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Usually Google and Bing do a good job of figuring out when terms are similar unless they have completely separate meanings (see Rand's response on singular vs plural). In your case if you go to google and type in "switchplate" it actually shows the "Did you mean switch plate?".

Also if you do a search on "Switch Plate" you notice Amazon comes up first with the word separated.

So those two notes are some big clues as to what direction to go for that example.

Either way I would use PPC as a playground here and run exact match ad campaigns for both versions of the term, find out which gets more traffic for you, which gets better conversions, and then optimize for that one first. Go with the data.

Anecdotaly I have heard singular is better for e-commerce as plural is usually used in language when talking about an item informationally. So I would probably go for singular and throw in a couple of plural versions on the page like an h2 or h3 link for "Other switch plates".

This could also be handled by doing your high level category pages as plural, and specific product pages as singular. I would probably keep a term like "switch plate" consistently separated in my copy though if I saw this was the big winner in my PPC test, but that is the copywriter/editor in me begging for consistency and not the SEO tweaker going for every version. In the end I still want my site to be user friendly and clean.

In short, this is not an error it is a security feature. You can check out Google's initial blog post about this here:

http://analytics.blogspot.com/2011/10/making-search-more-secure-accessing.html

They do not currently plan on providing that data anymore, and it doesn't look like that will change any time soon based on Matt Cutts' response to Rand's latest post about the number Cutt's presented in the article being WAY off.

"@__randfish__ we looked at all the data (not just a sample of 5K sites) before launch, and my estimate was and remains accurate." - Matt Cutts

So the answer is "it's not an error, and they will not be giving you the data back"

I would probably be thinking about two things:

First for the domain authority / page rank, if you do the redirecting correctly (301) then you will probably see an initial drop off as the search engines try to figure out what happened, and then you should go back to where you were as it should still be taking into account the old domain's information along with the new domains info.

So the question there is whether or not the change is worth that minor hit.

So the second thing I would be asking is what does changing to the new domain get me?

Is it more memorable? Does it fit the brand better? Does it get your highest value keyphrase as the URL? etc... each answer would sway me one way or another.

As an example I once new of a site that sold church furniture, and they had the chance to get "Pews.com", while switching over to this URL would be a pain, I would totally suggest going after it, and embracing it as it hit one of their strong keywords.

The other option of course was to build a subsidiary site just for pews (since they sold more than just pews), but that is where you need to look at your brand, and how you want to market yourself over time. For the pews.com example I could easily see re-creating the brand as "Pews.com" as that is much more memorable, and quickly tells users in my industry what I do, and how to find me all at once.

The branding question is obviously the bigger one here as I think the historical value, and links of the domain will transfer over fine as long as you do the technical pieces you need to.

Relevancy matters.

The links will count until one of your competitors notices and reports you, or until Google's team notices and penalizes you as it will be perceived as an unnatural gaming of the system.

Overall it is a gamble.

Neither of those things might happen.

If they do happen then Google might just discount the links, and not penalize the site directly. Or they could pull a JC Penny and penalize the site across the board for a set period of time.

Basically you are spending time on getting bad links when you could spend your time building new quality content and getting word out to real people about your products/services via blogs and social media.

Your choice is a valid choice, but can backfire, and should be thought of as a high risk short term choice

Hope that helps.

Underscores are not good to use in URLs as search engines do not treat it as a space or delimiter. So Snow_Bee would be considered Snowbee. I believe search engines have gotten better at figuring out when a word like this should be two words, but the best practice for this is to use hyphens (e.g. Snow-Bee).

Here is a video from Matt Cutts about it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=AQcSFsQyct8

This wouldn't cause you to drop off though especially if you ranked previously. Is it just for this one term or is it for multiple terms? I would be looking at link backgrounds to be sure there weren't any spammy links getting devalued that maybe didn't get caught before, or perhaps review the content of the page to see if it might have gotten caught by the penguin anti-spamminess updates.

Hello Bob,

Your question is all about learning how to do keyword research. One of the best places to start would be to read the guide here:

http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo/keyword-research

A lot of what I do on a regular basis is covered there.

I usually come up with a basic list based on what my competitors are targeting, what seems to be obvious ways of searching for my information, and then doing some keyword pulls on google's tools. The numbers you get there are all relative, and should not be taken as a predictor of traffic. Think of each number as an indicator of how that word should perform compared to the other words on the list.

One tool I find handy is http://ubersuggest.org/ for finding long tail, and variations of keywords. Start with small phrases, and build your way to longer ones with that tool so you can see patterns in search queries that people use for your terms.

Keyword research is an iterative process, so once you build your keyword list its good to have an adwords budget to test it out as this will get you traffic for a keyword much faster than organic methods.

Get campaigns going, see which keywords really drive traffic, which drive conversions, and then look to see the actual search queries used (available in adwords and GA) to see what people actually typed that brought your ads up.

There should be some clear winners that need to be your primary or "head" terms, and there will also be common topics that come up often, but have a lot of variations on how people search on them. Those are your long tail terms, and are probably best covered with ongoing blog posts related to those various searches, or with informational pages on your site.

Hope that helps.

Hands down I use GA much more than AW Stats.

AW Stats has it's place, but the segmentation of users, user defined variables, events, goal tracking, and e-commerce tracking all tied up with adwords data easily trumps AW Stats.

AW Stats is great for getting info on bots, 404 errors, bandwidth usage, and hits, but these are used more for diagnosis and less for business level decisions.

Also, the variations you are talking about between the two rarely matter unless you think the variation is due to large portions of your traffic not being tracked correctly by one or the other.

