Perfect! Thanks for your help Kristen

Thanks for the tip. I've never spotted that before!

I've tried to find the answer to this question myself, but I've found differing opinions. The conclusion I've come to is that Stackoverflow allows follow links when the user that posts the link has sufficient reputation or if the link receives user validation.

Has anyone else here used Stackoverflow.com that knows the answer to this question?

Thanks for the help Ryan

I think the title sums up the question, but does a new subdomain get any ranking benefits from being on a pre-existing high authority domain. Or does the new subdomain have to fend for itself in the SERPs?

I agree with Bendall that sampling is what is most likely causing your problem here. You may find this post useful: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1042498?hl=en-GB

I suspect that the reason that your sampled total closely matches the total of individually downloaded monthly data is because sampled data is Google's 'best guess' when the data in the date range becomes too large. This best guess is based on sound statistics, but ultimately there will be some variances. I've found these variances get bigger the larger your site and the larger your date range. Google do this to reduce load on their servers as crunching the numbers for large data sets can be very resource intense. You COULD upgrade to Google Analytics Premium which gives you un-sampled data as standard, but this is very expensive and only really suitably for large organisations.

There is no easy way round this I'm afraid. I'd suggest that you think about what level of data you are comfortably using - sampled data can still give you valuable insights / trends. Some are comfortable with using sampled data (I prefer now too). I believe there are some tools that allow you to download un-sampled data from Google Analytics via their API but I have not tried these.

Does Google penalise content that sits behind a read gate? Currently, most of the content on our site sits behind a read gate. People have to register before they can view the detailed content. Currently, our forums are accessible to all which draws a lot of long tail traffic.

Google does seem to be indexing some of our gated content, but can someone advise me how they view this content more generally please?

We’re a software company. Would someone be able to help me with a basic process for retiring old product pages and re-directing the SEO value to new pages. We are retiring some old products to focus on new products. The new software has much similar functionality to the old software, but has more features.

How can we ensure that the new pages get the best start in life? Also, what is the best way of doing this for users?

Our plan currently is to:

• Leave the old pages up initially with a message to the user that the old software has been retired. There will also be a message explaining that the user might be interested in one of our new products and a link to the new pages.
• When traffic to these pages reduces, then we will delete these pages and re-direct them to the homepage.

Has anyone got any recommendations for how we could approach this differently? One idea that I’m considering is to immediately re-direct the old product pages to the new pages. I was wondering if we could then provide a message to the user explaining that the old product has been retired but that the new improved product is available. I’d also be interested in pointing the re-directs to the new product pages that are most relevant rather than the homepage, so that they get the value of the old links. I’ve found in the past that old retirement pages for products can outrank the new pages as until you 301 them then all the links and authority flow to these pages.

Any help would be very much appreciated

I'm trying to convince people that we need good marketing reasons for starting multiple domains, as it will be more difficult to rank multiple sites. Does anyone know if Google actively discourages multiple domains from the same company appearing in the search results for the same keyword? We are creating a separate content website which is related to an existing company website. Would you agree that is best to have these sites on one domain with the content site on a sub-domain perhaps? I'm worried about duplication of effort and cross-keyword targeting in particular.

These sites would not have duplicate content.

Excellent advice Federico. My first reaction was, "but that's not a server-side sitemap generator". I just looked at their website though and it turns out that it is! Looks like I need to read things more carefully!

I'll look into that as an option but if anyone else has any server side sitemap generators that they'd recommend then I'd be really interested to hear about them

I've been looking into sitemap generators recently and have got a good knowledge of what creating a sitemap for a small website of below 500 URLs involves. I have successfully generated a sitemap for a very small site, but I’m trying to work out the best way of crawling a large site with millions of URLs.

I’ve decided that the best way to crawl such a large number of URLs is to use a server side sitemap, but this is an area that doesn’t seem to be covered in detail on SEO blogs / forums. Could anyone recommend a good server side sitemap generator? What do you think of the automated offerings from Google and Bing? I’ve found a list of server side sitemap generators from Google, but I can’t see any way to choose between them. I realise that a lot will depend on the type of technologies we use server side, but I'm afraid that I don't know them at this time.