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This doesn't really make sense because when you 301 those domains to your regular domain, you'll be passing on all link juice, and those domains won't appear in search results.  You won't get a bonus just for redirecting good keyword domains, unless they have backlinks to them.  Once the search engines crawl the page, and you redirect it, what's stopping the search engines from crawling the page again and picking up the redirect?

This feels to me like it would be gaming the system.  When your instincts tell you that, either it already doesn't work, or if it does, the search engines are working on ignoring it as a signal.

I like Shane's way.

For one of the sites I work on, I successfully track across multiple subdomains, and the site as a whole using one tracking code.  You can create multiple profiles, and then create a filter on each profile to include only URLs of a certain pattern.

URLs are case sensitive after the TLD, so these would appear to Google to be duplicate content.  Theoretically, those could be two different pages.  Ideally, you could 301 redirect all of one to the other.  So if you're using lower case /category across your site, you would want to 301 all the /Category URLs to /category.

Some sites correct for capitalization in URLs, and some don't.  Do you have internal links using both forms of "category"?  If so, you should correct those to one form, as 301's don't pass all your link juice, so you'd create a bit of a leak.

This lives in your Google Webmaster Tools account under Your site on the web > Search queries.  You can also access this data in Google Analytics if it's synced to your GWT account, under Traffic Sources > Search Engine Optimization > Queries.  This will give you impressions, clicks, average position, and CTRs of different queries you're ranking for in Google.

If you turn Google instant search off, and then add "&pws=0" to the end of the URL after you perform a search and resubmit the URL, it should depersonalize and delocalize your search.  Google takes almost everything it can into account in terms of browsing data, location, history, whether you're logged into a Google account, and more.  So these searches won't take your location or user data into account, so they're the most general searches you can perform.

Check out http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-personalized-search for more info.

Stephen is right; there's no need for that. It's a little odd it's telling you that, I would check that these URLs that are 404ing are returning a status code of 404.

If you have the check my links extension in Chrome, it makes it easy to find URLs that 404 on any page.  You can install it here: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ojkcdipcgfaekbeaelaapakgnjflfglf.

Excel has a feature called advanced filters that I use to filter these out.  See here for more info: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel-help/filter-by-using-advanced-criteria-HP005200178.aspx.  It allows you to filter your data by multiple criteria.  You might have to break up your regex a bit into multiple different filters, but you should be able to get it done with this.  They support * and ?.

If you use Google Analytics, you could view this by setting up an advanced filter with a regex to separate branded vs. non-branded paid search queries.

In Google Webmaster Tools, you can go in, and go to Diagnostics > Fetch as Googlebot.  Once Googlebot fetches the page, you can click the "Submit to index" link.

In Bing Webmaster Central, go to Index > Submit URLs, and you can submit the page to be re-indexed there.

With the AJAX crawlability guide implementation, Google knows they're requesting a different page than the one being shown to users, so it's not quite the same as cloaking.  That being said, you could go black hat and return a completely different page, but Google has their ways of finding these things out.

I think you mean JavaScript and not Java.  What you're suggesting is what Google recommends in their AJAX crawling guide here http://code.google.com/web/ajaxcrawling/.  They want you to create a static HTML page to serve to Googlebot instead of your regular page.

Google is getting better at crawling JavaScript content that's loaded asynchronously, so you might want to dedicate your resources elsewhere.  On one of my sites, Google is indexing text that's loaded asynchronously (Bing isn't yet), and Matt Cutts has said that Google is crawling some comments that are loaded asynchronously, like Facebook comments (see http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-indexing-facebook-comments/35594/)

They're indexing AJAX comments for sure (e.g. Facebook comments - see http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-indexing-facebook-comments/35594/), and on one of my sites where the main page content is loaded via AJAX, Google is indexing the text, because when I search for that exact text, it's returning that page. This was nice, because my developers weren't looking forward to having to implement the HTML snapshots as Google suggests in http://code.google.com/web/ajaxcrawling/.

