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That's correct. The more freedom you give the engines to match your keywords to "related" queries, the less relevant your average click will be, which will drive down conversion rate and thus revenue per click. So, in summary, the more broad the keyword the less you should be paying per click (99% of the time).

This reminds me of a funny blog post I read today that shows how ridiculous some of the matches can be when using broad match -- http://www.ppchero.com/wtq-do-the-creep/

fidelityim makes a good suggestion. You should definitely bid according to performance of your keywords match types. In all but the most rare cases advertisers' performance will match the tiers fidelityim has mentioned exact > phrase > broad (not including the near exact, near phrase, and broad modified match types Google has added).

There is one point that fidelityim made that I don't agree with... I think it's worthwhile to create separate ad groups and even campaigns for different match types. The main reasons being that it allows you to:

1. View performance by match type at a glance in the absence of sophisticated tools like Kenshoo or Marin Software. This performance will vary by a huge margin so making it easy to see your winning buckets is very helpful given that everyone's time is limited.

2. You can budget your match types based on performance. By analyzing your search query reports, broad and phrase matched queries can be great feeders for your exact match campaigns, so you'll probably want to limit your spend on those terms until you are sure about the performance at a query level. This can only be achieved by separating these match types into their own campaigns.

Cheers,

KT

I loaded your website while using httpfox which views all of the information being loaded through my browser. I don't see a 301 redirect happening. Now, this is really over the edge of my technical expertise, but I can tell you for certain that a 301 redirect doesn't appear to be working. However, people are being redirected in some fashion from non-www to www.

I can also see that my original request to http://longboatkeyclub.com is being aborted, rather than triggering the 301. After the aforementioned request is being aborted, there are several other calls to the non-www. that are being aborted (some examples below) before the www. page begins to load:

<colgroup><col width="64"></colgroup>

http://longboatkeyclub.com/scripts/showGallery.js

I think a first start would be to dig into the 301 redirect and confirm its setup, because it's not working from my side and I'm not getting a 301 status anywhere when trying to access your non-www site. Hopefully someone more technical than I will chime in and provide a specific solution.

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Hi Leslie,

Care to share the site URL? One issue that frequently causes self referrals to sites is missing a Google Analytics tag (or whatever web analytics tool you're using) on one page of a site. If you are, in fact, using Google Analytics, you should be able to see the specific URL that is referring traffic to you by viewing your referring sources report. That should help you pinpoint whether it's the redirect or something else.

Hi CarIS,

This isn't currently a feature in SEOmoz but it's in their queue of features that they would like to add. Check out this thread for more info:

https://seomoz.zendesk.com/entries/20199538-is-there-a-way-i-could-add-another-user-to-access-my-pro-account

This has happened to me recently as well. However for me it was for seemingly more disparate queries related to coupons. I don't remember the specific merchants but I had searched for something like 'finish line coupons' and subsequently searched for 'target coupons' and was still seeing ads for finishline coupons on the SERP for the latter query. Clearly, they have some work to do on this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers Data from a few different sources is listed there.

I took a quick look at your backlink report using opensiteexplorer.org and noticed that a large percentage of your backlinks are coming from www.computerwords.com. www.computerwords.com's site is inactive as of me writing this. I'm not sure how long the site has been down but if it's been a while and Google also noticed that it's been down f, that coor some time, that could have caused your rank to drop. At a glance it appears that 50% of your links were from that site.

The full crawl diagnostics and rank reports are only generated once per week. So, I would give it at least 7 days before you see full data reported in your new campaign.

Sorry about that. I typed the response out too quick! To summarize: Yes, you do want followed links. They will help you rank higher in the search engines.

However, according to Google, paid ads should never be made to be followed links. Google says that paid ads should be designated as such, by giving them a rel="nofollow" attribute.

The link I posted in the previous response as well as the one below explain it pretty well.

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66736

It would really depend on how the links were implemented on the site serving them.

However, you may want to consider this: Google doesn't like when an ad link that does not carry the rel="nofollow" attribute, which would prevent the link from helping to improve your search engine rank. So, proceed at your own risk with ads that have "followed" links.

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=96569

Google Analytics may be able to do that for you depending on what type of site/conversion you have. Will you respond back and let me know if you are an ecommerce site, lead gen, or other type of site? I can point you in the right direction with that information. Thanks

Omniture also does not sample data when the data sets get large, which GA goes a fair amount of these days.

SEOmoz has a list of directories that they find to be above average quality:

http://www.seomoz.org/directories

Here is another resource to help point you in the right direction as far as link building goes:

http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo/growing-popularity-and-links

Was there something specific that you are having trouble with in regards to link building?

GWT = Google Webmaster Tools

Hmm, most of the content on Facebook is being served up dynamically without a resultant change to the URL. That might explain why you are seeing most of the referral visits coming from /l.php which appears to be what Facebook filters all outbound links through. I see "/l.php" as the largest Facebook source in my reports as well. Do you have control over the links of yours that are being posted on Facebook?

If so, maybe some tagging of the URLs will give you a bit more tracking visibility -- http://support.google.com/googleanalytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55578

If you navigate to Traffic Sources > Sources > Referrals > Facebook within Google Analytics (new Google Analytics interface) you can see where your visits are coming from within Facebook at the Facebook referring URL level. What level of granularity are you looking for?

You're absolutely right! I left that part out. Thanks

It's not required to have the ending slash. At least, it works for us without it.

I'm assuming you want all search engines blocked from this directory. If so, edit your robots.txt file to state the following. This will block all bots from accessing a folder/directory on your site

User-agent: *

Disallow: /directoryname

Thanks for the follow up. AdWords won't directly affect your organic rank.

