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If I had more than just a few datapoints, I'd offer them up. To really prove something like this though you'd almost need to do a controlled study. And because there'd be some seriously qualitative judgments made, data alone couldn't prove the point.

Went live on Monday? Chances are you received a huge brand-new-shiny-ooo-look rank bonus. Happens a lot.

Also, some of your title tags (like the home page one) could use some work.

Are you using a plugin to append .html to the end of WP pages? If not, I'm confused as to what html doctypes are doing on WP

Hmm. I'm seeing the homepage indexed as non-www, however every internal page I just checked out is indexed as the www version.

I'd check your GWT indexed pages, and see if both the non-www and www home pages are indexed there, tell google to prefer the www, and go from there.

Also check your backlinks. If they're going to non-www, well...then it becomes difficult.

Ahem:

You can read the full list of what gets you MozPoints by clicking on "MozPoints" under your user profile thingy.

First, a bad bounce rate doesn't always mean a bad page. There are several reasons one might see a high bounce rate as a good or neutral thing.

With regards to your page, however, I'm not sure. I'd say look at what your entrance keywords are. Which entrance keywords are triggering the bounce? I'll bet if you look at that data, it'll make more sense. 9 times out of 10 bouncing people are landing on a page that doesn't have content to fit their query.

I believe the practice of pointing negative backlinks to a site has been in use for quite some time now. The prevalence has remained somewhat low, however, due to the relative difficulty of obtaining the quantity of links required to sufficiently negatively impact rank of a competitor. I've seen this practice used as a form of ORM to decrease rank of negative press.

As it gets easier to game this system, I'd anticipate Google making an algorithmic change to consider the sudden building of low-quality or spam-identified links. I'd expect that they'd be ignored rather than used to determine rank or quality.  How this would effect IP neighborhood metrics, however, I don't know.

While I can't substantiate anything meaningful with the data I've seen thusfar, I will go as far as to say I'm pretty sure Google already takes this into account on some level, negating any negative passed. Almost like automatically assigning a nofollow. It's just gut though.

Bounce rate threshold is super high. Super high. If it wasn't, every single blackhat would be using it as a negative-SEO tactic.

In short, you don't have to worry about it unless your company owner homepages his browser 10,000 times a day.

And, if we're going to get all pedantic about it, I'm sure if Google's really looking at it that much it'll take into account single-IP bouncing. So 1 IP bouncing 10k times a day would be looked at entirely differently than 1,000 IPs bouncing once a day.

Why would you point rel canonical to a page you don't want to rank?

I've found most copywriters understand density well enough to get it.

It would help to give them a short primer on semantic relationships and search. Use specific examples and the ~ operator in Google. Explain something like how auto relates to car but auto service and car service mean totally different things.

Hmm, well I honestly don't know how to correct that kind of an issue. I know DNN is the cause of a lot of my tech-SEO headaches. Sorry!

I think you've gotten a decent diversity of opinion here, the rest is all just going to come back down to you and risk tolerance. As Dr. Pete said, there isn't a single right answer. It's going to come down to a try-and-see.

It probably doesn't need to be said, but first make sure the content you're developing serves your reader. I can't stress that enough. Never write content specifically for SEs.

Now, to the meat, in my experience density percentages between 2 and 5 seem to work best. You can go all TF-IDF and LDA on it, but simple measure reads 2-5%.

I'm having a hard time understanding the issue. What crawler is finding CaseStudy.aspx? Don't see it in the Google index, and Xenu didn't find it. If it's just the SEOMoz crawler finding the file, what particular URLs are being tagged as dupes?

If they weren't spammy links I'd say damn, you struck some SEO gold. That they're spammy, however, makes me think you're going to have a helluva time trying to pull rank. IMO It'd be worth the effort trying to get the backlinks removed.

Give the "link:" operator a try, or see if OSE has any data. I'd say use GWT, but I'm assuming since it's just a forward there isn't an account set up.

Someone else'll smack me if I'm wrong, however:

www.eitan.es

That's your only external linking root domain. And, your only true external link, too. Since September Google has considered subdomains internal links.

Hello and welcome to the industry!

Since you're new, you're going to want to start here:

http://www.seomoz.org/article/social-media-marketing-tactics

Do a lot of reading. I mean a lot. Read and read and read. Then make sure you read this:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/tracking-the-roi-of-social-media

That'll make sure you don't fall into the SMO for SMO's sake trap.

You've joined the right community if you're looking for help, and we'll all be glad to help you get started. Your initial query, however, is really really vague. If you can get more specific we can provide better, more directed help.

I agree with RankSurge here. The more time spent preparing reports, the more you're paying for data and less for actual performance.

Ask yourself why you want week-over-week. Because you don't trust the vendor? Find someone you do. I'd recommend monthly reporting. Week-to-week just isn't going to be actionable, and you're liable to see information you honestly don't want to. I've seen it commonplace for rankings to swing so wildly week-to-week that moving off that data is folly, you really need to look at month-to-month and general trends.

