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Sounds like a pretty good return, $1 per fan. Especially if the were truely engaged fans, rather than the fictious fans that it sounds like you could get from these purchasing sites. Thanks for the info!

What type of hosting/server do you have linux based or microsoft?

Have you seen a good response with facebook ads? If you don't mind me asking, what is your average cpc and ctr?

This client is a two man startup that truly has no knowledge of inbound marketing. He first came to me with the facebook fan link and i explained to him these wouldn't be targeted and probably fictitious accounts.

A week later he sends me the twitter link and asked the same question, "If i get 40,000 followers if only 20 of them convert i would cover cost."

So after his determination i figured i shoot the question out to the inbound marketing community that i have grown to trust, and to no surprise they have all agreed. It sounds like i should tell him to invest in facebook ads rather than fake facebook friends

So i have a client that sends me a link once a week about buying followers for social media profiles. Each time i tell him if it seems to good to be true... then its too good to be true!

What are your guys thoughts, experiences, feelings?

Here are a few examples:

http://www.targetedtraffic.int.tc

http://www.fbfandamonium.com

FYI - http://seomoz.zendesk.com/entries/372859-trifecta-is-mostly-broken

The same thing is happening for one of my campaigns, specifically for a 302 redirect to the homepage. My guess is I need to update it to a 301, but I'm not 100% sure if that would solve the issue?

I would highly suggest using CPM (cost per thousand impression) pricing structure for your content network campaigns. You can get a lot more bang for your buck than paying per click.

For example lets assume you get 1000 impressions with only a 3% CTR. This means you have around 30 clicks for $0.45 a piece, which means your total cost is $13.50.

If you would have instead setup your campaign to bid $1.50 per/thousand impressions you could have saved $12 dollars. Then taking it another step further, what if you have a CTR of 5%? you still only pay the $1.50 even though you are receiving more clicks.

As you can tell these are just made up figures and I understand each case is different, but i would definitely suggest looking into it.  From my experience i have never paid more than $1.50 per thousand impressions (and that was for the keyword "stimulus reimbursement" during the health care reform bill craziness).

I fully understand that the 301 is the best option, i was interested if it had been published anywhere that meta-refreshes could pass any value or not?

I did some searching around and couldn't find any trust worthy articles. They only thing i found was that it wasn't suggested by SEOMoz and the W3C doesn't support it...

Quick question, can Googlebot (or other search engines) follow meta refresh tags? Does it work anything like a 301 in terms of passing value to the new page?

In the past i have seen conanicals take up to 5-6 weeks. My only other advice is to monitor the amount of indexed queries you have in Google. If you know you started with 100+ and over the past three weeks it has dropped down to 50, then it is slowly taking affect (once again, using the site search). If you see the opposite and you notice no change, then perhaps the tag is still incorrect or some other issue?

I can't promise that all of the queried URLs will become un-indexed but the most important thing is the base page ranks the highest when searching.

First i would check to see if the update you made to the pages have been recognized by Google. You can do this simply by doing a "site:www.domain.com" search, then view the cached page. If you find that it has not been recognized, you can always resubmit a new xml sitemap to your webmaster tools. In the past i have seen this help speed up the process.

How long ago did you make these updates?

Along with the current crawl notices (canonical links, 301s, etc) you should add "meta refresh". Those are tricky to catch via the human eye unless you are paying very close attention and they definitely effect your SEO if not done properly.

Thoughts?

Were you previously being penalized on these sites? For instance, did you have a good rank for your selected keywords then randomly drop off the first three SERPs? Or are you just trying to take steps to not be penalized?

The drop in organic traffic for your partner's sites is directly related to the canonical links. Before i can give advice on how to solve the problem i first need to know, what is the reason for the duplicate content?

I've always had a great experience with 99designs but you want to make sure you give a lot of requirements and inspiration if you want to get exactly what your looking for. I've only used them for logo work though so i can't give much feedback for other types of projects. What are your price points?

You could always check for colleges around your location that offer interns/co-ops for college credit. Normally there is good design talent with relatively affordable prices.

Hopefully we get some feedback from an SEOMoz staff. It would just be good to know for future analysis.

