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Taking one step back, realize that a site (or a specific set of pages) that has all or almost all links without a nofollow attribute isn't showing a normal link profile. Normal sites will get a mix of inlinks that are followed and nofollowed, so you don't want to stick out that way.

To be really honest, the landing page doesn't inspire a lot of trust. As others pointed out, what's with the non-hyperlinked YouTube URL at the top? What is this blog about? There are two posts, and a hire me page. The hire me page doesn't talk about doing what you're writing about in this post.

In this post in particular, more attention to editing could help with the trust. Several sentences don't end with any type of punctuation, and you have grammar and spelling errors. The post doesn't flow very well. I'm having to assume that the Pastry Shop is trying to upsell you on things and is not efficient about letting you get in and out quickly, but it's never stated.

If you want comments, it can help to ask for comments. Either something as simple as asking for the reader's views in general, or ask for comments about some particular aspect of the post.

What are the results from the sitemap? Has Google started crawling any more of your pages?

Hi Mike,

I'm wondering what you decided to do here, and if you have any interesting results that you'd be willing to share with the Q&A community. Thanks!

Hi Jimbo, did you get those sorted out, or are you still having a problem? If you're having a problem, the best bet is to email help@seomoz.org and create a ticket there.

Brent, we'd be interested in hearing what you chose to do in the case with the employee bios, and if you encountered anything unexpected.

Could it be that Adwords can't see a particular call to action on this page, and are figuring you're using it as a bridge to another page that does have the call to action? What is it that you want your people that come to this page from a PPC ad to do?

If I'm looking for a pastry shop, I'm looking for a site that tells me where I can go and get my pastry, the hours, etc. or where I can order my pastry. I'm not looking for a lesson on marketing. If I'm looking for a lesson on marketing, I'm not going to enter the keywords pastry shop. Does this page satisfy the intent of your user's query?

Here's one way to think about it. Google wants to make money, and their primary way of making money is by selling ads. If the users aren't happy after they click on those ads, the users won't come back to Google to click on any more ads, and Google won't make money.

We're working on the duplicate posts. I was able to delete some of them, but not all.

Keri

In this case, the title element probably means the title tag. Was this with the SEOmoz report? If so, you can send a note via the feedback button at the left of the screen and mention that changing some language could make it a bit less confusing for people.

Is this your site? It's a self improvement site, so in the course of things, it generally wouldn't have come up in discussion about SEO.

If it is your site, can you give some more specific information about what type of feedback you're looking for? This is a broad question, and you will likely get more success and better answers if you give more details about what you're looking for or a problem you're having.

Have you chosen a service yet? I don't have experience in this area, but SEOmoz does use Wistia and I've heard great things from the other staff members at Moz about Wistia. In an SEOmoz post about favorite tools, Jamie writes:

Wistia is video hosting on steroids. Not only does this video hosting platform support HTML5, which makes your videos viewable on a slew of non-Flash enabled devices, but the platform is inherently designed for SEO.  Try searching Google for "Top 10 Web Apps We Love" and you'll likely see the above Wistia-hosted video that's included with this blog post. Their tracking and analytics are also the best we've seen in video hosting.  See a sample report here.

For some more current information, you can check out Google's official page here http://www.google.com/support/news_pub/?hl=en. Have you been able to get in Google News since you posted this, or are you still trying?

Hi Kalvin, can you share with us how things are going and what you decided? Are there any nuggets you can share that might help out the next person in a similar situation, and/or do you have more questions you'd like to throw out to the group? Don't forget that you can use private Q&A with just staff members as well.

Hi Michael,

What did you and the client end up deciding? Do you have any lessons learned or anything interesting to share? We'd love to hear it!

Hi Jennifer,

Rand just made a comment today on another question in Q&A that addresses some of the differences between the figures from OpenSiteExplorer and Magestic. http://www.seomoz.org/q/why-there-is-no-even-close-correlation-between-majesticseo-data-and-open-site-explorer

Hope this helps!

That will tell you the number indexed, but it still doesn't tell you which of those URLs are or are not indexed. I think we all wish it would!

Though be assured that since this is public Q&A you didn't use a credit for this question. Thanks again for using SEOmoz tools!

I agree with EGOL. The people who are in a position to know what makes a perfect landing page for your area are your competitors, and they are certainly not going to give that information to you.

Your question is quite broad, and as it's written you may not get help information. You might consider narrowing the question and adding some more details. It's often said that you should consider every page a landing page. You've also not said if this is for a PPC campaign or for organic traffic, or for an offline campaign that direct to a specific URL.