As for confidentiality of client information, it depends on the contracts that the vendor has with them. I've had a client ask me for a business reference before, one that they could talk to live. When asking my clients to volunteer one of them made a good point by saying they took a risk on me without a reference, so why should they alleviate someone else's business risk for me live. They're happy to provide a testimonial, but being available to speak live to a potential client for one of their vendors can be too much.

In Webmaster Tools, use the Change of Address function.

Michelleh speaks truth.

Using CNAME for this practice is pretty commonplace. That is, provided your DNS setup isn't going to generate a lot of lag.

EDIT: Of course now that I'm Googling around on this, there appears to be a mixed bag of reasoning. I could swear that I've seen it used several times with no negative SEO implications.

Given that you're using CNAME to maintain a URL rather than move to a new one, I still think you're in the clear, though.

Shamelessly stealing this from Sha Menz in this thread:

You can do what you want to do as long as the keywords are loaded in your campaign. Its just a little hidden

If you go into the On-page tool you see the Summary view. If you look right above the big heading On-page Optimization, there are two blue text links. Choose Report Card.

Now you will see a selector which allows you to choose any keyword from your campaign list and enter the URL of any page in the site.

Click** Grade my On-page Optimization** and voila! Roger will fetch your Report Card!

To expand on Nakul, and after checking out your site, I'd say your best-case option is to use rel canonical to indicate to Google which your preferred page would be (in your case, I'd say the first page or a view-all page). This will address your duplicate content issues.

As for duplicate title, using a canonical will take care of the SEO penalty associate with that. If you just want to see a smaller number in that red box in SEOMoz, just add a variable to the end of the title tag based on the page.

No worries. Yes, the x-pack is the local listing that sometimes appear in a SERP. X because sometimes it's3, sometimes 7, and occasionally I think there can still be 10, but not sure there.

When doing keyword research I'd recommend pulling numbers both without and with the geographic identifier, phrase and exact match. Use Insights for Search for some good geographic data, too.

I have a feeling there is going to be a lot of diversified opinion in this thread, but here is my opinion.

First, to answer your direct question, I do think localized optimization in <title>is going to slightly affect your non-geographic rank. You've got 10oz of SEO Juice to split up amongst however many keywords you've got in your title, and pulling a geo-identifier into that is going to dilute the non-geo a bit. Maybe. Possibly. Probably.</p> <p><em style="background-color: initial;">That being said</em><span style="background-color: initial;">, you have to consider what keyword you're targeting, and whether or not they're triggering the x-pack in a SERP anyway. This speaks to question #2. If you want to rank nationally and locally, and who doesn't, consider your separate search verticals. If your target queries aren't triggering the x-pack, then take into account search volumes on those geo-specific terms.</span></p> <p>If you want to focus on local, non-map placements, I'd use the following <title> methodology:</p> <p><em>pagesubject city, stateabv | brandname</em></p> <p>e.g Oil Change Plymouth, MI | Midas</p> <p>Of course there could be a substantially more in-depth exploration of this topic, and I'm hoping one of my fellow inbound marketers will expand upon the subjects I didn't touch.</p></title>

I've had issues with SEOMoz flagging dupes before that weren't. See the same URL twice in the report. Exactly the same URL. Like Mat said, submit a ticket. They're really good about support.

I typically look at both numbers, but when making judgments I default to phrase match. I feel it better takes into account long-tail.

Hi Everyone,

In robots.txt, can the sitemap be indicated with a relative path? I'm trying to roll out a robots file to ~200 websites, and they all have the same relative path for a sitemap but each is hosted on its own domain.

Basically I'm trying to avoid needing to create 200 different robots.txt files just to change the domain. If I do need to do that, though, is there an easier way than just trudging through it?

They change dynamically as new products are added or removed.

Content is framed in from a subdomain on the client's site that syncs with All You Retail's (the third party supplier) inventory stuff. Content lives in the subdomain, images are hotlinked from a variety of different places (suppliers, AYRs system, supplier info stream).

As for how exactly the inventory works, I'm not 100% sure yet. The site I'm referring to is here:

http://durochersonline.com

You can see what I mean.

I know there are a slew of other SEO problems to be fixed, but this is the one I've never dealt with before. I don't start on the project for a few weeks, just want to make sure I know what I'm in for here.

I'm getting to start work with a new client, and I've run across something I've never had to deal with before, off-site images.

The site I'll be working on is for an appliance retailer, both online and physical. The way they've had their site built (not something I was part of) a third party company maintains the product inventory side of things. They're sourcing from about 35 different manufacturers, and this third party has direct access to the product information streams. They push the weekly updated information to my clients site.

What this means, though, is that the product images don't live on the client's site. They're hotlinked from the third party's inventory doohickey.

I've never seen something quite like this before. Has anyone else? Any ideas as to what problems I may face when it comes to on-site SEO?