I just looked and....Out of the top 100 pages by views, 90/100 have decreased load time by one half. Pretty serious stuff there. 10 have increases of like 10 to 30% but nothing alarming.

Best

Our intent is to subscribe to pro, go with the lower option $5 per month on less critical sites and the much higher options on critical high performance sites. I really appreciate the input and time, I am glad I had one last good answer to give. 
All the best,

Robert

I forgot to post before I hit good answer and it wiped out my comments. Thanks for the detailed response. I will show our info to our head of dev. 
Best

jStrong,

Thanks for the info. I think responded to both you and Prestashop at once, sorry. I like the security features a lot given some client sites are fairly sensitive. 
Best

Thanks so much for the help here. That is the other piece that we liked about what we saw in the initial tests - security. Here is the data (sorry a bit redacted due to confidentiality needs) from our head of development. It is a reasonably large site with quite a bit of traffic over a short time interval ( a few days)

• 126k total pageviews
• 105k regular visitors
• 20k crawlers/bots
• 1.5k threats (which Cloudflare forces to jump through hoops to access the site, and if failed they are denied)
• 523k total requests for files and pages - 207k were handled by Cloudflare rather than having to be handled by our server
• 8.3 GB of bandwidth total - 2.0 GB of which were handled by CloudFlare, reducing our usage and allowing other sites to deliver faster.

I appreciate the info re cookies, I will have to look into that as there may be client concerns. Great help!

We are considering using CloudFlare as a CDN for a large group of sites. The fees are $5 to $200 depending on many factors. We tried the free trial on one site and were impressed with the results. I am wondering if any of you have any longer term experience with this and performance metrics, etc.

I have to say I laughed when I saw the typo. I appreciate your wanting to find one as well and I will PM all as I go forward. So far, there are none I can identify so maybe we will endeavor to start one.

Thanks

Thanks Who Wudda Thunk

I agree Webmasterworld is a great forum, it is open to all so is not strictly an agency related forum. I was wanting to do something or find something along the lines of a Vistage but online. I was a Vistage/TEC member for several years and then a member of another CEO forum. Both were very helpful in that you are talking with other business owners and learning from them. Along with that you are teaching them things you know. Home builders have an organization where builders from different cities are in a group (so they are not competing with one another in the same market) and share information, assistance that I have seen be very beneficial to their members. I would love to find something like that for agencies.

Best

With this info, I would go with Robots.txt because, as you say, it outweighs any potential loss given the use of the pages and the absence of links.

Thanks

Thanks PrestaShop

I have been a member in business organizations where there was a monthly fee and it does seem to weed out the less committed. I will PM you and any others who have an interest and maybe we can get something going. 
Best

Robert

Moz.com is the best forum I have been a part of. There is a local forum I really like but spend less time on (we have staff who live on it.) I am interested in a forum where everyone is agency related. Does anyone know of a good one? If not, would anyone have an interest?

Killer

I saw this in the Moz Top 10 this morning and had to reach out to you. Very interesting stuff on organic traffic showing as direct. While not referral showing as direct, I think you will see the implications. Best

Groupon organic vs direct test.

Killer,

Sorry I fell out of the loop on this one. I have to say that Takeshi has done beyond an above admirable job on laying out the issues of how referrers become direct. I think two things stand out to me: yes the installation of your GA code could be wrong and it should be before the closing head tag . Often people will put it in the footer and occasionally someone enters it more than once.

I think another thing you have to look at is you are comparing Chartbeat to GA and they provide two types of analytics. The numbers, of course, are different. Chartbeat was out before GA had realtime and, I think, it was intended for the real time needs. It claims to have better data for publishers and I have no way of comparing. Since it has been around for some time, I would think it has some real traction, but you have to be careful as you are comparing two different services.

Another thing that gives me a slight amount of concern about the issue is that they have a section on how they help you sell more ads (when you are a publisher). That type of data makes me a bit nervous. It may be the real deal, it just makes me nervous when something claims to help you prove your position.