There was a great post today in YOUmoz regarding PPC landing page optimization, with resources that are also applicable to organic landing pages. You might check it out at http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/6-essential-ppc-landing-page-optimizations.

The downside to a high search percentage is that if the algo changes and the change isn't in your favor, you don't have anything to fall back on. The traffic sources for my model warship combat site are similar to yours Yumi -- about an equal mix of direct, referral, and search engines. It's a comfort to know that if something drastic changed with the search engines, I still have my referral and direct traffic.

I don't know how to trigger it, but Search Engine Roundtable wrote about this last month at http://www.seroundtable.com/adwords-title-url-13424.html. Google is quoted in a forum post as saying

When shown in the headline, the display URL will be separated from the rest of the text by a vertical bar and will include only the domain, not the "www." prefix or any subdirectories. Your display URL will also continue to appear as normal below the description line. Of course, if the headline already contains your domain, we won't display it again. Finally, it's possible for the display URL domain to appear in addition to a description line that is promoted to the headline, as long as the resulting headline is sixty-eight characters or less.

Hi! Sorry for the delay in response. We do appreciate the great feedback!

Did you know we have a feature request forum? It's a great place to share your ideas. Other people can vote on them and it will help us determine priorities. You should check it out: http://seomoz.zendesk.com/forums

Hi Marcos,

Here's a response from the help desk regarding Juicy Link Finder (specifically regarding unicode characters) that I copied from http://www.seomoz.org/q/juicy-link-finder-doesn-t-support-hebrew-utf8-input. I'm asking the help team to come take a look at this thread and see if they have any more suggestions for your case, but this should help in the meantime.

Keri Morgret, SEOmoz associate

Hi Kevin

I feel like I've got to be honest with you. It's an old tool and we're not very proud of it anymore. It doesn't take advantage of our awesome web index, or all the cool analysis we've done around powerful links. We're working instead to replace it with more powerful link tools. Our newer tools are built to support Unicode, but most of our older ones don't. Sorry about that!

For example, I think you'd be much better off trying our Competitive Link Research Tool (it's in Labs and therefore sometimes gets overloaded, but it's so cool when it works!), or even running your competitors through Open Site Explorer.

www.seomoz.org/labs/link-intersect
www.opensiteexplorer.org

The bottom line is that Juicy Link Finder is unstable and doesn't support Unicode (because we're deprecating it in favor of new technologies), and it doesn't give you very sophisticated results.

You're not the only one with that question. Google replied to WebProNews  at http://www.webpronews.com/google-instant-pages-analytics-2011-06

See that post for a more complete response, but in brief they said that they're only going to "only issues the prerender hint when it is confident that it knows where the user will click, in some cases it will mispredict, resulting in a page that has appeared to load but was never actually shown to the user." and go on to say that there's a new page visibility API that should help weed out a false positive.

I don't personally have any experience with this, but I have heard that it's harder than getting into Google News. Until someone else chimes in, this post at Search Engine Roundtable might help. http://www.seroundtable.com/bing-news-13146.html

Hi Chris,

I don't have an answer for you, but if you give a little more about your budget that will help other people give you a better answer. Are you closer to $500 a month or $500,000 a month in ad spend? What is your budget for a management solution?

I'll be there. It'll be my first MozCon, and I'm real excited to be able to attend this year.

I'll just say I don't quite adhere to all of the TAGFEE bullet points and make sure that I'm not wearing my SEOmoz tshirt when I reply.

Don't forget to think about how your boss might react when asked for how many visits all of your pages in French got for the past 60 days. With the /francais/ in the URL, it's a snap. Other structures it might be a little more challenging. It's something to at least think about ahead of time.

Lunametrics has a great article on designing a Google Analytics friendly site at http://www.lunametrics.com/blog/2010/09/22/designing-google-analytics-friendly-site/.

Dan, IIRC, it may relate to the sort order and looks at the ad that's currently at the top of your list of ads. Try showing only ads that are not deleted, or sorting by impressions in the past month (thus showing the most active ad at top), and see if that works.

I looked at the server headers for the URL mentioned in the screenshot, and the site is running IIS6. I don't have the instructions for doing the domain redirect for that handy, and it's been ages since I've done it, but at least now we know we can't just say use .htaccess.

For a time (October-December 2010, if not earlier), the AdWords Keyword Tool was ignoring keywords that were not commercial in nature, and there was much outcry from the community. For the following two links, the first link is from when they removed non-commercial intent and lists several keyword alternatives. The second post is an update, with information about how Google has improved their keyword tool. This may be one of the reasons you've heard people say not to trust the results.

http://www.aimclearblog.com/2010/10/07/r-i-p-google-keyword-tool-long-live-seo/

http://www.aimclearblog.com/2010/12/21/safe-for-seo-hacking-fixed-google-keyword-tool/

In Google Analytics, I'd also look at the network properties and service providers. I had a similar situation once, and found that an uptime monitoring service was using javascript and triggering Google Analytics. The service was easily identified by the service provider.