Recently i have found that the data in the trifecta report is becoming less complete. For the last few sites i found that the report returned about half of the metrics it was looking for.

For instance, it mentioned that one of the domains did not have a dmoz or wikipedia link/page even though they had both? Also, it rarely returns the Yahoo Site Explorer metrics even though when clicking to see the source the data is there?

Are you guys planning on phasing out this tool, if not it seems like some work needs to be done on cleaning it up.

Thanks!

From my understanding it will only positively effect the site if there is a 301 redirect or conical link back to the original corporate site domain. A simple domain alias will risk the possibility of duplicate content in search engines.

Thanks for the quick response, Steve.

I have a client that picked up a bunch of keyword rich domain names and he wants to point them to his current corporate site as domain aliases.

Could this in anyway negatively or positively effect his SEO? or ranking?

Thanks  - Kyle Chandler

I see, i wonder what those metrics are. I have seen some pages with a page authority of 50 with only 3 backlinks. So I'm sure their is a correlation with quality of backlinks along with the amount.

I'm hoping this is a quick and simple question. Sometimes when using the open site explorer or the keyword difficulty tool i find that some pages have a higher "page authority" than the "domain authority."

That seemed odd to me, is there a correlation between the two? You would think by default as you grow your page authority the domain authority increases as well?

So i guess my question would be, what happens on a page to give it a higher page authority than domain authority?

@Mike Scanlin

Are search engines like Google currently using LSI? I tried doing some research on the topic but had trouble finding anything actually published by Google (except in their patent section). Either way, very interesting topic!

By using the canonical link will it begin to pull the tracking queries out of the ranking or at least discredit them?

A client of ours uses some unique keyword tracking for their landing pages where they append certain metrics in a query string, and pulls that information out dynamically to learn more about their traffic (kind of like Google's UTM tracking). Non-the-less these query strings are now being indexed as separate pages in Google and Yahoo and are being flagged as duplicate content/title tags by the SEOmoz tools. For example:

Base Page: www.domain.com/page.html
Tracking: www.domain.com/page.html?keyword=keyword#source=source

Now both of these are being indexed even though it is only one page. So i suggested placing an canonical link tag in the header point back to the base page to start discrediting the tracking URLs:

But this means that the base pages will be pointing to themselves as well, would that be an issue? Is their a better way to solve this issue without removing the query tracking all togther?

Thanks - Kyle Chandler

For this case specifically it was two different sign ups: One for an in home consultation, and the other to download product information. The first one asked for a lot more personal information while the second one only asked for name/email.

I had a client claiming his industry (replacement home windows) conversion rate was around 15% based on his research. In my research i could find nothing of the sort, and really couldn't find a single place that provided this type of information. Anyone out there have some advice on where to research industry conversion rates (averages) or tools/thought processes to explore?

Thanks!

(these stats would primarily be used for goal setting and competitive analysis)

I'd take a look at using advanced segments. You are able to blend a lot of reports into one and see graphically the segments of your site traffic. For instance, you could do a generic "content detail" report and add an advance segment to see the break down of traffic (direct, referral, paid searh, organic search). Then, taking it a step further you could do a date comparison to see how your site is trending month to month or week to week.

In my opinion, yes. This way you are achieving two goals.

1. Passing the domain strength of the niche sites to a related page

2. Ensuring a smooth end user experience

Making the assumption that shutting down both websites are in the best interest of your company. I would 301 redirecting the niche eCommerce sites back to your main corporate site. In terms of how to redirect them, are there any pages on your main site that are directly related to your other sites? If so i would redirect them there.

Or perhaps create an page on your main site briefly explaining the reason those sites no longer exist and redirect to that. This way you can pass the domain strength as well as ensuring a good experience for the end user.

Thanks for the input! I haven't had a chance to view their .htaccess file. I am still in the early stages of reviewing their site. I just wasn't sure if their would be a technical reason for them to do this or if it just happened by accident. It sounds like adding a basic robots.txt file would be the appropriate solution.

I've been doing some site analysis for a new SEO client and it has been brought to my attention that their robots.txt file redirects to their homepage. I was wondering:

Is there a benfit to setup your robots.txt file to do this?

Will this effect how their site will get indexed?

Thanks for your response!

• Kyle

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