclusions, among other information.

If there's a plug-in for this, free or not, that would be great!  If you can't tell I'm a Wordpress noob... so please bear with me.

#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."

Here's all the things you can do to try geotarget your content for the search bots:

• Register each subfolder as a separate site in Google Webmaster Tools (e.g. example.com/ca/, example.com/us/), and geotarget it (see here).
• Set meta tags or http headers on each page to let Bing know the language and country (see here).
• For duplicate or near-duplicate pages across different English speaking localities, you can try out the hreflang tags to clue Google in that they're the same page, but geotargeting users in different locations.  I haven't personally implemented this myself, so I can't speak to how well it works, but you can find more info about it hereand here.

Setting nofollows just stops PageRank from flowing, but bots can still follow these links, so I wouldn't do that.

Sure!  It looks like it's happening on both the DROID Incredible by HTC as well as the DROID X by Motorola when I search for "ixl.com" or just "ixl".  You'll notice if you search on the iPhone or on a PC, our brand will rank #1 with sitelinks for these searches.

Good luck figuring this out!  Maybe Droid doesn't like us if it doesn't have additional info about the user (like location)?  BTW, being able to simulate searches on mobile devices is really cool!  Thanks for putting that together.

Who is the www version of the site supposed to target?  I'm with blu42media... you most likely should just target the US and the smaller group of international people outside the UK on the www version, and target the UK users with the UK subdomain.

Beyond that... here's what you can do to clue the search engines into what's what in terms of international content:

• Register each subdomain in Google Webmaster Tools, and geotarget it (see here).
• Set meta tags or http headers to let Bing know the language and country (see here).
• For duplicate or near-duplicate pages across different English speaking localities, you can try out the hreflang tags to clue Google in that they're the same page, but geotargeting users in different locations.  I haven't personally implemented this myself, so I can't speak to how well it works, but you can find more info about it here and here.

Thanks for checking!  I wonder what's going on with mobilemoxies simulated Android search...

Is there a reason you're supporting both http and https versions of every page?  If not, 301 redirect to either http or https for each page.  I'd only leave pages that need to be secure as https, e.g. purchase pages.  Non-secure pages are generally a better user experience in terms of load time since the user can use cached files from previous pages and non-encrypted pages are more lightweight.

If you're out to support both for those secure users who like https everywhere, I'd go with Malcolm's solution and rel canonical to the version you'd like to have indexed rather than using noindex nofollow.

http://piwik.org/ is open source and you install it on your own webserver.  I've never used it, but I've heard good things from a friend about it.  It's supposedly like Google Analytics, but you're sending and storing the data yourself.

I would assume since you control your own data, you would be able to choose not to use sampled data.

Are you doing this with a cookie?  If so, it shouldn't be a problem.  Last I checked, Googlebot still denies cookies.

In the new blog post here, she links to mobilemoxie, a site which allows you to do searches on various different smartphones.  I tried a search for my brand, "ixl.com" on an iPhone 4 and a Android phone, the Motorola Droid X.  On the iPhone, our brand appears in #1 like normal, but on the Android phone, our result doesn't appear on the first page.

Any ideas as to why this would be the case?  We're currently developing a mobile version of our site but we don't have one yet.  Could that be the issue?

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.

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.

Alan is right. Your question reminded me of this relevant WBF. Enjoy! http://www.seomoz.org/blog/title-tags-is-70-characters-the-best-practice-whiteboard-friday

Google doesn't care, but Bing may not like this.  Read http://nickroshon.com/seo/google-bing-disagree-on-relcanonical-implementation for more info.

The bots won't care about that.  If you have your site on www.company.com, your robots.txt will reside at www.company.com/robots.txt, and its directives will apply to any pages living under www.company.com.  When a bot comes to www.company.com/blog, it'll look for the robots.txt at www.company.com/robots.txt to see if it's allowed to crawl there.  It won't look in a subdirectory. Robots.txt always resides on the root level.