So, Google is already doing it, and presumably they'll only be getting better at it.  That same search that works in Google doesn't work in Bing, so I think Bing is behind with crawling AJAX content.

If the content is too late, you're right, the Googlebot may not grab it. However, Google is getting better and better at indexing AJAX content that's loaded after the fact. On one of the sites I work on, we really didn't want to go through the whole process of serving up an HTML snapshot to Googlebot (outlined http://code.google.com/web/ajaxcrawling/).  About a month ago, I did a search in Google based on the AJAX content, and it returned the page, meaning Google is finding that AJAX content and indexing it!  They're indexing comments now (see http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-indexing-facebook-comments/35594/) as well, like Disqus and Facebook comments.  What kind of comments widget are you loading that Google can't get at?  Maybe they'll be able to index them soon?

I would guess that Google would devalue

<noscript>text, as almost everyone has JavaScript enabled. Otherwise, everyone would be keyword stuffing in their <noscript> tags.</p> <p style="color: #5e5e5e;">The option you outlined sounds like it could work. If you're just taking the content from JavaScript, and loading it in the HTML if the user doesn't have JavaScript enabled.  Google is actually suggesting in their ajax crawling guide to actually serve the Googlebot a static page instead of the page with AJAX content, which seems much closer to cloaking than the option you're suggesting.</p></noscript>

That's not really necessary unless there URLs or directories you're disallowing after the allow in your robots.txt. Allow is a directive supported by major search engines, but search engines assume they're allowed to crawl everything they find unless you disallow it specifically in your robots.txt.

The following is universally accepted by bots and essentially means the same thing as what I think you're trying to say, allowing bots to crawl everything:

User-agent: *
Disallow:

There's a sample use of the Allow directive on the wikipedia robots.txt page here.

I had to set up an additional profile to show the hostnames, as given here.  Is there a filter on this profile to display the hostnames?  If so, delete it.

You're right, you definitely don't want multiple counters.

Are you saying GA is displaying the entire URL when you view reports?  It shouldn't be.  I set up an additional profile for myself to show the full URL names for all my subdomains in the page URLs.  If that's what you're looking for, I can help you with that.

Take a look at this Whiteboard Friday; Cyrus can answer your question better than I can: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/beyond-exact-match-anchor-text-to-next-generation-link-signals-whiteboard-friday

If you meta noindex, follow these pages, they won't appear on search result pages, but they'll still pass link juice.  It won't increase the amount of link juice any of your indexed pages are getting however, so I'm not sure why you'd want to do that unless you want those pages removed from search engine indexes.

The search engines have gotten rid of link juice sculpting.  Your next question might be whether or not you should start nofollowing links to your own pages to try to pass more link juice to important pages.  That won't work either, as that only serves to burn the link juice the links would pass, it doesn't cause the followed links to pass more.

Yeah, that's a problem.  That means if people put links to http://mydomain.co.uk, they won't be passing their link juice on to http://www.mydomain.co.uk if the redirect is a 302 (temporary) redirect.  You should configure this to be a 301 (permanent) redirect.

Eventually, but that's the code Google recommends to return when your site is having downtime, so I would expect them to be more lenient towards not removing things right away.  I wouldn't expect it to be as efficient as returning a 404 or a 410.

The best way to get content de-indexed is to return a page with a meta noindex tag on it, if you're really keen on getting it removed immediately.

Google. Pick a few sentences or phrases in the article, and Google them. If you put quotes around them, Google will only return results with exact phrase matches. If any of the phrases show results, look and see if the article is the same.

Nofollowing links doesn't sculpt link juice, it burns it.  Doing this to internal links is bad, as you're wasting your own link juice!  If I don't want a page on my site on the SERPs, I'd much rather set a meta noindex, follow tag on the page I don't want indexed rather than nofollow links to it.

