I would point out these key differences.

1. A blog gives you more control. With a blog, you can target the keywords you want to target. You can edit the content after you've published it. You can time when posts go out. Of course, it takes a lot of effort to come up with good content, but you're in the driver's seat.

2. A forum gives you less control, but you don't have to write all the content. The attractive thing about a forum - for SEO purposes anyway - is user-generated content. This is great because you don't have to do all the heavy lifting that real writing requires. The bad thing about a forum is also user-generated content. All those things you have control over with a blog ... you kinda lose them with a forum. You could exert a lot of control over your forum if you want, but then folks will stop contributing and you won't have a forum. Also, all that heavy lifting you save by not having to create the content may get replaced by the necessity of moderating the content.

3. You can build a blog steadily over time. With a blog, you can go from "Hello World!" to a good following just by disciplined, regular, quality publishing over time. You can start small and build.

4. Nobody likes an empty forum. Unlike a blog, a forum needs to go live with content already in it and conversations already happening. If you're going to launch a forum, I suggest getting some dedicated customers involved in a pre-launch. Seed the forum with a number of conversations before launching it to your full customer base. Otherwise, most people will get stage fright and you will have wasted your launch.

LindaLV is right. Here are some screenshots to help you out.

1. Expand the hamburger menu. Then navigate to Tools > Extensions (#1 attachment)

2. Either disable or delete the Moz toolbar. (#2 attachment)

That said, I recommend leaving it installed. I don't use it terribly often, but then there are those times that it comes in really helpful. So for most of my browsing, I leave it disabled. If you find it's covering up content while you're browsing, you can just click the toolbar icon to disable it and make it inactive. That's how I browse most of the time. (#3 attachment)

T0GV0ux.png enynR1V.png 6YpU2uV.png

I would not use bit.ly or any other shortener for internal links.

If you want to track internal links, then you should use Google's enhanced link attribution or URL builder. I prefer the link attribution tool over the URL builder, though. This approach is more natural for visitors to your site, and it allows you to reap the SEO benefits of good internal site linking.

If you want to track external links, I'd recommend Google's outbound link tracking, a url shortener, or both. For Wordpress sites, Joost de Valk has an old (but good) post on one way to do this with a plugin. But the idea can be replicated on other sites. Basically, you link internally to a directory that's behind robots.txt. Then 301 those links to your affiliate or shortened url.

Hope that helps!

You would do the first option. The "streetAddress" property needs to contain all the information, even if it spans two lines.

Check out the example over at Schema.org - http://schema.org/streetAddress. That address contains 2 lines.

You can probably set it to ignore parameters you don't want added to the sitemap. Here's a screenshot from my standalone version to give you an idea of the settings.

LFfMo.jpg

If you have ftp access to the root, you can simply overwrite the current one with a new one. Google will pick it up.

Also, you should include a link to all your sitemaps in a robots.txt file - also in the root. If you look at SEOMoz's robots.txt file, you can see how to do that. http://www.seomoz.org/robots.txt

Kate,

What if I have one url translated into French but want to target French speakers in multiple countries? Would I do this with my hreflang tags:

Note: I generated these with Aleyda Solis's international sitemap generator. Does hreflang="x-default" ever get used?

Yes. The layout markup should not mess things up. Just put the whole street address within itemprop="streetAddress", and you should be fine.