If you had your blog at blog.company.com instead of company.com/blog, then you would have to have a separate robots.txt at blog.company.com/robots.txt.  As you have your blog in a subdirectory rather than a subdomain, one robots.txt is all you need.

Disallowing in your robots.txt keeps the bots from indexing your pages going forward, but Google may keep returning them in search results.  This post has great explanations about ways to remove pages from indices: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/robot-access-indexation-restriction-techniques-avoiding-conflicts

The surefire way to get them out of the index is to remove the disallow from your robots.txt, and add a meta noindex tags on all the pages you want removed.  Once they're reindexed by Google, they'll no longer appear in SERPs.

Looking at http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/12/new-markup-for-multilingual-content.html and http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=189077, you would only want to implement rel=alternate tags when the content is duplicate content.  So if you write new content in a different language on a subdomain that doesn't appear on your main domain in a different language, don't specify a rel=alternate.  If it's a translation of content on your main domain, go ahead and add it.

The difference in the implementation when you have pages with completely different languages vs. small regional differences is if the pages are in completely different languages, you won't want to implement canonical tags pointing to one of the variations.

Re-reading through those articles, it's not 100% clear to me what adding this does when you don't implement the canonical tags.  Google says "This markup tells Google's algorithm to consider all of these pages as alternate versions of each other."

Matt Cutts said at one point that page speed effects less than 1% of searches.  You can read more here: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/site-speed/.

So, I wouldn't expect it to help much.  But think about how much happier your users will be!  That's where the real gains are. Over time, it might help you a bit in the SERPs because people should bounce less frequently as a function of how fast your pages load.

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.

1. Make sure you're setting your location for your domain/subdomains/directories correctly in Google Webmaster Tools.

2. 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.

3. 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.

I remember reading somewhere that the title attributes have no weight for ranking purposes.  If you add a title to a link, it'll add a tool tip showing that text when a user hovers over the link.  So if you think your users would like that, go ahead and add it.

I do lots of tagging with the Google Analytics URL parameters. It's hard to get around using them for tracking. To get around the duplicate content issues, I:

• Set all pages with the parameters to rel=canonical to the appropriate pages.
• Let Google know those parameters don't change the page content within Google Webmaster Tools. The canonical should take care of this, but it shouldn't hurt to do both.
• Let Bing know those parameters don't change the page content in Bing Webmaster Tools. Again, the canonical should be on top of this, but just in case.

Google can index and render both CSS and JavaScript, and has an uncanny ability to sort out bad intentions, so if you're trying to mask links with these, Google will (eventually) figure it out.  Your developer's assumption is wrong.  Google has come a long with with this, and can even index some AJAX content (when JavaScript loads additional content to a page from the server).

Lots of navigation use accordions and other widgets that will display or hide navigation links depending on the page state.  That's fine.  Just don't go out of your way to hide links.

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.

My instincts say I'd rather exceed the 100 links than trying to get the count down by nofollowing footer links, but I've never had this issue before so I can't say for sure.  Google may follow nofollowed links, so I have a feeling this doesn't really get the link count down in Googlebots eyes.

Here's Matt Cutts take on it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1lVPrYoBkA.

He says Googlebot will follow 301 redirect chains.  Once you get to 4 or 5 in a row... he says Googlebot might bow out.  He recommends 1 or 2, or maybe 3 in a row.

So based on what he said, you should be completely safe doing 2 redirects.

My advice is to not nofollow any internal links.  It burns your link juice; it no longer sculpts it.  If you really don't want the page it's going out to indexed, either exclude it in your robots.txt, or even better, stick a meta noindex tag on it.

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:

• http://support.optimizely.com/kb/advanced/what-does-chance-to-beat-baseline-actually-mean
• http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/split-testing-blog/what-you-really-need-to-know-about-mathematics-of-ab-split-testing/

Hope this helps!