To explain burning vs. sculpting, here's an example.  Say page A has 6 votes of link juice to pass, and links to 3 other pages, B, C, and D.  If all the links are followed, it'll pass 2 votes to each page.  However, if you nofollow the link to page D, it won't give 3 votes to B and C, it'll give the same 2 votes to B and C, and the 2 votes that should have gone to page D go nowhere.  They're burned.

If instead you set a meta tag on page D to noindex, follow, the link juice will flow in and out of page D, so that would be much preferred.

The ads that rank best may appear at the top of the page.  In the screenshot you've attached, the top result there with the orange background is an Office Depot ad.  Branded searches rank very well, so you'll usually see that companies result up there at the top of the SERPs.

In my experience, bidding on competitors branded terms does not convert well.  People are looking for that site, and not your site.  My experience is not in e-commerce though; if you sell shoes, and you bid on "buy nikes", you're may be doing it right.

First, in answer to your questions:

1. There are no different policies other than what you stated above.  You can not use a companies trademarked name in ad text, but you can use their names in keywords.
2. They don't block them.  By entering the auction, they'll drive up the price for their competitors.  Since their quality scores are higher, they'll win the auctions with cheaper bids.

If your sales are pretty steady, you can run a test to see if running a branded campaign bidding on your own name is worthwhile.  Your organic traffic will go down a bit, but since people are looking for your company, your keyword quality scores will be very high, and you should be winning the auctions with relatively cheap bids. If anyone else is bidding on your brand keywords, it's almost always a good idea for you to be in there as well.  Otherwise, it's worth testing to see if it has a positive ROI.

Your examples are a bit flawed... a query like "Nallys used cars" is going to trigger for all broad and phrase keywords targeting "used cars", which many companies are going to target.  Also "la jolla cosmetic surgery centre" has "cosmetic surgery" which lots of people are bidding on.

Also, I saw ads for all of your examples above which you didn't see ads for (Best Buy, Victoria's Secret, and Office Depot).

The new interface is cleaner and easier to use.  You can switch back and forth between the new and old interface at will with a link in the header, so I'd recommend trying it out on your terms before they force everyone to switch over!  It's not that much different.

You can set up those profiles and filters in the old interface pretty much the same way.

Are you in Austrailia?  We have IP based redirection in place to redirect Austrailians to the Aussie version of our site (au.ixl.com) via a 302.  I still don't know why Alexa would be displaying that as the title of our site...

If you search for the site "ixl.com" in Alexa, for some reason, it's showing the site as "302 Found" instead of showing the website name, IXL.  If you drill into that, it shows the site as ixl.com, but underneath that, it says "302 Found" again.  Every other site I search for seems to show the site's name properly.  I have no idea where it's getting this "302 Found" from.  Does anyone know how to fix this?

Here's a link directly to the search results page: http://www.alexa.com/search?q=ixl.com

As a user, I prefer the URLs without.  Looking at the SEOMoz 2011 Rankings, longer URLs correlate to worse rankings, so do yourself and your users a favor and save them 5 characters.

http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors#metrics-8

(The instruction below are in the new Google Analytics UI)

That shouldn't be a problem.  You only need one Analytics snippet on your site to do this, the rest can be done with profiles and filters. You'll want to create new profiles in your web property to track these for each of your examples above.  To filter for www.website.nl/sub1, create a profile and then a filter for it.  You can do this by drilling into the profile, and under the Profiles tab, find the Filters subtab.  Create a new filter.  Choose "Custom filter" and "Include".  Choose "Request URI" in Filter Field.  For the Filter pattern, you'll put "/sub1".  If you're doing anything fancier for request URI, beware that it takes a regular expression.

That should work for sub1, and you can repeat the above for sub2.  For excluding those, you should be able to create a profile, and instead of include, choose to exclude, and create two filters on the profile, one for sub1, and one for sub2.

And yes, in the smaller profiles, when someone comes goes from a /sub1 page to a /sub2 page, it'll show up as a referral from sub1 in the sub2 profile.

