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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.

If the content you have is original and is bringing in quality organic traffic then keep it.  If you want to make sure to avoid any duplicate content issues that could arise from this just make sure you correclty implement 301 redirects on any old URL's where the content used to live so you can inform Google that the new content lives at a new URL.  You might find it useful to "refresh" the content while you move it over b/c recency/freshness of content also influences organic rankings.

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.

What do you mean the nofollow did not work?  I noticed on the example page that some of your external links in the papers section are nofollow while the videos are not nofollowed.

I like the Solo SEO tool for a huge list of advanced search queries you can do to start uncovering niche blogs/forums/communities.  It's free, check it out at

http://www.soloseo.com/tools/linkSearch.html

Just plugin your keyword and it will generate a long list of advanced search queries you can search at Google to find what you're looking for.

Don't think of it as link building as much as relationship building and community engagement.  If you think of your primary goal as relationship building then an obvious place to start is by getting engaged on other high traffic travel blogs/communities.  It's extremely important to start with engagement so you can establish some rapport with the community before doing outreach and offering a "free guest post."  Webmasters of quality sites are inundated with requests from complete strangers for "free content" that if you don't establish some sort of rapport first you won't get 1/4 of the responses you would have.

That being said, you should also start building several Twitter lists of authors and influencers in your niche so that you can start engaging with them via Twitter.  I find engaging via Twitter just about the easiest way to start building rapport with someone.

After you have a sense of who is influential in your space and you make efforts to engage with their content and build rapport then you will have a very clear idea of what kind of content you need to create and you will have a relationship in place to start pitching the content once it's ready to go live.

Essentially link building isn't about any tactic, it's writing content, having a network to share it with, enough credibility/authority to get your content picked up somewhere other than your blog, and your commitment to engage with the audience that responds to your piece.

Sites aren't looking for "free guests posts" they want authoritative authors that drive community engagement!

SEOmoz rankings are updated weekly, I believe every Thursday.  It's possible that you are getting skewed results when doing manual searches due to search personalization.  I would attribute the difference in results to either one of these issues.

As for the back link count being less than other sites it's best to consider Open Site Explorer as only one source of data for building your back link profile.  To get a better picture of your full back link profile you should also pull your links from Webmaster tools, Majestic SEO, and aHrefs if possible.  This will give you a fairly comprehensive look at your link profile.

I wouldn't de-index just yet.  If there are pieces that you can revisit and refresh with new additions to the content I would consider doing that.  You can always keep the old URL's that are bringing in traffic and refresh the content to keep organic traffic up.

Also don't forget you need to setup a change of address in google webmaster tools

301 redirecting shouldn't be hurting you much unless you are getting 3 or more 301 redirects on the same URL.  When you string together a bunch of 301's you stand the chance that Google will refuse to follow it after about 3 so in that case you would be in trouble.

Other than that you should be OK and once Google reads the 301's they will eventually deindex the old pages and your 301 ratio should go down.

I agree with the earlier response though that you should be mindful about changing product titles too many .

You can always edit the image in the Wordpress post and then remove the link to the media file.  This will prevent those pages from getting crawled from the post page.

If you are rewriting the URL you could install the Yoast SEO plugin and then choose the noindex/follow meta tag for date based archives as shown here:

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

Are you using the date based archives?  I would stop using those if I were you and assign articles to the appropriate category so your URL's are optimized for SEO.

The reason I'm suggesting this is because the easiest way to solve the problem is to disable indexing on date based archives which will also eliminate the duplicate content on the photo's b/c they are basically date based photo archives.

Let me know,

You won't automatically get the rankings from site A but I have done this in practice 3 times in the past year with whole site redirects and each time we have seen a significant boost in domain authority for the site we redirected to.  This boosted our rankings and traffic.

If you do this just make sure you redirect at the page level tans also do outreach to see if you can get your best external followed links changed to your new url.

I prefer to disallow photo archive pages via robots.txt.

I also recommend removing the default link WP inserts to the media image page.

In my opinion I believe the correct implementation is to use the JavaScript event.  I've seen it implemented this way on a few ecommerce sites that I know are doing well.

Focus on external followed links gained over time.  If you can show links are being built that are quality then that should outweigh the lack I'm the other metrics bc you could be losing ground bc of old link strategies that are still weighing you down.

I recommend targeting themes of keywords rather than one exact match keyword.  I typically choose the top 2-3 keywords per theme to target based on highest search volume and lowest competition.

The only metadata that the search engines look at are image titles and alt tags.

of you are referring to all of the metadata stored in a RAW image then no the engines don't use this data today That we know of.  As seo morphs more into content and content becomes more and more visual this isn't to say that they might not use it in the future.

I agree with this response.

1.  It's not diluting your page authority.

2.  The links only hurt you if your blog is employing some spam tactics.

You need to create URL's for each service you offer and then link to those services in the navigation using the keyword you want the page to rank for.  You need to use discretion here so as not to over optimize but your example above "Manage DNS" as part of the navigation linking to a /managed-dns page would be perfect.

Hope this helps,

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

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

Could you consider a version of option 4?

Main deal page could feature the top 3-5 deals of each of your most popular subcategories.  Then your category pages feature all the deals for that category so it doesn't seem like there would be a duplicate content issue with this approach.  This also seems to be a user-centric approach b/c it allows people to see a variety of deals on the main page and they are being curated by popularity of category and top 3-5 best sellers within the category.

Does that make sense?

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!

It sounds like you have canonical and rel next/prev setup correctly so you shouldn't worry about duplicate meta descriptions.  You could add ?page= as a query string to "ignore" in WMT and then it will ignore those pages and you won't be getting any errors from duplicate meta's on those pages.

Hope this helps,

If they were hit for sure then I would definitely have the links removed just to be safe.  You don't want to continue partnering with sites that are penalized until you know they have cleaned up their act.

Are you tracking rankings on all 3 engines?  I've noticed something like this before where it said I was increasing or decreasing in ranking and I didn't see any change until I looked at Yahoo or Bing ranking and that's where the change was happening.

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.

The url for your sitemap is 404.

Your sitemap URL should be:  http://www.thebookshop.ie/system/feeds/sitemap.xml

Try updating to that and see if WMT accepts it.

It won't change the indexing but it does change server requests.  To reduce server load its best to use relative not absolute urls.

ImplementingImplementing pen graph tags on your website ensures you optimize any social shares directly through your website.  If you are blogging on this site it's especially important to use open graph tags To control the titles, thumbs, and descriptions of items shared from your site.

If the URL's are all the same are there different actions that the user is taking on the page?

Will is right, use webmaster tools to verify your site and submit your sitemaps.  Use G+ to share new content you publish moving forward and monitor indexation health in google webmaster tools.

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.

Branded sitewide footer links should be ok as long as your domain isn't an EMD.  If you do have an EMD then I would not use site-wides and go with advice of Irving about making them homepage only.

What do you mean by "Declined" category?  Can you take a screenshot?

I think you are probably over-thinking this one.  Adding another all-in-one services page isn't likely to move the needle.  Instead of thinking about making another page I would focus on the ideas Doug is suggesting in creating link-worthy content ideas that show use cases for your products/services.  For example if you do a case study featuring one of your customers and how you helped them you could probably get it picked up on a few relevant industry blogs and also get your customer to share it socially and maybe even link back to it from their blog.  I would focus on giving people reasons to link to your content!

Hope this helps!

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!

It may not be getting them a manual penalty but it's definitely not helping them in the long term either.  Creating unique and useful content is the only way to keep gaining organic search traffic in the long run.

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,