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.

Maybe I'm not understanding, but if you can differentiate on the server the difference between beta.abc.com and abc.com, subdomains can have different robots.txt files, so you should be able to serve a file for http://beta.abc.com/robots.txt that disallows everything, with

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

and a different robots.txt file for http://abc.com/robots.txt.  If you do so, it shouldn't block Googlebots access to abc.com.

Have you considered online advertising?  That can get your ad to appear above organic search listings.  There's no replacement for good old fashioned link building and quality content, but that's one way you can get your name out there quickly and easily.  It could turn out to be less expensive than the time and money you'd spend find and working with an SEO company (it would depend on the queries you're targeting).

Removing the geotargeting for www.xyz.com sounds like a good first step.  I'd watch like a hawk though to see if you see any loss of impressions or rank on google.co.uk searches.  When you say that "United Kingdom" appears next to it in the SERPs, where does that display?

How much duplicate content is there between the UK and US versions of your site?  If you have duplicate content, Google recently announced support for rel=alternate tags: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/12/new-markup-for-multilingual-content.html.  This can be used to help have only one version of each page appear in a SERP. What you'd do it select a canonical version of the page across duplicate (or near duplicate) versions, and then set the alternate pages.  Google will show the canonical versions title and description in the SERPs, but will show the country specific display URL based on the users geolocation.  I'm still working on getting these up and running on my site.

Also, for Bing and other search engines, you might want to take a look at http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/webmaster/archive/2011/03/01/how-to-tell-bing-your-website-s-country-and-language.aspx.  This gives instructions for how to tell bots which language and country each page is specific to.

I am aware that IE6 is old and many sites have dropped support for it. It's usage will vary by market. If the fix required 10 minutes of your time, you wouldn't do that for 1% or more of your potential customers?

If you have any Chinese users for instance, you'd want to make it work. Or if you're targeting people who are less tech-savvy or older in age, your IE6 usage numbers are bound to be higher. I agree that for most sites, it's probably not a huge issue. Since I experienced it on our site, I thought I'd mention it. If there is an issue, there is also likely a published fix that would require minimal effort.

Once you implement it, I'd check is that Internet Explorer 6 likes it.  I can't remember the details, but when we added compression on our site, there were instances where IE6 didn't like it.

First, have you tested whether first position ads convert well enough for you?  You described that as an "assumption", which you could test to see if it's true or not.  Even if the cost per conversion is higher, the larger volume of customers may make up for it.  Generally, if there are people competing for the top spots, they are making money off the ads.

I'm a litle wary of having hard and fast rules for changing bids and deleting keywords.  For changing bids, I like to look at a fair amount of historical data to see how the conversion rate has been trending.  It could just be a bad week or a bad month?  After doing this for 4 years, you probably are aware of any seasonality that exists in your business that may apply to different keywords or ad groups.  For deleting keywords, I look a lot at the quality score.  There are some queries that users for whatever reason don't like to click on ads, so CTR might not be the best indicator that a keyword is bad, if it has a decent quality score.

There are a lot more features to Adwords you may or may not be taking advantage of.  Have you tried any geo-targeting, language targeting, device targeting, or day parting?  Have you tried conversion optimizer in any campaigns?  Do you have any display network campaigns?  There are lots of different targeting options for display campaigns beyond contextual keyword targeting.

Node.js is a language that allows you to use JavaScript on the server.  if you're familiar with JavaScript, it's usually all executed on the client side, on the browser.

As it's all on the server, it won't have any direct impact on the SEO of the site.  They list a few users on http://nodejs.org/, like Microsoft, eBay, LinkedIn, and Yahoo!.

You can check the Wayback Machine to see which version the link was added in.  Search for the page at http://www.archive.org/web/web.php.

