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I don't have the best answer here for that, and look forward to others chiming in. I was just afraid you were going to spend money to have someone who didn't know your field write up content for you, and glad to hear that people involved in the industry are involved in the authorship.

Don't overlook the usefulness of folders when it comes to Google Analytics. Lunametrics has a post on designing a site that is friendly with GA at http://www.lunametrics.com/blog/2010/09/22/designing-google-analytics-friendly-site/.

What about using the allintext: query, so that your keywords appear in the text of the page? More information at http://www.googleguide.com/advanced_operators.html#allintext

Roger should obey wildcards. It sounds like he's not, so could you tattle on him to the help team and they'll see why he's not following directions? http://www.seomoz.org/help Thanks!

Actually, the OP will want to have both www and non-www verified at the same time in GWT.

Google made a post in their Webmaster Central blog about what makes a quality site, and offered a number of questions for people to think about in relation to a site or a page on a site. http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/05/more-guidance-on-building-high-quality.html

One of the questions was "Does this article have an excessive amount of ads that distract from or interfere with the main content?" which would make me think they look at ads to some degree.

Just make sure that when/if you copy over the staging site to the live domain that you don't copy over the robots.txt, htaccess, or whatever means you use to block that site from being indexed and thus have your shiny new site be blocked.

We're aware of the problem and working on it. We're updating Twitter as we have information, and help desk has been online for the last couple of hours letting people know that it's us and not you. So sorry about this everyone. We'll let you know when we have an ETA about things.

We have been having keyword problems since Friday, and this OSE problem cropped up in the middle of the night Seattle time last night/this morning.

I'd tailor the cover letter to the job being posted. I haven't hired anyone from odesk, but I do see responses to jobs that are obviously just forms and they haven't read the job posting at all.

Hi! We're going through some of the older unanswered questions and seeing if people still have questions or if they've gone ahead and implemented something and have any lessons to share with us. Can you give an update, or mark your question as answered?

Thanks!

Here's how I dealt with a similar situation in the past.

Robots.txt on each of the dev subdomains and on the live domain. Dev subdomains robots.txt excluded the entire subdomain, and subdomains were verified in GWT and removed as needed.

Made live subdomain robots.txt read-only so it didn't get overwritten. Should have made dev subdomains robots.txt read-only as well, since they sometimes got refreshed with the live content (there was a UGC database that would occasionally get copied to a dev subdomain, and we'd have robots.txt get copied over too and dev subdomain indexed).

Set up a code monitor that checks the contents of all of the robots.txt daily and sends me an email if anything is changed.

Not perfect, but I was at least able to catch changes soon after they happened, and prevented a few changes.

These are just notices. As long as things look correct to you (you're not doing a rel canonical to the home page for each of your internal pages) things are good and you can happily ignore that.

Does Webmaster Tools have any notices from Google about your site, such as a penalty?

Hi! I'm guessing that you're seeing Google deploying some listing rich snippets for your meta description. Take a look at http://www.seroundtable.com/google-real-estate-snippets-13928.html and http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2011/08/new-snippets-for-list-pages.html for a little more information about what may be happening. Does that help explain things at all?

Can you tell us what your issues are that you're seeing, or link to a previous thread that explains your problem? That might help us be able to help you a bit more.

Hi Tom,

Are you sending an email to help@seomoz.org, or somewhere else? If you sent it to help@seomoz.org you should have gotten an auto-reply with a ticket number. PM me that ticket number and I'll investigate for you.

It's not related to links, but are any of the images that you use copyright? You don't want to go into the effort of putting the site together and getting people to know about it only to get takedown notices because images are used without permission.

Francisco, you've probably thought about this, but be sure to look at all of the banking rules about privacy and sharing of information as you build this. When I worked at an agency, I remember how it would take weeks of turnaround to get a simple banner ad approved, as all of the wording had to go through legal, and how resistant another bank was to even install Google Analytics on some of their https pages.

I'm taking my experiences there and thinking there must be a lot of rules regarding how a site is to be secured so that type of information isn't hacked, how to ensure proper information displays for each level of person accessing the system, etc. Cost of compliance may be something to consider, and I don't know if WP would be quite compliant enough out of the box.

That's an interesting one. I'd email that to the help desk at help@seomoz.org to let them know about it. If there's some kind of cause of it that would be helpful for others to know, it'd be great if you could post more information back on this thread.

Generally, buying traffic isn't recommended and you often don't wind up with traffic that converts. Can you give a little more information about what you're thinking about so we can give you some more targeted feedback?

An older post, but Rand has some feedback on this at http://moz.com/blog/wrong-page-ranking-in-the-results-6-common-causes-5-solutions.

When the big update came through a little over two years ago about page speed, I was working on a site with load time issues. I did see quite the drop in organic referrals from Google after that update was pushed, while organic referrals from Bing and Yahoo continued to increase. I was working in-house at the time, so I don't have a lot of other sites to judge at that time, but I did see distinct change in that one site.

I also agree with you that load time affects users and their browsing and conversion behavior. And even though "everybody has broadband" there are a lot of people on poor public (or conference) wifi connections or on their phones, and pagespeed is quite important to them.

Bing and Yahoo have a partnership where Yahoo will use Bing's algorithm for ranking, but can still affect how things are displayed to the user. Covario has a post on this last year at http://actionableinsights.covario.com/1650/bing-and-yahoo-%E2%80%93-same-algorithm-different-results/ that should provide some more background information.