I would take a look at how www.speedtest.net is allowing sharing and historical tracking of users' speed tests. I believe they allow users to do what you're looking to achieve while at the same time not publishing each test's results in the Google index.

Google has not directly come out and said that they use Seller Ratings as a ranking signal. But, I would wager that they are. I think the benefits of having a strong Seller Ratings history go far beyond any ranking boost considering it would be one among many other small ranking signals that Google uses. With that said, I think it is an extremely worthwhile strategy to get your customers to review you.

My guess is that very strong or very poor Seller Ratings history relative to your category would make a difference in rank. That's just my two cents, though.

Check out this Google blog post that talks about Seller Ratings:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/12/being-bad-to-your-customers-is-bad-for.html

And this good article by Danny Sullivan on the same topic:

http://searchengineland.com/google-now-using-online-merchant-reviews-as-ranking-signal-57445

Hello,

Sometimes new sites will bounce around in rank as Google tries to collect data. They will subsequently settle to their true rank. This may be the case here.

What is your reasoning for saving each individual's results on a static page using a unique ID?

It's usually 1 of 2 causes that will give you a blank result on Open Site Explorer (OSE).

1. the site is so new, or the newly built links to the site are so new that OSE has not had time to crawl and display those links in their most recent index update. SEOmoz updates the index in OSE once every 30-40 days.

2. all of the links pointing to your sites have not been crawled by OSE. OSE crawls a big portion of the Internet, but it does not crawl 100% of sites out there. So, if we are talking about a site with only a small handful of links, it's quite possible that OSE just doesn't have the crawl depth to pick them up.

Scenario 1 is the most probable case. I looked at the whois information for the first URL you provided, and the domain was registered in December. So, if your site has been active for less than a couple months, I would suspect your link building activities trailed that by several weeks. I would suggest giving it more time for any links you've built (or paid to have built) will start to show up.

In the meantime, you can work on establishing your on-page SEO elements. Have you created a campaign in the SEOmoz tools yet? That is a great start. Good luck!

Crawl notices are just that; notices. You should be aware of them but I haven't seen any notices in my campaigns that would be something that needs to be fixed. I would focus more on errors and then warnings, in that order. Those are the items that can hurt you most when trying to increase your site(s) rank. Hope this helps!

go to the campaigns page at http://pro.seomoz.org/campaigns and in the grey section at the top right of the page there is a link to your archived campaigns called Archived Campaigns (1)  Click that link and you can then press the "activate" button next to the campaign that you want to bring back online. I don't believe that data is collected while your campaign was in an archived state.

Gotcha. I did some searching around and you will not block the AdWords bot unless you explicitly block AdsBot-Google. A wildcard user agent disallow will not block the AdsBot-Google. Hope that helps!

I'll take a stab. I like the big and more varied imagery of the new page.

I will say that opinions don't really get you all the way there. I would suggest (maybe you already are) testing the new paging for improved conversion, or other KPIs using Google Website Optimizer (free), or Visual Website Optimizer (my favorite and pretty cheap). I love to prove my own opinions wrong through testing!

• All elements of the headers on the old vs. new pages appear to have different pixel heights
• I found it hard to tell that there were products to choose from because the items that are in this category appear below the fold. I would consider doing something to the page (possibly moving the products higher?) to make it dead simple that there are products below that people need to be browsing through. Check out the Google browser size tool below for help on the lowest pixel to show the important stuff on your page

Those were a few things I noticed right away. I'm sure others will chime in as well.

Relevant Links:

www.google.com/websiteoptimizer

http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/

http://browsersize.googlelabs.com/

If you have a specific directory for PPC pages then you can follow these steps that have worked for us wonderfully:

Block the directory /ppc to the robots.txt file for all user agents. This can even be live before the /ppc directory even exists.

User-agent: *

Disallow: /ppc

Add noindex, nofollow in the meta tags for all pages in /ppc

I'm not sure what you are referring to when you mention an AdWords robot?

If the recipes that appear on both sites are in different languages then you are fine. If they are the same language, then I would consider re-writing the recipes one of of the sites so that they are not duplicated exactly (might be challenging for parts of a recipe).

The biggest thing is that, if you can avoid it, you don't want a link profile that looks starkly different than the average for your category. Otherwise you might trip some red flags at the 'plex.

In my opinion, diversifying in everything you do that's SEO related is not a bad plan to minimize risk, even absent the red flag threat from Google.

I agree, Julie. Google is not going to, or able to (unless the site with the link has Google Analytics) flow more link juice to a link that gets more clicks than another.

To answer the original poster's question, just because a link is getting a lot of clicks does not make it valuable. Traffic means nothing in the grand scheme of things. It's all about what that traffic is doing on your site once they get there. Are they purchasing? Are they turning into leads? Are they bouncing immediately? In all likelihood the traffic has some value, but to truly measure which would be better would require more information.

All else being equal, a link that drives traffic is better than one which does not.

Will you clarify what "clicks" you are referring to?

Great question. I think you are fine with having the same content on two sites in different languages. Google I smart enough to see that you are targeting difference audiences, locales, etc. The queries that would drive traffic to each site are completed different (language-wise) so the two sites are not even in competition with each other generally speaking. I would personally move forward with the two sites without worry.

I would suggest using hand-written translations though, rather than auto translations, which should also help differentiate, if you are super worried.

You're correct. These links definitely used to be dofollow. It appears YouTube may have changed the links to nofollow when they redesigned the YouTube Channel pages in the last couple of months.