One thing you could try is to put the following meta tag on the page, and once Google re-indexes the page, remove it immediately.  This tag will take down the instant preview, but also takes out your meta description on SERPs, so you'll want to remove it as soon as Google re-indexes the page. Once you remove it, Google will (hopefully) create a new snapshot of your page?  I have no idea if when Google re-indexes the page if they'll go create a new snapshot, or dig up the old one to display, but it seems like there should be a fair chance they'll take a new one?

Again, I've never tried this, so I'm only endorsing it as a possible idea, it is not a tried and tested solution.

[http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35304](http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35304)

This is where the adCenter Destkop tool and Excel will be your friend! You should be able to export your whole account, and set it up in Excel to construct your destination URLs using your campaign name, ad group name, and keyword (and any other info you want to add). Then you can re-import this file back into adCenter Desktop and update your account.

If you have questions with specifics, let me know.

The best thing to do is set up the geotargeting in Webmaster Tools for Google, and for other search engines, set the country and language you're targeting on the HTTP headers or in a meta tag (see here).

Your English version is probably a lot more popular and has a lot more backlinks to it than your regional versions, so it will rank better as compared to your region-specific subdomains.

To make it easier to find the right version, you could make it more clear on your site how to find the different international versions.  For example, if you can't read English, you won't know to click a link that says "international versions".  We got around this on the site I work on by using flags in the UI, since most people are familiar with the concept of each country having a different flag. (see http://au.ixl.com/ for example).

It's not considered cloaking when you're giving the same information in two different ways, an improved version for users, and a different version for the search bots which they can read. If you look at http://code.google.com/web/ajaxcrawling/docs/getting-started.html, the HTML snapshot method they're recommending is serving the bot an HTML snapshot of a page, rather than using AJAX to render it (or parts of it). This sounds similar to what you're doing.

Nofollowing links doesn't sculpt link juice, it burns it.  Doing this to internal links is bad, as you're wasting your own link juice!  If I don't want a page on my site on the SERPs, I'd much rather set a meta noindex, follow tag on the page I don't want indexed rather than nofollow links to it.

To explain burning vs. sculpting, here's an example.  Say page A has 6 votes of link juice to pass, and links to 3 other pages, B, C, and D.  If all the links are followed, it'll pass 2 votes to each page.  However, if you nofollow the link to page D, it won't give 3 votes to B and C, it'll give the same 2 votes to B and C, and the 2 votes that should have gone to page D go nowhere.  They're burned.

If instead you set a meta tag on page D to noindex, follow, the link juice will flow in and out of page D, so that would be much preferred.

301 redirect chains are bad.  If it's important to you to get the link juice to get from page A to page D, you should change it to just one redirect from A --> D.  Matt Cutts talked to Rand about it on a whiteboard Friday http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-interview-googles-matt-cutts-on-redirects-trust-more:

Is It a Bad Idea to Chain Redirects (e.g. 301-->301-->301)?

"It is, yeah."

Matt was very clear that Google can and usually will deal with one or two redirects in a series, but three is pushing it and anything beyond that probably won't be followed.  He also reiterated that 302s should only be used for temporary redirects...but you already knew that, right?

Thanks Nick!

Hey guys!

Suppose I disallow search bots from indexing anything on my secure server in my robots.txt, and 301 redirect all of my secure server traffic to my non-secure site.  Will the search bots see the redirect before they realize that they're disallowed from accessing that page?  Or will they see that page is disallowed and not follow the redirect?

Should I change my robots.txt to allow search bots to crawl my secure site so they can find the redirects?

Cyrus mentioned this in his whiteboard friday here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/title-tags-is-70-characters-the-best-practice-whiteboard-friday

Second is write for users. Here at SEOmoz our title tag is the same as the title of our post on our blog because we think it is important to meet users' expectations. When they see a title tag in the SERP and they click through to your page, you want them to feel like they've arrived where they thought they were going to arrive. So, it doesn't always have to match the title of your post, but something similar, something to make them comfortable, and something to talk to the users.

