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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?

I'm looking for two things: 1. Some top notch  articles on building out a content strategy for a blog (coupon blog is more relevant). 2. Tools that can help to determine target keywords to focus on (Most I've seen are where the keywords start with me, are their any that will help to predict which keywords are relevant for our blog & that would be great to target).

Any feedback/discussion on either is greatly appreciated!

We are a coupon site & occasionally have some updates to certain coupons that we post (maybe 24-28 hours after the original post). Is there any best practices to follow for reposting content? Here are a few thoughts:

• Would it be ok to use the same post, but just re-schedule it again to go out with the new updates?

• Should we create a new post & just reference the previous post?

Any articles that might be helpful on an overall approach?

We get very little search traffic from the images on our site & I can't necessarily figure out why? We post a ton & tag them correctly, we've got to be missing something?

We are a Wordpress blog, can anyone provide some quality articles on Image search or have suggestions that should help to get more traffic?

Our site does fairly well, as we get over 100k/visits a month, so we'd really like to get more traffic from our images.

Would you always do this, even in extreme cases? Say for example you had to 100's of redirects? Would that be overkill?

Over a year ago we moved a site from Blogspot that was adding dates in the URL's (i.e.. blog/2012/08/10/) Additionally we've removed category folders (/category, /tag, etc). Overall if I add all these redirects (from the multiple date options, etc) I'm concerned it might be an overload on the server?

After talking with the server team they had suggested using something like 'BWP Google Sitemaps' on our Wordpress site, which would allow Google some time to re-index our site.

What do you suggest we do?

Ya, I read through that article yesterday & see that they recommend the same setting as the Yoast plugin should be doing? Although I didn't ever get a response from me to see if there is something missing?

For now, I plan on adding this to the robots.txt file & see what results I get?

Do you know the time frame that it takes to get the updates in GWT? Will this update within a few weeks or would it take longer than that?

Thanks for all the help!

BJ

Sorry to open this back up after a month, in adding this to the robot.txt file is there something that needs to be done within the code of the site? Or can I simply update the robots.txt file within Google Webmaster Tools?

I was hoping to get a response from Yoast on his blog post, it seems there were a number of questions similar to mine, but he didn't ever address them.

Thanks,

BJ

Ok, I've posted a question on Yoast.com blog to see what other options we might have? Thanks for the help!

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?

We didn't have these errors showing up previously, so that's why I was really suspicious? Also we have Joost De Valk's SEO plugin installed on our site & I thought there was an option to turn off the searches from being indexed?

http://screencast.com/t/KLPVGTzM I just logged into our Webmaster Central account to find that it shows 100k links that are not found? After searching through all of them they all appear to be from our search bar, with no results? Are we doing something wrong here?

Awesome..thanks for the actionable items, I'll jump into them & see what I can find. Thanks!

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.

K, thats a good opinion, but not the question at hand. I understand that it turns off some visitors, but we do it because it works

If it was in some way affecting our SEO, we would look into other alternatives.

Actually I just pulled up my notes to find out when we added the popup to the site & it was on May 19th, which would have came after the traffic had dropped for these pages.

Hmm...you're the second person to question the popup promoting our eBook. Can you provide any articles that discuss how this would affect our Organic rankings? Could this really cause that much of an issue?

If I turned it off & waited to see how long it would take to get better search results, how long do you think I would need to wait to see results? I'd be fine running a test on this. At the moment, we do get a good amount of subscribers, so it would be a loss if we lost it.

This page http://onefrugalchick.com/2011/03/22/free-mio-drink-mix-sample-new-product/ ranks higher for the term & was posted around the same time as ours. So I'm not sure if it would just have been a freshness boost?

What tool are you using to crawl this page to find all the html errors? That would be helpful to find them & to start fixing them.

Do you have any resources/articles you could send about a page having an issue because a popup promoting the site? I'd be curious to look into this to see if there could be any issues.

Thin Content: This was my original impression, but after the Panda update we stuck around for at least 2 months, before anything happened. I wouldn't have suspected an update like that to take this long, so I'm suspicious about it being something else? Do you know if it could have delayed by two months?

Thanks for the response! I have tracked the backlinks & haven't seen any major drops overall? Is there any tools available that would show an overall link count for a particular site overtime? Also I wouldn't say this was a competitor move, as much as something happening on our site.

I read over this post on the blog tonight: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/lessons-learned-by-an-over-optimizer-14730 & it's got me concerned that I might be having a similar issue on our site?

Back in March & April of last year, we ranked fairly well for a number of long tail keywords, here is one in particular 'Mio Drink' for this page: http://www.discountqueens.com/free-mio-drink-from-kraft-facebook-offer

The page is still indexed, but appears back on page #3 for the search term.

During this time we had made a number of different updates to our site & I can't seem to put an exact finger on what might have caused the problem?

Can anyone see any issues that might have caused this to drop?

Thanks,

BJ

Daniel: haha...you must have a real issue with any type of Advertising? Do you see any issues that would be raised with Google & a sites rankings?

Let me rephrase my question as I don't feel it's been addressed yet...

We own a blog & are looking for additional ways to monetize our site. Social Spark is a Blog Sponsorship Network & pays bloggers to write about different products. I'm aware that they are using the 'No Follow' tag.

My question is if we would have any issues with Google & our organic rankings if we were compensated for posts, that pass no link value? Or is Google an all knowing power that has an issue with this & will drop your rankings just because they can? Or is there another angle that I need reconsider?

We are looking at working with http://www.socialspark.com/ which is a Blog Sponsorship Network. How does Google treat the sites that work with advertisers like this?

• Do they treat these the same as selling links?

• If we add a no-follow link would this cause us any problems?

• Are we ok working with them, or should we consider looking into something entirely different?

With the Panda updates, we're looking into additional ways to work with advertisers. We're trying to thin down the affiliate type banners on the side & focus more on the content side. What guidelines does Google have for working with advertisers that wouldn't hurt us in our rankings?

Thanks,

BJ

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

Thanks for all the help Sha! We'll play with the example code that you'd sent & see what we can come up with. After a few weeks I'll continue to watch our organic rankings & see how it affects us overall.

Thanks,

BJ

My fear with this approach is how the search engines will handle the redirect? I know that from the users perspective this should work, but I've never read any articles that even resemble this type of approach.

Do you believe that this method will pass the value along in the search engines & treat it as a proper 301 redirect.

Thanks,

BJ

Previously our site was using this as our URL structure: www.site.com/page.html. A few months ago we updated our URL structure to this: www.site.com/page & we're not using the .html.

I've read over this guide & don't see anywhere that discusses this: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection.

I've currently got a programmer looking into, but am always a bit weary with their workarounds, as I'd previously had them cause more problems then fix it. Here is the solution he is looking to do:

The way that I am doing the redirect is fine. The problem is of where to put the code. The issue is that the files are .html files that need to be redirected to the same url with out a .html on them. I can see if I can add that to the 404 redirect page if there is one inside of there and see if that does the trick. That way if there is no page that exists without the .html then it will still be a 404 page. However if it is there then it will work as normal. I will see what I can find and get back.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

BJ

Ryan, thanks for the response! Each of the author pages do have a unique title for that author. So the problem isn't that they are duplicating the other author pages, rather 1 author has multiple posts, making multiple pages of their content that is being duplicated. Does that make sense?