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We do have the sales data but I have not yet cross referenced the chat lead phone numbers and names vs the sales records. Unfortunately it's a manual process currently but we do have plan to fix that.

Hi Logan,

Thanks for your response. In this case anyone who chats is essentially a conversion b/c we gain their contact information and our purchase process happens offline in the dealerships.

My hypothesis for the test is that the live chat pop up is actually annoying some users and thus hurting our overall conversion rate which includes other conversion actions that have a higher value to the business such as phone calls and test drives.

Does that make sense?

My client sells 4-wheelers, motorcycles, UTV's, Boats, Jet Skis, etc.

They have a live chat box that pops up on average 1.66 times per session and is automatic (does not require the user to click any button)

Based on our analytics I am recommending we disable this feature but I want to hear from other professional data-driven marketers.

I'm just looking for professional opinions on this strategy.

Here are your options:

• Love Live Chat Pop Ups
• Hate Live Chat Pop Ups
• Don't Care/Undecided
• Let the Data Decide

Thank you in advance!

mCjeiouqH1

It seems like you have done what you can for damage control. Now focus your efforts on publishing high quality content and building links. You need to marginalize the effects of the bad SEO with proactive link building.

On Wordpress there is a page created for each author on the blog.  It looks something like this.

http://hilounge.com/author/hilounge/

The author archive or page needs to have a link to the authors google plus Profile.

If you keep the same URL structure and properly SEO optimize the WP site then you shouldn't have any problems with rankings.  I recommend using the Yoast SEO plugin for Wordpress and making sure you correctly implement your robots.txt file to block any archives or duplicate content that might get created by Wordpress when you bring the content over.  Wordpress has author archives, date based archives, etc and you need to make sure you don't get any duplicate content indexed.  The Yoast SEO plugin has a great post here with all the details:

http://yoast.com/articles/wordpress-seo/

I don't see 197 on that page I only see 42 external followed links.  See the screenshot below:

http://screencast.com/t/1p11W4jQkU

I agree with Andy, it totally depends on the type of data you are marking up structurally.  For example product pages would need different markup to share quantity, price, reviews, etc versus some of your main company data like address, phone, etc.

If you share what data you are marking up we can better assist you as to which pages should get code added.

Rankings change constantly so it's not uncommon to see different rankings when performing manual searches on Google.  For this reason I tend to track rankings with the rank tracker tool in SEOmoz.

I'm not sure what your SEO company has recommended but have you checked to see if you have any warnings in Webmaster Tools?  If you took a major hit you may have a penalty and that would be the first thing I would check.

Let me know,

Have you checked Google Webmaster tools to make sure you didn't get hit with a penalty.  Although you may not be engaged in any black hat SEO that doesn't mean you couldn't have been a victim of negative SEO by a competitor or even that some SEO tactics you previously employed have now been devalued or penalized.

I would check to see if you have any warnings in WMT and report back here and I can help you more from that point.

Yes it can be an issue.  You should be implementing rel=canonical tags.  If you use the rel=canonical tags you can tell Google which pages are "duplicates" and which is the original version.  For ecommerce I usually recommend making the most product page in the most relevant category as the canonical and the other versions in other categories/subcategories are not canonical.

Hope this helps!

In my opinion the best option for your organic traffic is to try and keep the service pages.  The caveat is that you need to substantially differentiate the content.  You should brainstorm options with your team but some ideas that come to mind are obviously changing title tags ,adding some service specific descriptions to the top of those pages, incorporating some unique service specific video, add links to service specific DIY/Guide/Warnings/Other related educational pre-sales material.

If that becomes too much work for this phase of the project my next suggestion would be rel=canonical back to the profession page.  Ensure your profession page is designed in a way that makes filtering to the service level the obvious call to action and you should be fine.  This will hinder your ability to target all of those service level keywords with service level URL's but you could still create content around those niches and drive links back to the profession page.

Hope this helps

You could use that but it's not as good as using a short description of the picture itself.  The alt tags are what Google uses to determine what the picture is of since they can't actually see the image.  If you use keyword optimized alt tags that are natural not keyword stuffed then you will probably also bring in more Google image traffic.

Hope this helps,

You should setup rel=canonical tags to be automatically added to each of the affiliate pages that are duplicates of your main page.  This basically tells Google that your original URL without affiliate parameters is the authoritative version of the content and that all other pages should not be indexed above the canonical version.

You should also probably add a query string to tell Google Webmaster Tools to ignore URL's that contain your affiliate query parameter.  This will make sure that Webmaster Tools is setup correctly so you aren't getting hit for duplicate content.

Hope this helps!

In most cases it's probably best for site A to have its' own blog on sitea.com/blog or something to that effect.  This ensures any links coming to the blog get attributed to the root domains' domain authority.

If Site B, the blog, is sort of a standalone brand on it's own, then you could make an argument for making a separate site for the blog.  Most of the time this isn't the case though b/c if you are simply writing articles on another site and linking back to site a repeatedly this isn't a good strategy.

In this case site B would represent a "micro-site" and I have been advising clients away from those since 2009.

Good question, I think it varies based on the product.  For feature rich products it makes sense to develop the product pages completely so the user has all the information they need to make a purchase decision.  There's no point in ranking a category page if your product pages aren't ready to drive a sale.

On the other hand for other products like fashion I think product content is much less important. In this space I think people tend to "browse" more and enjoy more of an editorial experience.  In this case I think incorporating editorial content at the category level is likely to differentiate your category page and if done right can actually drive incoming links.

Another big factor is the Return on Effort, it can be substantially quicker to add meaningful content to a category page versus a ton of product pages.

Just my $.02

1.  Yes you are correct about moving the blog to /blog so you can get the DA value from the root domain.  It also will help your root domain more to have the content at /blog b/c any links you generate to your content will go back to the root domain DA.

2.  I wouldn't recommend switching from wordpress.  There is just no business case (SEO-wise) for switching away from Wordpress.  The Yoast SEO plugin makes on page optimization and technical seo for wordpress a no-brainer and the WP community support will more than make up for any advantages you might think of on a propreitary system.

3.  Yes tracking on GA will be suffice.  You may want to setup a custom profile to track just the blog content in google analytics if you have someone who you want to be able to view blog analytics but not the entire site analytics.  Just a suggestion!

Sounds like you are on the right path, hope this helps!

As for damage control I would just focus all efforts on Site A unless there is a clear differentiation in content.  If you have useful content to publish do so on the blog of Site A and focus on social promotion and outreach.  It's a much better use of time if you can get a few links from outreach than another one from a microsite.

I've noticed Google does this sometimes.  They will auto adjust the actual title they are displaying in the SERP's just like the example you are referencing here.  I've seen this where they move a brand name to the front of the title if you are doing a branded search.  I've only seen this for well known brands.

I have also seen it for queries like "ties"  In this example the actual title of the #1 result is

<title>Ties | Mens Ties | Discount Neckties | Silk Neckties | Mens Silk Neckties | Extra Long Ties | Bow Ties | Cufflinks | Pocket Squares | Wool Ties | Cotton Ties</title>

but Google displays the title in the serp's simply as Ties

I think this is just Google testing different title displays to see how it impacts the interaction of organic vs paid traffic.

Why would you want to build comment spam?  Are you trying to get penalized by Google?