The question re your site is a bit skewed in the way you present it. What is the other data re that site? How many total directs? How many organic visits? How many PPC visits? Etc. You cannot just conclude that there cannot be that many directs without all the data. How many total visits would be the first place to look.

As to the expert on analytics and your GA code, you can do it your self. Look at view page source (typically a right click function). When you have the page with the code on it, do a control lookup (command or Control  plus  F on). Then in the search box, type in UA- and see where it occurs. There should be only one occurrence of UA-XXXXXXXX-1 or -12, etc.

If you see it more than once it is likely a problem, but not always. If it is in the header and footer, typically you will see an artificially low 2% or less bounce rate. You can also do a lookup of the closing head tag and see if it is after the analytics code.)

I hope this helps you a bit.

Robert

Killer

When you say referrers are showing as direct, what are you meaning by that? 
If I type in your domain and enter, I will show as direct.

If I go to site A (say YP.com) and click a link to your site it will show as a referral from YP.com.

The way you are saying this, if you are getting 1000 visits in a fixed period it shows as 500 organic, 450 direct and 50 referred. You believe the 450 direct are actually more like 50 direct and 400 referred, is that correct?

Best,

Good follow up question and I probably should have mentioned it even if GWMT did not. Yes, if you are a local business use that Schema. If you are an organization use that schema. It will help with your geo targeting.

Best

I don't disagree at all and I think AJ Kohn is a rock star. In SEO, I have learned over time that there are rarely absolutes like always do this or never do that. I based my answer on how you posited the question.

If you read AJ's post you will note that the rel=canonical issue comes up with others commenting and not in the body of his post. Yes, if the page is superfluous like a cart page or a contact page, use the robots.txt to block the crawl. But, if you have a page with rank, links, etc. that help your canonical page, how are you helping yourself by forgoing rel=canon?

I think his bigger point was that you want to be aware and to understand that the # of times you are crawled is at least partially governed by PR which is governed by all those other things we discussed. If you understand that and keep the crawl focused on better pages you help yourself.

Does that clarify a bit?
Best

Yair

I think that the canonical is the better option. I am unsure as to your use of the term "crawl budget," in that there is no fixed number of times a page or a site will be crawled versus a second similar site for example. I have a huge reference site that is crawled every couple of days and I have small sites of ten pages that are crawled weekly or less. It is dependent on the traffic and behaviors of that traffic (which would include number of inbound links, etc.) and on things like you re-submitting sitemap, etc. 
The canonical tag was created to provide the clarification to the search engine as to what you considered to be the relevant page. Go ahead and use it.

Best

Robert

It is really quite a simple answer. In WMT, Google gives you the answers for targeting a specific country. Frankly, Google did not require your server to be in the country you were targeting in 2012... Remember, Google is not saying any of these is the end all or be all of geo targeting. They state clearly each is a signal and each signal has a given weight.

The first indicator if you base it off of what Google says (and your question seems to be anchored by the search behemoth)... ccTLD is the first indicator they mention. Google further states it is a STRONG signal. Next is geo targeting. The fact that there is an option to tell them where you want to target and that it is second would seem to indicate that server location was less relevant than you waving a flag and screaming: Hey Google! Hook me up in Russia please! 
The third (But not last) signal is... server location, but they are very clear about this being not as strong a signal when they state, "Some websites use distributed content delivery networks (CDNs) or are hosted in a country with better webserver infrastructure, so it is not a definitive signal."

And, finally, there are other on page signals that Google can use to determine where you are targeting like phone and addresses on the pages, language, etc. (If your server is in the US, your site is a generic TLD, you have not geo targeted in WMT, and the entire site is written in Urdu, it is likely not going to rank well in Lithuania, but would have the ability to rank in Pakistan or Bangladesh).

Now the winner is ... sorry, YOUR PARTNER. Please by him a nice 5 button, 2000 vintage, Tokaji as a compliment to his SEO prowess...this time.

Best,

Robert