Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks for letting me know that I'm not the only one seeing this.  In Analytics, I've got a nice upward line of traffic, so as you said, I'm not too worried about it.  Maybe someone else will have more knowledge about the graph itself.

Changing the content to show a bot something different than regular user is always considered black hat and is frowned upon.

That being said, if you're trying to create different messages based on where the user came from, you may want to consider something like a bright box to provide direction and interaction to the visitor.  Some general text in the page like that could be dynamic without being considered deceitful to Google.

I would have to recommend not trying to show Google something completely different than what users see in any regard.

So I was thrilled when Webmaster tools released the little graph telling you how many pages are indexed.  However, I noticed with one of my sites, that it was actually going down over the past year.  I've only been doing the SEO on the site for a few months, so it wasn't anything I did.

The chart is attached to this post.

Now here's the funny part.  I haven't really noticed anything out of the ordinary for keyword ranking dropping off.   I also tested my most recent page that I put up.  3 days after I posted it, I could find it in a Google search.  Shouldn't this mean that's it's indexed?  I can also find any other page I've posted in the last few months.

Another oddity is that I submitted a sitemap a while ago when the site was only 22 pages.  The sitemap index count says 20 of those pages are indexed.

The chart only says that there are 3 indexed pages right now.  However, I can clearly find dozens of pages in Google searches.  Is there something I'm missing?  Is my chart for this website broken?  Should I report this to Google?  Has anyone had a similar issue?

decreaseIndex.png

Also keep in mind that SEO is not an exact science.  There are methods that should produce results, but there are no guarantees that the company can rank your for the keywords you want at the price you're willing to pay.  Theoretically, given the budget, any company can rank for any keyword they want, but you probably aren't going to be happy with the price tag.  They're a company too, so the more work it's going to take them to rank you, the more it's going to cost.

Sounds like that keyword is just very specific and there won't be much competition for it.

PA and DA are just 1 of the many ranking factors for SERPS.  DA not as much.  Consider a blog you set up at wordpress.com.  Your DA is 100 because it's a wordpress.com domain, but your page authority will still be 0. Will that DA help you out eventually?  Sure, but to start, it's not going to make you rank that much higher.  Perhaps that's why your expert writes it off as important.

If you're stuck on doing this, I would recommend using a backend programming language like .Net or PHP to detect the Google Bot and generate a completely different page.  That being said, it's highly black hat, and I wouldn't recommend doing anything close to it.  Google doesn't like being fooled and has stated it penalizes for sites that try to display different content to the bot and users who browse the site normally.

The canonical tags are definitely applicable to this situation once Google goes everything again and sorts it all out with the new tags.

I would say it's worth the effort to give your main site a boost.  IMO the more content you can get on your own site that's relevant, the more Google has to base it's evaluation off you.  If your blog has alot of fresh content, that'll keep Google coming back for more!

Just to follow up on this.  the meta tag for this is

I'm looking for a way to track backlinks that are made and make sure that they don't disappear.  Is there a way in SEO Moz to have it check the backlinks that it has identified every month to make sure they're still there, or do you have to do it manually by download the list every month and comparing them?

Just to follow up on this.  the meta tag for this is

If you exported a document with all the url's of your domain, do you think this spreadsheet program would work?  I fooled with it a little, but couldn't get the function to work.  There's a Curl call you could try if you're a programmer

http://www.tomanthony.co.uk/blog/google_plus_one_button_seo_count_api/

Edit:  Since I'm a programmer, I thought I'd see if I could make it work.  Here's a really quick application of it.

http://www.touchoftechnology.com/google-plus-1-counter-for-list-of-urls/

Also keep in mind that SEO is not an exact science.  There are methods that should produce results, but there are no guarantees that the company can rank your for the keywords you want at the price you're willing to pay.  Theoretically, given the budget, any company can rank for any keyword they want, but you probably aren't going to be happy with the price tag.  They're a company too, so the more work it's going to take them to rank you, the more it's going to cost.

Adding Canonical links certainly wouldn't hurt.  I don't think it'll help you though.  It may see them as duplicates because there is so much of the page that is the same.  Is it possible for you to throw in a paragraph description about the scholarship for each one?  There isn't much for a robot to compare when 80% of the page is the same and just a few fields are changed.

Oh yes,  I realize the call only gets it for that specific domain.  The thing you could could do is download a full list of the URL's in your domain, and paste them into the textbox.  Then put that into Excel and run a sum on the count column.  Sorry if that didn't make sense.  If I get my site crawler operational, I may be able to implement a way to just put in the top domain and have it find all the other pages and tally them for you.  But as of now, the list is the best I can do.

for instance.

"http://www.apple.com/",13476

"http://www.apple.com/mac/",257

"http://www.apple.com/ipod/",134

The export tool from OSE should have all your pages listed.  Given it's not a huge domain, the tool should be able to handle it.

Let me know how you make out, if not, I'll have time tomorrow night or maybe Sunday to improve the functionality.

I have to say that a well posted comment with some meaning has driven traffic to my personal blog.  Every once and a while I'll see a strange referrer and it's due to a random blog comment I posted.  Has it made a huge impact?  Not really.  Could it be outsourced?  Probably, if done by a professional that will take the time to make the comment meaningful.  You won't find a cheap way to outsource a true comment though.

Where you installed the blog shouldn't matter as any content in the blog will be structured under the directory you installed it in.  I've run a few blogs out of sub directories with no issue.

If you're comparing your page speed from pre-blog to post-blog, chances are they'll be slower because of the nature of the blog.  Every widget/plugin slows down your loading time, as may a poorly designed theme.  Add the fact that you're using a database to serve your content, it slows down more, especially if you're on a shared hosting platform that has other sites doing the same thing.

As for your 404 error.  Is products.html a page that's outside of the blog directory?  If so, you have to hardcode the http://www.mysite.com in the href or the blog will auto append it's base directory on it.

SEO is linked to your domain name, not the IP address.  Think of these two scenarios.

1:  You move your website hosting company.  Your website obviously will get a new IP.  Google has stated that this does not affect your SEO.

2:  You have your domain hosted on shared hosting.  There would then be thousands of sites with the same IP.  You clearly don't all share the same SEO values.

If the comments above haven't swayed you from looking at density, SEO Quake has a plugin for Firefox that will analyze all the words on your page and give you density for each word and each phrase.  It may bring to light some phrases you weren't meaning to target, or show you a word you have much too high a density of by mistake.