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Hi, I'm working with a very niche website where only one product is sold. This means there is a small keyword set (just variations of same keyword) that we are optimising for. Currently the homepage www.example.com ranks in position 2 for target term - "sample". But there is also a required deeper page www.example.com/sample which has lots and lots of internal links targeted to "sample" pointing to it. This page ranks position 8. Effectively this is optimising the deeper page for the same keyword as for the home page through internal anchir text. This deeper page must exist as it has much more detailed information about the product. We want the homepage to rank highest and I'm trying to figure out if we are confusing Google and splitting authority between 2 pages. Best result for us would be to have homepage in position 1 and the deeper page can disappear (total visits would increase). So the question is, is there a solution to do this? My initial thought was use canonical tag on the www.example.com/sample page specifiying www.example.com. Can we do this? Its not duplicate content. Other option I considered is to nofollow links to the deeper page. Again not sure if this will have positive or negative impact. My fear is by removing 40 odd internal links with "sample" anchor text will reduce relevancy of the domain as a whole for the "sample" keyword. Any help much appreciated! Thanks

I have a global site with .com as the US site and then /country for all other markets i.e. .com/uk .com/de etc. Each site has it's own WMT profile. Each site has it's own GA profile. Since Google added Search Engine Optimization to the GA interface, I can't track these sites separately under this new feature. It seems to me that it can only be associated with a single WMT profile at a time or rather that WMT can only be associated with a single GA profile at a time. The numbers for the UK and US site are identical, but when I try and link the UK WMT account with GA it removes it from the US profile and vice versa.

Hi, We have a new client who has built a brand in the UK on a xyz.com domain. The "xyz.com" is now a brand and features on all marketing. Lots of SEO work has taken place and the UK site has good rankings and traffic. They have now expanded to the US and with offline marketing leading the way, xyz.com is the brand being pushed in the US. So with the launch of the offline marketing US IP's are now redirected to a US version of the site (subfolder) with relevant pricing and messaging. This is great for users, but with Googlebot being on a US IP it is also being redirected and the UK pages have now dropped out of the index. The solution we need would ideally have both UK and US users searching for xyz.com, but would see them land on respective static pages with correct prices. Ideally no link authority would be moved via redirection of users. We have considered the following solutions Move UK site to subfolder /uk and redirect UK ips to this subfolder (and so not googlebot) downside of this is it will massively impact the UK rankings which are the core driver of the business - also would this be deemed as illegal cloaking? natural links will always be to the xyz.com page and so longer term the US homepage will gain authority and UK homepage will be more reliant on artificial linkbuilding. Use a overlay that detects IP address and requests users to select relevant country (and cookies to redirect on second visit) this has been rejected by ecommerce team as will increase bounce rate% & we dont want users to be able to see other countries due to prduct and price differences. Use a homepage with country selection (and cookies to redirect on second visit) this has been rejected by ecommerce team as will increase bounce rate% & we dont want users to be able to see other countries due to prduct and price differences. Is there an easy solution to this problem that we're overlooking? Is there another way of legal cloaking we could use here? Many thanks in advance for any help here

I have a global site targeting many countries including the UK which is the only English language site. Does it matter whether I use /en or /uk for the UK sub-folder? If I already have /en in place, but my Google UK listings are struggling, will it benefit me to switch to /uk? I honestly don't think it matters too much, but given the choice would've gone for the /uk I'm trying to weigh up whether it is worth the effort of changing it.

We have a client who publishes deals that are time sensitive. Links to the deals expire and so Google's crawlers are picking them up and finding a 404 If I no follow them, will the 404's still get picked up and reported in WMT? The same question applies to SEOMoz Pro.

The client is already on /en and in my opinion there is not much to be gained by switching to /uk

We are doing some optimisation on sites in the APAC region, namely China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Japan. We have set the url generator to automatically use the heading of the page in the URL which works fine for countries using Latin characters, but is causing problems, particularly in IE, when it comes to the double byte countries. For some reason, IE struggles with double byte and displays URLs in their rather ugly, coded form. Anybody got any suggestions on whether we should persist with the keyword URLs or revert to the non-descriptive URLs for the double byte countries? The reason I ask is it's a balance of SEO benefit vs not scaring IE users off with ugly URLs that look dreadful and spammy.