If you put in the more common matches people use, like in your example if you included "swiffer sweeper", that keyword would likely get a higher quality score than just "swiffer", so you'll get a better ad position, cheaper clicks, and higher impression share when people search using that query.  So it still makes sense to build out a keyword list for a branded campaign, but including your brand term on its own as a phrase match like you gave above is still a good idea.

There's no problem with cross subdomain canonical links.  Your plan of using setting canonicals for duplicate pages until the pages differ sounds fine to me.

If you're internationalizing across different locations but the same language (like, English), Google recently released some new markup to display the title and description of the canonical page, but the URL of the localized version.  You can read more about it here: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/12/new-markup-for-multilingual-content.html.

You'll want to group the keywords into different campaigns, and within those campaigns, different ad groups.  It's important to group similar keywords into their own ad groups, so that you can have those keywords trigger relevant ad copy.  Similar ad groups then should be grouped into campaigns.

For example, your branded keywords you'll want to keep in their own campaign, so you can easily see at a glance how your branded campaign is doing.  For some of my branded terms, I like to have dynamic keyword insertion ads, so I have one ad group that covers that.  For searches that misspell my company name, I have another ad group.  For branded, I've found it works pretty well on mobile and tablets, even if you don't have a mobile optimized site.  Device targeting is a campaign level setting, so you could change that just for your branded campaign without any issues.

I'm not sure what you're describing with your brand names using  the "+" broad match modifier.  Your keyword in your example would be "+brand +kw1+kw2"?

Keywords are always coming and going, so no algorithm is going to find all the keywords.  What you have sounds like a good start though, and as you review reporting as time progresses, you'll find new opportunities, as well as new negative keywords.

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?

I would start with exact or phrase match keywords, as broad match can go quickly through your budget.  If you know of queries you don't want ads to show for right away, go ahead and put those negatives in (also as either phrase or exact).  Watch what queries are being triggered closely as the campaign runs.  If there are queries that are getting phrase matched that are doing well, you can add them to your keyword list.  If there are poor performing queries, you can add more negatives (based on your opinion or performance), or delete the keyword which is matching the query.  If your exact or phrase match keywords are doing well, then I would try broad.

You can see the actual queries by going to the Keywords tab, and in the "See search terms..." droplist, selecting "All".

Also, have you considering trying any display network advertising?  Remarketing campaigns can be relatively inexpensive, and convert well, so you might want to try setting that up first.  Remarketing would be targeting people that have already visited your site before.

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.

If you have Google Webmaster Tools set up, go to Site configuration > Settings, and you can set a custom crawl rate for you site.  That will change it site-wide, so if you have other pages that change frequently, that might not be so great for you.

Another thing you could try is generate a sitemap, and set a change frequency of never (or yearly) for all of the pages you don't expect to change.  That also might slow down Google's crawl rate of those pages.

First, the site structure you're proposing sounds fine.  The shorter URLs with just the country code look better to me, but I'd lowercase the country codes.

Second, there are a few things you can do to make sure the search engines are doing the right thing with respect to content for different countries.  You can set you location target for each directory within Google Webmaster Tools in Site configuration > Settings.  You can also set language metadata, or set HTTP headers to clue in Bing as to what language and country the page is targeting (see http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/webmaster/archive/2011/03/01/how-to-tell-bing-your-website-s-country-and-language.aspx).

Even though these are targeted to different countries, they show up to the search engines as duplicate content since the content is so similar, and until recently there wasn't much that could be done about it.  You could either rel=canonical to the page that caters to your main audience, or just accept that there would be some duplicate content.  Google recently announced support for a rel=alternate tag which should help to mitigate this.  You can read more about it here: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/12/new-markup-for-multilingual-content.html.  The tl;dr of this is you can set rel=alternate tags to signal which pages are alternates of each other, and rel=canonical to one preferred version.  When this page would come up in search, it'll use the title and description from the preferred page, but if the searcher is in a country where you have an alternate version, it'll use the URL for the alternate page.  It's not perfect, but at least it's a step in the right direction.