I find WordPress' blogging functionality a lot easier to use and a lot more customizable. Not only that, if your blog is currently a significant driver of organic rankings/traffic for your site, I would recommend against moving your blog if you have the option to keep it where it is, especially if moving it would mean an overhaul in URLs/URL structure.

Hi Eric,

A few things to reassure you off the bat:

1. For what it's worth, there is a huge, HUGE amount of crawler spam happening in the web today. Every site I work on is being hit hard with false referrals and direct visits. I know Google Analytics is working on a solution to better filter these visits out. So I wouldn't be too concerned that it is something a competitor is doing to your site, specifically - it's more likely that it's been caught up in the general wave of spam crawlers.
2. It's important to note that when we talk about Google looking at bounce rate and dwell time as part of ranking your site, those numbers are specifically from clicks through from search - that's data that Google can get without using your private web analytics data as a ranking factor, which they've said repeatedly that they don't and won't do. So a bunch of direct visits with high bounce rates will NOT affect your rankings.

So, it's not dangerous, just annoying. On to how to get that data out of your reports:

• Make sure you're not filtering out spam referrers at a View level - this can cause those visits to incorrectly appear as direct traffic.
• You could set up an Advanced Segment in Google Analytics to filter out direct visits with visit times of, say, under 5 seconds. Some real traffic may get caught in that, but it will get the noise levels down.
• The best way to filter out spam bot traffic, in my opinion, is to set up hostname filtering. Here's a post on Megalytic on how to do that: https://megalytic.com/blog/how-to-filter-out-fake-referrals-and-other-google-analytics-spam. Make sure you've also got an "Unfiltered Data" View so you'll still have historic raw data if you need it.

Hope that helps! Good luck.

A longer page title is certainly ok - although, as the other answers noted, yours is pretty unreadable by humans.  Too many keywords in a title tag can make your page look "over-optimized" and have a negative effect - not to mention that users are less likely to click on an unattractive tag.  I would advise targeting a maximum of 2 keywords in a title tag.

WIth Google's recent updates it's becoming more important to have a tag that's not TOO long, though.  Title tags longer than about 68 characters (including spaces) may be automatically shortened by Google - or Google may choose to use different text from the page altogether in place of the title tag.  This can make for some pretty weird results since Google's auto-inserted text isn't always as nice of a user experience as your hand-crafted tag.  So make sure your tags are shorter than 68 characters so as not to get truncated.

What analytics tool are you using? I know that both Google Analytics and SiteCatalyst have functions where you can make a note of changes - make sure you've recorded the date of the change so you can compare back and forth and as time goes on, remember exactly when the switch happened.

I would also run some comparison reports for equal amounts of time before and after the switch - things like your most popular pages by organic traffic, home page visits, etc. That will show you right away if an important page has stopped doing well.

In the Moz tool, tracking rankings before and after is definitely a good thing to do. You should also dig in and see which pages are ranking for your target terms before and after the switch to make sure it's still the page you want ranking for the keyword you want.

Lastly, don't forget that your site switch didn't occur in a vacuum. Take into account factors such as seasonality that could also be impacting your traffic post-switch.

If Moz and Webmaster Tools are showing the 403 error, it means that they are able to crawl to the URLs that are returning the 403 - so somewhere on your site or on the web, pages that are accessible by bots and crawlers are linking to these pages that don't exist yet. Having a bunch of errors on your site can impact Google's ability to crawl it well, which can impact your rankings, so it's best to get those cleaned up. In Webmaster Tools you should be able to click on the pages and see which pages are linking to them, so you can remove those links; you can do the same using a tool like Screaming Frog if you'd prefer. Good luck!

DA doesn't usually transfer very well across subdomains - so it's likely the DA from www.example.com is already not affecting subdomain.example.com.

It's certainly possible to keep the subdomain alive, but I'd be a little concerned about what it would do for your brand. If you're sending the message that example.com is now newexample.com, but then keeping things running at example.com, it could create a lot of consumer confusion. From a DA stance you should be OK, though, especially if you take some extra time to promote the subdomain and the new site after launch.

You may still not see pages from the new domain and the old subdomain ranking in the same SERPs, though - Google is often pretty good at figuring out when multiple sites are owned by the same people.

You certainly don't need to include every page of your website in your top navigation menu. Your plan of having a Locations page that then links to each of your location pages individually is a fine way to go.

That said, the deeper into your site architecture your page is, the fewer ways there are for people and search engines alike to discover it - to your point, there is now only one page on your site linking to all of these location pages. One reason internal linking outside the navigation is important is that it provides additional ways for users and search engines to browse to your content. I would recommend taking a look at the pages on your site and thinking about what pages a user might want to visit next, and linking to those. Providing an intuitive next step for your users keeps them engaged, and provides additional ways for your content to get discovered.

It's fairly common for Google to rewrite the displayed title of a website to more closely match the searcher's query, if Google thinks it would be helpful to do so - it's like an extra signal "yes, you're in the right place." When your query is your domain name it's not unusual for Google to display that instead of whatever the actual title tag is. I'm not sure where the apostrophe is coming from; it may be that a high percentage of inbound links use the apostrophe, or it may be that your entry in a data provider like Localeze has an apostrophe. I'd use the Moz Local testing tool to make sure your business name is consistent across data aggregators. Other than that, I wouldn't worry too much about the snippet changing, since it will give people searching for your brand/domain a strong signal that they're where they're supposed to be. Hope that helps!

I agree with Sean - I've never heard of an official limit to image filenames in terms of length alone. Since the file name is almost always part of the image URL, you could be running the risk of too-long URLs but that's a relatively minor problem. I would make extra sure that your file names don't appear keyword-stuffed, though - so watch out for things like repeating keywords or having all variations of a keyword. There's a big difference between widgets-extralarge-round-blue-widgetmaker.jpg and blue-widgets-best-blue-widgets-blue-widgets-online-free-shipping, if that makes sense. Other than that you should be fine.

In a post-Penguin world, I'd be leery of this kind of automated anchor-text-rich link building.  If you continue with this approach, make sure you're also getting plenty (i.e. a majority) of links without keyword-rich anchor text.  Otherwise, yes, they will both count as they are to different pages.