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I managed to snag an early, early bird ticket to MozCon for $799. Now it appears I won't be going. I'd like to exchange it with another Mozer who does want to go, but would like to save $200 off the current price. If interested, please email me at patrick.garmoe@travelex.com.

Just curious if anyone has experience working with: http://sojern.com/? If so, and you don't mind giving me a quick overview of whether it was a good experience, email me at patrick.garmoe@travelex.com Thanks, Patrick

Happy Thanksgiving Mozers, In my efforts to get rid of a Google penalty, I've come to the conclusion that all the travel agents who link to our site with a unique code, are technically affiliates because they get commission. Therefore we need to get all of them to switch their links to "rel=nofollow". I'm worried this shift will cost us in search rankings, especially since none of our competitors require nofollow tags. So before I actually begin requiring the switch, I wanted to just double check that I'm not misinterpreting Google. Our travel agents are paid commission on every sale (whether their customers click the link from their website to ours, or calls in and gives us that agent's code. So even though our travel agents aren't technically part of an "affiliate program" run through CJ or anything, they are in Google's eyes affiliates of my company. Therefore their links with their personal codes all need to be nofollow. Am I correct on this? I can't find anywhere where Google goes into great depth explaining various types of affiliates.

I'm trying to get rid of a Google penalty, but one of the URLS is particularly bizarre. Here's the penalized site: http://www.travelexinsurance.com. One of the external links Google cited as not being natural that links to the penalized site is: http://content.onlineagency.com/index.aspx?site=6599&tide=769006&last=3111516 In the backlink profile of the penalized site, there are about 100 different backlinks pointing to www.travelexinsurance.com from content.onlineagency.com/... So when I visit  http://content.onlineagency.com/index.aspx?site=6599&tide=769006&last=3111516 it actually is displaying content from http://www.starmandstravel.com/787115_6599.htm, which you can see after clicking the "Home" button. That company is a legit travel agency who I assume knows nothing about content.onlineagency.com and is not involved in whatever is going on. And that's the case for every link from content.onlineagency.com. So I'm just wondering if someone can help me understand what sort of tactic  content.onlineagency.com is using. One of my predecessors I fear used some black hat tactics. I'm wondering if this is a remnant of that effort.

Hello Mozers, If you work in the field of online marketing and especially E-Commerce, I’m inviting you to consider joining my mastermind group. I’m looking for up to nine other people who work in E-Commerce or online lead generation full-time, who would like to meet weekly on a Google hangout, to help one another solve our online marketing problems. Ideally a member of the group would: 1. Have worked for several years in the field of online marketing, either as an E-Commerce manager, marketing VP, content marketer, copywriter, SEO, developer, or some combination thereof. 2. Currently work in house on the web team at a company of at least a few people, and you primarily do marketing online. As space allows professionals who work for agencies or as independent consultants can join the group, but we will have a no-pitching policy. 3. Be looking to grow as an online marketer by investing your energy in helping others in the group achieve their goals, and opening up to group members about the challenges you are having in your position, in order for other members to assist you. 4. Want to listen and share constructively. This is not a group for people who just want to gripe or tear others down or use black hat techniques. 5. Want to have fellow members hold him or her accountable for taking action in areas the individual desires to improve upon. Sound like you, or someone you know? Here’s the outline of what I’m envisioning a typical meeting might look like: Mastermind Weekly Group Outline Step 1: Start the meeting reporting on what you did the previous week. Step 2: Talk about what went well, what didn’t go so well, why, and what you’re going to do to improve the situation. Step 3: In a rotation, determine who is going to be focused on during this meeting. Typically we’ll focus on one person’s needs in-depth in a meeting, rather than trying to focus on everyone. Sometimes we’ll also focus just on a topic members are struggling with, like making sure your E-Commerce data is tracking accurately in Google Analytics. Step 4: The person “in-focus” for that week tells the group what they’d like help with, discusses the challenge and asks for feedback, advice and strategy. This could range from advice on how to deal with a boss who hates ecommerce and blocks every initiative you propose, to figuring out the steps for dealing with a Google penalty, or maybe trying to increase conversions on a certain landing page. Step 5: Everyone spends the final 10 minutes discussing his or her high leverage activity for the next week, which they want the group to hold them accountable for. For those interested in potentially joining the group, I created a simple Google form you can fill out in two minutes. Your answers will be kept private. Feel free to share the link with anyone you think might benefit from being in a group like this. http://goo.gl/forms/2dBiAWGtj7 There is no fee beyond committing to attend at least 80% of the online meetings, once you’ve had a chance to see if it’s a fit for you. If you have any questions or additional ideas, I’m all ears. Please comment below or email me at pg@patrickgarmoe.com My thought right now is to make it a six-month commitment or less, and then we can re-evaluate. I'll be contacting everyone in November, and starting the group the first week of December. Anyhow, I look forward to hearing from some of you soon! Patrick

We're starting a campaign to get rid of a bunch of links, and then submitting a disavow report to Google, to get rid of a manual action. My SEO vendor said he needs an @email domain from the website in question @travelexinsurance.com, to send and receive emails from vendors. He said Google won't consider the correspondence to and from webmasters if sent from a domain that is not the one with the manual action penalty. Due to company/compliance rules, I can't allow a vendor not in our building to have an email address like that. I've seen other people mention they just used a GMAIL.com account. Or we could use a similar domain such as @travelexinsurancefyi.com. My question, how critical is it that the domain the correspondence with the webmasters be from the exact website domain?

Hello all, I installed Google Analytics on a main website and a blog (blog.travelexinsurance.com) While it appears to be tracking correctly (and when I test it in real time it shows that I'm visiting) but it is treating the entire blog as though it's one page. So I can't see data on blog post X. All I see is that X visitors came to my blog in aggregate. So I see blog.travelex.com has 999 visitors, but it doesn't show that /travel-luggage got 50 visits, while /insurace-tips got 75 and so forth. I assume I screwed up the tracking somehow, but can't figure out where I went wrong. Tracking on the main domain works just fine. It's specific to the blog.

Hello community, I'm trying to find the oldest links to my website/places that have referenced my company. By old, I'm looking for anything 2008 or older. I have access to a bunch of backlink tools, but they all log stuff based on when they discovered it, and we didn't begin using the tools until June 2013. I'm hoping there's some tool or some easy trick where I can quickly sort my links based on original date they linked to travelexinsurance.com. Thanks, Patrick