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Hi all,

I've just come to learn that a client has been cross-posting their blog posts to other blogs (on higher quality domains, in some cases). For example - this is the same post on 3 different blogs.

http://thebioethicsprogram.wordpress.com/2014/06/30/how-an-irb-could-have-legitimately-approved-the-facebook-experiment-and-why-that-may-be-a-good-thing/
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/billofhealth/2014/06/29/how-an-irb-could-have-legitimately-approved-the-facebook-experiment-and-why-that-may-be-a-good-thing/
http://www.thefacultylounge.org/2014/06/how-an-irb-could-have-legitimately-approved-the-facebook-experimentand-why-that-may-be-a-good-thing.html
And, sometimes a 4th time, on an NPR website.

I'm assuming this is doing no one any favors and Harvard or NPR is going to earn the rank most every time. I'm going to encourage them to publish only fresh content on their real blog, would you agree? Can this actually harm the ranking of their blog and website - should we delete the old entries when migrating the blog? They are going to move their Wordpress Blog to hosting on their real domain soon:
http://www.bioethics.uniongraduatecollege.edu/news/

The current set up is not adding any value to their domain. Thank you for any advice!

Ketan

Just thought I'd follow up after doing a lot more research. It's now my understanding that cross-domain GA will only work if you are moving from one domain to another via onsite links or form posts. It won't do any good if the user visits Domain 1 and Domain 2 independently (they won't look like the same visitor in this case).

If such a thing is required, it seems that sub-domain usage is the only way to account for both types of behaviors (cross domain links and random cross-domain visits).

Thanks John - the gap for me in the documentaion has to do with this:

It discusses traffic moving from A.com to B.com, in either direction (via links). Does this also work if there are never any links between the sites. How would the cookie pass and true up? This parent company has two business lines and wants things to role up if say the user visits Site A on his own accord and buys something. Then a few days later, goes to site B and does the same. Thanks!

Hi everyone,

Been doing some research about cross-domain tracking in Google Analytics (preferably Universal Analytics where documentation is a bit spare). All of the tutorials focus on the auto-linking and ensuring links to the other site are taken care of.

I'm considering a site that may not cross-link like that at all (or it may, but won't be the main avenue). A good example is:

www.gap.com
www.bananarepublic.com
www.oldnavy.com

Now, they do link to the other brands in their navigation but let's pretend that they don't necessarily do that. Gap Corporate may want to roll up all these domains into a single reporting profile because customers can clearly visit any of those sites on their own and buy. It would be nice to know that Visitor X bought 2 items from gap.com and 3 from oldnavy.com... and of course, here were their campaigns, etc. From what I am reading, I am not sure this is really possible. It seems that the cross-domain code is really only best for when my main site links to another domain for checkout or something. But in my example, we are definitely not in control of that kind of behavior.

Thoughts? Perhaps I need to recommend they go with subdomains only which Universal GA seems to handle quite fine out of the box. Thank you!

Agreed Jardo, thanks. It's one of things that if a friend told you about the product, you might very well type it using two separate words even though the brand name has it combined. Fairly unfortunate... perhaps an issue dating back to when they chose the name. They really want to rank for both but I've already told them I see that being quite tricky given it's not their brand name. We can insert it a couple times with the two words, but my worry is that it might come off as kind of wonky!

Hi All,

I'm dealing with a company that has a two word name like "GreatCompany". They rank #1 for that but not for "Great Company". The phrase is not super competitive, but obviously they are not writing the company name with two words anywhere on their site. Has anyone had to deal with something like this? Thinking about creative solutions but I'm fairly sure we're going to need to use the name both ways to have an effect here (or use PPC to augment) but I don't really love the idea of doing that... will feel very odd and inconsistent for visitors.

Thanks!

Hi everyone, we just launched this new site and I just ran it through SEOmoz and I got a bunch of duplicate page content errors. Here's one example -- it says these 3 are duplicate content:

• http://www.alicealan.com/collection/alexa-black-3inch
• http://www.alicealan.com/collection/alexa-camel-3inch
• http://www.alicealan.com/collection/alexa-gray-3inch

You'll see from the pages that the titles, images and small pieces of the copy are all unique -- but there is some copy that is the same (after all, these are pretty much the same shoe, just a different color).

So, why am I getting this error and is there any best way to address?

Thanks so much!
Ketan

Looks to be back up guys!

Same here Gotta work on some stuff today so hope it's back soon!!