We want to track users from a particular campaign to see what they do when they get to the site. The site generates revenue from clicks out so we want to be able to see whether visitors from a particular source click on multiple deals. i.e. enters from the source and then clicks on 3 different deals that take the user to other sites. Using GA, can I track this by implementing UTM on both the campaign links and outgoing links? Can I see exactly how many deals the average user is clicking on? As far as I know I can: Track visitors from the campaign Track overall clicks on deals Divide click outs by visitors But I can't track how many deals the visitors from campaign A clicked on... or can I?

I just experienced something VERY odd and wondered if any of you had an idea of what it might be. When I did a search on Google and clicked the top SEO listing I was taken to a competitor of the number 1 listed site i.e. NOT the site I clicked on. When I clicked the back button and clicked it again, I was taken to the correct site. This happened with two different searches and I was taken to two different sites. Could this be a clever/sinister cookie implemented by the competitor; a site I frequent regularly? Could this be malware implemented by an affiliate? Could this be a Google glitch?

We have a blog on each of our country sites, but the content on the English speaking sites is shared i.e. locally produced in US is mixed up with stuff produced in UK and vice versa. I'm not concerned about duplicate content because we have taken the necessary measures to let the search engines know that we have a US site for the US and and UK site for the UK. My question to you is whether we should develop the blog independently in each country or develop one blog to satisfy our global sites. I believe a local blog for each country is better because the content would speak to the audience better and any reference points or product and price points would be 100% relevant to the audience.

One of my clients is an email subscriber-led business offering deals that are time sensitive and which expire after a limited, but varied, time period. Each deal is published on its own URL and in order to drive subscriptions to the email, an overlay was implemented that would appear over the individual deal page so that the user was forced to subscribe if they wished to view the details of the deal. Needless to say, this led to the threat of a Google penalty which _appears (fingers crossed) _to have been narrowly avoided as a result of a quick response on our part to remove the offending overlay. What I would like to ask you is whether you have any safe and approved methods for capturing email subscribers without revealing the premium content to users before they subscribe? We are considering the following approaches: First Click Free for Web Search - This is an opt in service by Google which is widely used for this sort of approach and which stipulates that you have to let the user see the first item they click on from the listings, but can put up the subscriber only overlay afterwards. No Index, No follow - if we simply no index, no follow the individual deal pages where the overlay is situated, will this remove the "cloaking offense" and therefore the risk of a penalty? Partial View - If we show one or two paragraphs of text from the deal page with the rest being covered up by the subscribe now lock up, will this still be cloaking? I will write up my first SEOMoz post on this once we have decided on the way forward and monitored the effects, but in the meantime, I welcome any input from you guys.

I work for a number of clients on linkbuilding campaigns, and I follow and recommend to clients a white hat "quality" linkbuilding approach. This has achieved great results for my clients but I often get questions such as. Q. What is better for us - £100 for a mozrank 4 placement vs £200 for a mozrank 5 placement? I am trying to build a numeric way of showing cost of placing a link (via article mainly) vs the mozrank / authority of the site its placed on. The key to working this out though is knowing how much more value there is between the different quality of sites, and what are the key factors to build into the formula. Ideally the output we will get is a linkbuilding effect cost which shows the cost per impact of a placement. A highly simplified formula (that wouldn't work)  therefore would be Cost / mozrank If we look at mozrank being 8 times higher between levels, how does this correlate with the value of the link from sites at those different levels? We know that we will never have a correct formula for this but we are striving to get a formula which helps us to plan and evaluate different site opportunities at different costs. I would love to know anybody’s thoughts on this, Thanks

I have a bastard of a problem... Google Analytics is incorrectly tracking PPC traffic as SEO which is screwing up all my reporting . I don't care for rankings, I care for actual SEO traffic and I can't be sure that what i am seeing is correct which is driving me nuts. Any ideas?

I have suggested to a client with limited content on their site (considering it's in a very competitive sector with oceans of content possibilities!) that they probably shouldn't name the XML sitemap featuring their "seo content pages" (I hate that terminology BTW!) - google_sitemap_seo.xml My reasoning is that if I was a Google engineer or Google bot, I would probably ignore and disregard those pages because they are most likely poor quality content/doorway pages/boiler plate pages/ "enter your descriptive phrase here" pages. The push back from tech is that it doesn't make a difference so we're not going to do it.