You're serving pages for http://allrmc.com/, http://www.allrmc.com/, and http://allrmc.com/index.php.  It looks like you implemented a rel canonical to point all of these to the www version of your home page.  Ideally, you could just 301 redirect all of them to the www version, but since they're all the same page, Google should respect the canonical.  If you do a general redirect for all of your pages to go from the non-www to the www version, that would fix this for the rest of the pages on your site, which also suffer from this and don't have canonical tags on them.

It won't matter for the SERPs really if you go with the www or non-www version everywhere.

From Google Webmaster Blog, April 9th, 2010 http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/04/using-site-speed-in-web-search-ranking.html:

While site speed is a new signal, it doesn't carry as much weight as the relevance of a page. Currently, fewer than 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed signal in our implementation and the signal for site speed only applies for visitors searching in English on Google.com at this point. We launched this change a few weeks back after rigorous testing. If you haven't seen much change to your site rankings, then this site speed change possibly did not impact your site.

Thanks for the answers everyone!  It's still crazy to me that these pages actually work.

Do these mile-long pages with a call to action at the bottom really produce more conversions? For example, see http://www.keywordelite.com/. Has anyone A/B tested this format vs. breaking up the content into tabs or some other format with multiple pages? Personally, these turn me off as they seem disorganized, they take forever to read, and they always sound like scams.

Using the Adwords tool works to find the high volume and low competition keywords. You should have an instinct for which of these will convert best. Build your content around those, and over time you'll see which keywords produce the highest value. I don't know of a tool that will measure the value of keywords for you. Since everyone's site is different, I have a hard time picturing how that would work.

What you've got there looks good to me!  The iframe method is what you want to do for the widget.  I'd be wary of trying to load additional Javascript on other people's web pages.  The physical link ends up on their page, so it should count.

Note that by putting the link on their page, all their CSS is going to get applied to it, so the

and <a>tags might not look the same from site to site, but it should be consistent with the style of the page they place it on.  If you want the text and link to stand out a bit, you could add your own styling to the text (specifying color, size, font-family, hover, etc).</a>

<a></a>

<a>And if you'll allow me to nitpick, I'd say "is provided", and put a period between the</a> and

.

It won't hurt the site.  You only need one if you want to disallow parts of your site to search engines, or disallow different search bots.  If you don't have any pages or directories to disallow, I wouldn't worry about it.

Having two homepages sounds weird to me. I'd definitely opt for 301 redirecting /Index to your regular home page to pass all the link juice to one page.  The old /Index page isn't really an "empty" URL, it will redirect to your regular home page, so people who try to navigate there will see your regular home page.

How to implement the redirect I believe will depend on what you're running your server on (Apache, etc).

From http://www.seobook.com/smx-east-2011-recap-seobook:

"At this point it seems Google will crawl a page if +1 is present, regardless of the robots.txt. This could possibly create issues with trying to not crawl certain pages to avoid dup content. More information found here:http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4358033.htm."

My guess is that they'll ignore your noindex tags too if you have a +1 button on your page.

Yes, almost all of the link juice passes through with a 301 redirect.  A little is lost, but a very tiny amount.

Source: Matt Cutts http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/rel-canonical-html-head/

If you have your listings available in an unordered list, that should be fine.  If there aren't hundreds and hundreds of listings on your site, I don't think Google will have a problem with your implementation.  If there are, you might consider building static pages for each category, and linking to the listings from there.

Is there some alternate navigation to reach all of these listings without using your AJAX search?  Or are the listings included in a sitemap?  Is there some way for Google to find them already?

I'd recommend reading http://code.google.com/web/ajaxcrawling/ to learn more about how to make your AJAXy pages indexable.  You may also want to take a look at http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html if you have prev and next pagination.  If you have a view all, and want to make that the canonical form, you'll want to look at http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/view-all-in-search-results.html

Also, in Bing Webmaster Tools, you can go to the Crawl > Crawl Settings tab and enable the "Configure your site to have bingbot crawl escaped fragmented URLs containing #!." option if that's applicable to you.