You might also look at the Intelligence feature in GA and see if it dives deep enough to give you a clue as to what else shifted during that time other than just the direct visits.

Hi Ryhs,

Here are a couple of other Q&A threads and posts that may provide some ideas. I don't do a lot of link outreach myself, but I do get a fair amount of spam link requests that are obviously taken from a boilerplate and not customized. Those never get a response from me, unless I'm in a bad mood, and then it's not a positive response.

http://www.seomoz.org/q/when-going-about-asking-a-site-for-a-link-on-their-page-how-do-you-ask
http://www.seobook.com/art-pitching-email
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/dont-ask-sites-for-links-find-people-and-connect

A badly-spun article can also make your company look bad and incompetent. Do you really want your company name attached to an article that was written by a machine? And do you want a backlink from a spammy blog or directory that is filled with other such articles? You're not getting on most of the good sites with that type of article, as the good sites have humans that can spot these articles and leave them in an unpublished purgatory (at best) or ban the submitter/destination URL from that entire site.

Now that it's been a couple of months later, can you tell us what you decided to do, and anything interesting you found?

You can also see how much of your desired content Google is indexing. in Google Webmaster Tools, you can see that you've submitted 65 pages and 45 pages of those are indexed. You still need to figure out for yourself which are those 20 pages, but you know that there are some things not being indexed.

Hi Chris,

Did you find a tool that met your needs? It'd be great to hear about it and be able to share with others.

Thanks!

Hi Jason,

Did any of these tools meet your needs, or have you found a tool that answers your question? Would love to have a followup here and find out what worked for you!

My first question: are you already in Google News, or are you trying to make your content so Google News will pick it up?

You've probably seen it, but there's a wealth of resources for Google News publishers on Google's site at http://www.google.com/support/news_pub/ that should help too.

Even if we don't always chime in, the SEOmoz staff and associates are here and we review the questions and answers. We'll add a comment if something isn't quite right, or endorse a good answer, or provide an answer ourselves. The thumb system is in place here like it is on the blog, so you can see if others have agreed or disagreed with a particular answer.

I second what Ryan Kent says as well -- if you need more information or an answer doesn't feel write, ask for the additional citation or more background.

Welcome to Q&A, and I look forward to seeing what you have to say. Please feel free to use the Feedback links for any comments to SEOmoz that you may have about the site!

Congratulations on publishing, and the good response so far. Always a nice way to start a Monday!

You might still send something to the radio station. They could hardly complain about you wanting to make their lives easier with some written (email) information that they don't have to create, and you could get in your links that way.

Thanks for the great feedback in the P.S. - we really appreciate it!

Did you know we have a feature request forum? It's a great place to share your ideas. Other people can vote on them and it will help us determine priorities. You should check it out: http://seomoz.zendesk.com/forums

Thanks!

Keri

It also wouldn't hurt to log into Google Webmaster Tools and see if there are any messages to the webmaster from Google in there about any problems.

Hi Jay,

So glad to hear you're coming to Mozcon! It's my first year coming as well, so I've dropped Jen Lopez a note and asked her to add a comment to this Q&A with more information about Mozcon and attendance. In the meantime, did you see this blog post from a couple of months ago? http://www.seomoz.org/blog/announcing-mozcon-2011

Keri

It's that place that doesn't give you Mozpoints for participation and makes you write in 140 characters.

Hi Josey,

Could you please open a ticket by emailing this to help@seomoz.org? That's the best route for this problem.

Thanks!

I personally haven't used the dollar index, so am basing this on the definition I found at http://www.analyticsmarket.com/blog/google-analytics-definitions, which states:

A measurement of how influential a page is to conversion. It doesn't indicate how much money a page brought. Rather, it's a score. The higher the number, the more frequently it was viewed prior to a purchase or conversion. It's calculated by taking the goal conversion value or transaction value of a visit and applying it evenly to all the pages prior to that conversion. Seen in aggregate, it just attempts to correlate pages to conversions.

Have you done something on that page to better qualify your prospects, and encourage them to order more? If you qualified them better, you may have driven away some of the people who were not going to buy or were going to purchase a small amount, increasing your bounce rate but also increasing your dollar index.

Kevin, there was a recent YOUmoz post about how to delete a Google Places listing. Let me know if this helps. http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/the-right-way-to-delete-a-google-places-listing