Hi Brian,

We no longer have the term extractor tool, I"m sorry to say. I'm asking around for alternatives. Someone a while back mentioned Wordstream, and I've also seen people mention using Google AdWords and putting in your URL for it to look at terms.

Will there be any original content on this site?

I've always liked Pinnacle Promotions at http://www.pinnaclepromotions.com/. The store is easy to use, has good descriptions, filters, product not found page, etc. I have no relation with them; they're just a site I ran across when looking for promotional goods that stood out to me as someone having paid attention to  a lot of factors that make a good site.

If you look at the bottom of the original question, to the right there should be an email icon and a flag icon. Select the email icon to subscribe by email to the thread even if you don't comment.

Sorry, no experience here with implementing schema. We did make a post on it at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/schema-examples in case you missed that.

Keri

Hi Sara,

Right now, there is no way to track beyond the top 50 results. In our help hub page for rankings at http://www.seomoz.org/help/rankings, we mention "Ranking results beyond the top 50 tend to fluctuate to such a large degree that they make any actionable insight almost useless. Also, traffic gained beyond the first couple pages of search results is usually negligible."

Hope this helps!

One reason you may be getting different answers is that a good evaluation of your situation may actually take several hours to dig in and find out what is going on, the cause(s) of the problem, ideas for solutions, etc. This may be a case where it would be good to contact an expert (we have a recommended list you can find in the footer) and ask for some help. You don't necessarily need to hire them to do all of the cleanup work for you, but it'd be a great place to start from in having confidence to know what to do.

Have you checked the response code of your custom 404 page and made sure that it's returning a 404 and not a 200?

There's more information about robots.txt from SEOmoz at http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/robotstxt

SEOmoz and the robots.txt site suggest the following for allowing robots to see everying and list your sitemap:

User-agent: *
Disallow:

Sitemap: http://www.example.com/none-standard-location/sitemap.xml

Hi everyone!

We're sorry for the problems here, and we're looking into it now. We also discovered that our handy new Help Hub page does mention our help desk hours of 7am to 5pm Pacific Time, but we forgot to put that it's just Monday through Friday. We are often around on the weekends to respond to things, but not as fast as on a weekday, and we apologize. We'll also be updating the help hub real soon so our hours are more clear. Thanks for your patience!

Keri Morgret

[edited to make clear the hours are for the help desk]

Have you thought of instead spending $1000 or $2000 on an audit that can identify your current problems, and give you direction so your staff can work on correcting the issues?

We had a great guide posted about this in February that you might want to look at. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/web-site-migration-guide-tips-for-seos

It's a good idea to have an xml site map and make sure the search engines know where it is. It's part of the protocol that they will look in the robots.txt file for the location for your sitemap.

Hi Nancy,

Thanks for reaching out. When you're in your campaign settings, the order of the engines you select is the order of the rankings that are displayed. So the top engine is the first ranking, the middle engine is the second ranking, and the bottom engine is the third ranking. Hope this helps!

Thanks for pointing this out -- it is a bit confusing! I'm forwarding this over to the correct department so we can see if we can get this fixed and explained a bit better.

Keri

This question is over three years old, and the person who made this reply is no longer a Pro member. If you have a question on a similar subject, it's probably better to start a new thread after all this time. Thanks!

Google is constantly crawling the web. When I search "next google index" in Google in quotes, this post is the second result on Google right now. They do tend to crawl different sites at different rates, however. They crawl CNN a lot more often than they crawl the local RC airplane site that updates every three months, for example.

Hi John,

Dr. Pete made a very comprehensive post to the SEOmoz blog this week about duplicate content that should help give you a better understanding of the problems you are facing and options for solutions.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-in-a-post-panda-world

Hi! We are having some issues, and should be caught up by the end of the day Friday (Washington / Pacific Standard Time).

It's often an internal link that's a bit screwed up that will cause this to happen. Look for a missing colon in http:, or something like that.

You might also want to review the section of the beginner's guide to SEO that talks about links at http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo/growing-popularity-and-links, and the link building section of our blog at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/category/4.

Hi Jeremy,

I have a forum in the RC space as well, running on DNN Active Forums (www.rcnvavalcombat.com). My top five most common keywords in GWT are posts, private, combat, ship, forums, and admiral (a user rank). Ryan gives good advice to not sweat it.

Keri

Yes, the fix for now is to use the AdWords Keyword Tool for this information. The rest of the keyword difficulty tool (the stuff you can't get form other sources) works just fine.

Then there is no need for citation building for your NAP, as you are not considered a local business. One thing you don't have to worry about!

Aside from the domain name, is the URL structure identical between the two sites? If so, there should be a real easy redirect to just say "if person hit oldsite.com/page123 take them to newsite.com/page123". I don't know that exact code, but can get someone on here who does.

Bing has said that anything over 1% of bad URLs in a sitemap constitutes a dirty sitemap to them, so yes, it is very important.

Are you able to share the system that you're using? Others may have experience in working around this already.

You can crawl up to 3000 URLs on demand at http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/crawl-test, which should help you until the next regularly scheduled crawl.

The robots.txt would allow the OP to go back into GWT and request removal of the dev site from the index. Password protecting a dev site is usually a pretty good idea, too.

Hi Dana,

I don't know the operation of the toolbar well enough to say, but we did roll out an index update this afternoon. I think it started after you wrote this, but for the heck of it, could you come back and look at this and see if you're still seeing the same PA on every page you visit? If so, it's probably something to send an email to help@seomoz.org about, as they can look into it better.

Thanks!