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Yea, what I'm thinking I'll do is now that I've got the base of fans just focus more attention on getting them to now 'Like' the URL. Shouldn't be too difficult & will help to increase our 'SEO' worthy likes. Up until now, I just never new there was a difference, so thanks for the insight, huge help!

Excellent, thank you for the insight! Yes, I would agree being able to reach our 73 fans is more valuable to use, especially with our niche, than to have them one time liker's on our URL. It would be an interesting comparison though with our search rankings on how much of a bump it would give us with organic traffic if there 73 were counting towards our URL.

Interesting, so with our 73k fans: http://screencast.com/t/Qzxh99VZeX are you saying they are not being reported in OSE because the 'like' didn't happen directly on our home page - rather within Facebook or somewhere else?

I'm guessing this is intentional within the report? If that is the case, are you saying that if our 73k fans were showing up in the OSE report, would it make a dramatic difference not only in the report but with our search rankings & competitiveness? Which I would conclude means that a like from a page is valued more, than a like from within Facebook?

Sorry for the ramble...just trying to understands what's going on here & why it would be intentional? Do you have any articles you can refer to that might help to better understand why?

Thanks!

I don't fully understand what this means in the report for our site: http://screencast.com/t/aG5jbkYWLA here is our site: www.discountqueens.com & we have thousands of fans & facebook likes and all the time on all our posts. For example yesterday we had 73 likes on this post alone: http://www.discountqueens.com/amazon-ultimate-shrinky-dinks-jewelry-designer-1495/

So here's my questions:

• Is there an error in the reporting?

• Are we using a social sharing method that isn't giving us valid credit for these links?

• What should I consider doing differently & why isn't our likes, shares, tweets & Google+ being calculated into our score?

What analytic tools do you use? We currently have Google Analytics, but I'm familiar with KissMetrics & Crazyegg, do either of those make this process easier to measure?

I'm always afraid of drastic tests, how would you do that on a large scale? With the 15 different versions you tested on your pages, what were the key items you were measuring?

Any chance you can share more info on the enormous differences in your changes & how measured this? Ultimately this is what I'm looking to do. I just want to make a calculated decision before jumping into it.

That's good to know about the SEO...thanks!

We're in the coupon blogging space & saw that one of the larger coupon sites move away from the more traditional blog layout: http://thekrazycouponlady.com they now have more of an editorial type layout. Here is another site which is more similar to our layout: http://hip2save.com.

So here are my questions:

• Which layout type do you feel better serves their visitors & why?

• How does the affect the SEO of the site?

• How does it affect the advertising revenues?

• Which layout do you prefer?

Is there strategy in this move for the coupon blog, or is this just a preference on how they now display their content?

We're making some updates to our design soon & I wanted to get some feedback on the overall direction we take.

Ok, I think I've got a good outline of what needs to be done. I guess I left out one thing in my question, is that I'm not going to be the one putting together the content. Do you have any suggestions on how to hire or train someone a good content author? Or any good services that I should look into?

Excellent thanks for the articles & tools. The Long Tail Pro does look a little spammy, it appears the owner hangs out with the 'Biz Opp' crowd which always scares me a bit.

I'll dig through the articles & see what I can find...thanks!

Yes, I understand that approach, but that's basically sitting down with a blank piece of paper in front of me & guessing on that data.

What I'm looking for are more of a written out approach & how to get to your conclusions, but have valuable data in front of me (either my own from our analytics, or another tool that can help to guide us where opportunities lie). I'd like to have some information in front of me that helps me to better determine all 5 steps that you map out above. Does that make sense?

Of course it does...we have people coming to the site looking for coupons. Our popup is a free eBook on how to save money using coupons. It doesn't popup every time, only for first time visitors.

Do we get 100% of the people submitting an email..of course not. Does anyone get annoyed, of course. Do we get higher conversion rates than without out..of course. That's why we use it!

If we judged everything by the cover, we'd never get anywhere. All the decision made on a site, need to be tested & measured. Hence what I was asking above in the article. If someone had data & ran some tests to suggest that a popup would have an effect on a popup, then that would be helpful information to have as I'm trying to address the drop in rankings.

Ok, I just did a little more research into this, to see how Yoast was handling this within the plugin & came across this article: http://yoast.com/example-robots-txt-wordpress/

In the article he stats that this is already included within the plugin on search pages:

I just confirmed this, by doing this search on my site & looking at the code: http://www.discountqueens.com/?s=candy

So this has always been in place. Why would I still have the 100K not found links still showing up?

Interesting, so with our 73k fans: http://screencast.com/t/Qzxh99VZeX are you saying they are not being reported in OSE because the 'like' didn't happen directly on our home page - rather within Facebook or somewhere else?

I'm guessing this is intentional within the report? If that is the case, are you saying that if our 73k fans were showing up in the OSE report, would it make a dramatic difference not only in the report but with our search rankings & competitiveness? Which I would conclude means that a like from a page is valued more, than a like from within Facebook?

Sorry for the ramble...just trying to understands what's going on here & why it would be intentional? Do you have any articles you can refer to that might help to better understand why?

Thanks!

Sha,

I wanted to send a quick update & see if we're on the right track? After implementing this 301 redirect, I'm seeing a few negatives, but also a few positives & would appreciate your feedback:

Concerns:

• Google Organic Traffic has dropped by 26.65% since we implemented the redirect (12 Days).

• Top Content Pages From Search Traffic has dropped from a weekly average of 1,500 pages to 998. I've segmented the Analytics to see if I had more or less pages that were driving traffic to my site (Organic Only).

Positives:

• Bing Organic Traffic is up 32.15% although not substantial for our overall traffic, but it has increased.

• Yahoo Organic Traffic is up 26.53% less traffic than Bing, so not substantial.

• Webmaster Tools Pages crawled per day: http://screencast.com/t/krkD69bj3mG we've had a huge spike, which I'm assuming is a good thing & a direct correlation to the 301 redirect.

All this being said, are we on the right track? The initial traffic loss had me worried, but after seeing the crawl stats it gave me hope? Do i just need to be more patient to see this through? Are we missing anything, or is this what you would expect?

Thanks,

BJ

Yea, what I'm thinking I'll do is now that I've got the base of fans just focus more attention on getting them to now 'Like' the URL. Shouldn't be too difficult & will help to increase our 'SEO' worthy likes. Up until now, I just never new there was a difference, so thanks for the insight, huge help!