I don't see that much differences in the URL structure of Hollywood Life and TMZ, their editors just chose the short or shorter variant for their news story (in most cases they don't have to worry about SEO). The Washington post is a pity as they have to add a couple of extra directories in their URL structure.

Hi Aron,

I agree with Samuel on this one, just make sure Google is just not able to find the thank-you pages. I would even add these pages to your robots.txt file to make sure they won't even reach these pages in their crawls.

They'll eventually drop these pages as they already know where to find them and as they give the proper 404 header they know that's a sign to drop them. In most cases pages that 404 are already not linked from any other pages so that will also be a sign to search engines that the specific pages aren't important anymore.

I would check the service providers first just to know for sure they're all coming from the same provider. You can check this by visiting your Audience > Technology > Network report on the left side of your Google Analytics. If you see the same network and browsers being used I would use a filter (only if you're really determined/ 100% sure that it's bot traffic) to get them completely out of your Google Analytics view.

Hi Jesse,

I could see why some people would argue that you should have a consistent design across all your templates on the site including your homepage. The homepage is in most cases the most linked to page on your site and based on that has the highest authority. By having some important links not on there it could be that you're not passing on some of the value/ authority that the homepage has.

You really need a splash page, you know that it's really killing your bounce rate if you let users chose on the first entrance of your site? Besides that I wouldn't got for a JS solution to redirect users. Although Google is perfectly able to use JS these days I think a PHP solution is more effective.

Hi Andy,

I would agree that GOOD backlinks are probably the most important factor in ranking your sites in competitive markets but to get there you really need to address all the other elements you mentioned of SEO as well. If they started 'link building' out of the blue there's probably not much idea behind it. Just my 2 cents!

Use some sort of automation in this, what you normally do is just repeat the page you're on in the META descriptions. So that it will be a different and unique META description but not one that is really unique if you know what I mean. It's mostly the best way to deal with pagination as in most cases these pages don't rank very well anyway.