The reason why I say these variations don't matter is that both methods of tracking have their quirks, and what you are really using them for is to see the trending of the data.

As long as you know the data is as accurate as you can get it, and you know how/why you are getting the data you are getting, then that data becomes actionable based on the trends you see and not based on the explicit value of the number.

As an example lets say I see in GA 1,000 visitors this month, and 1,200 visitors next month, and I see in AW Stats 10,300 visitors and 12,500 visitors. I care less about the differences in the numbers in the systems and more about the 20% growth in that statistic. Considering I can find out the "why" easier and with more clarity in GA I usually don't even look at AW Stats for this type of data.

I also might take a look at AW stats when first setting up analytics to be sure it looks like key indicators are showing similar trends so I know I am not missing a huge chunk of the site or something similar.

Check out articles on the Panda update recently to see a lot about this topic.

I especially like this one from Vanessa Fox

The gist of it is that Google has started to devalue sites with lots of "cloned" pages where the content is very similar from page to page, but the area info, or keyword swaps out.

This is based on the idea that content that is tailored to a page's topic is more useful to the user, and it is more likely to carry nuances than broader content.

So for example I can talk about hotels in Dallas, or New York the same exact way "See Dallas/New York Hotels downtown and be close to all of the hip restaurants and activities"

Or I could go with something more Dallas Specific "See our Downtown Dallas Hotels near the American Airlines center, the Dallas Museum of Art, and direct access to the DART Trains"

The second example is WAY more useful to the user, and so Google's latest updates will tend to favor that over generic topical text.

So if you can afford to get copywriting for each topic I would.

If you can't then I would start picking out the biggest value terms and build content specific to that, use generic content for the other terms for now, but slowly replace those over time as well with more valuable content.

You may be in a situation where there isn't more valuable specific content to outrank you right now so the generic content will do decently in the rankings. In this case you may not see such a horrible ranking, but when someone eventually competes with you and catches on to your scheme it will be better to have the unique content already working for you.

Just my 2 cents

Without knowing the terms, or the type of content it is hard to say what would work best. I know that if you rank well for the topic in general you will rank well for localized terms using localized landing pages if each page has unique enough content.

So if you rank well for Blue Widget Company, and you setup a section of the site for "locations" or "Service Areas" and then build out a "Dallas Blue Widgets" page that talks about your location in Dallas, your contact info, and staff that serve Dallas, and Maybe a short story on what you have done for people in Dallas you should do relatively well. From there you can link back to your generic "Blue Widget" page.

Obviously the success of that strategy will depend on how competitive each market is for that term, and probably on how unique your regional content is as well.

If there is anything to be learned from the panda update it should be that going the route of serving the user with your local content is Key. So providing "service areas" and then creating somewhat unique content for that market should be a good way to go. This also helps you consolidate all of your links.

I would rather spend time writing 50x unique pieces of content than try to get good links for EACH site.

Just my thoughts anyway.

EDIT: This way is also MUCH easier to track in analytics, and helps you consolidate all of your tracking, so for efficiency, and for flexibility I say this route wins in the long run

Actually, I just took a look at your code, and I think it is something much simpler.

You somehow deleted the opening "{" after the function call.

Your function declaration code looks like this:

function record_login_status(slot, network, status)

if (status)

it should look like this:

function record_login_status(slot, network, status)** {**

if (status)

The key is that bracket telling JS to start the function.

I would get those re-written to dashes for a few different reasons:

1. Dashes are known as the best way to separate terms in URLS
2. IMO dashes are easier to read by the user, and easier to remember thus more user friendly (just my opinion though no data behind this)
3. Plus signs are often used in URL encoding or in query strings, both of which are not great for users, and both of which have been thought of in the past to look somewhat "off putting" to search engines compared to dashes.

So while it might be a pain I would say go to dashes.

Yes this hurts SEO. Mostly in that search engines rank pages based on the URL as a the URL is the only unique identifier they have for a given page.

This means link popularity is split amongst the URLs and the same page is competing with its self to rank so Google usually picks one and ignores the others, and then you lose all of the link juice for links to the others.

So with that said there are multiple ways to fix this. The most useful one is to setup 301 redirects for every option and redirect the user to the one you want to use. This way even if an outside source links to one of the variations google will go through that link, hit the redirect, and see the final URL and use that for ranking. Going the 301 route also keeps your stats programs much cleaner as you won't see stats for various versions of the pages.

The hard part with 301s is catching all variations of a URL.

With that said you might have a 301 in place, but then have parameters passed to the URL often. This is where the rel=canonical tag comes in handy.

rel=canonical is a tag you can place in a page that tells anyone who cares (search bots mostly) that if you see this page at a URL other than the canonical URL you need to treat it as the same page as the canonical URL (that is a simplification, but works for the most part).

So, get 301's in place, and then in your template for each page get a rel=canonical tag setup with the base URL so you are taken care of on both fronts...

This can be rough on huge sites, but there is usually a programmatic way to do this to catch a good portion of your pages.

GA will provide a large portion of what you need to report on, but has limitations if your site is gathering large amounts of data.

GA is generally easier to install, but gets more complicated if you are setting up custom variables, events, tracking across 3rd party services, and tracking e-commerce (these are still relatively easy though).

GA doesn't like you to identify individual user actions for the purpose of targeting marketing efforts specifically to that individual.

GA Premium runs around $150,000 per year. I say "around" as I have heard some certified firms can provide discounts.

Omniture is more complicated to install than GA, but when you do that setup you will be able to track individual user actions, and then use that information to market directly to that user via email, highly focused content, etc... also a really nice part of Omniture, to me, is the integration with their Test & Target system.

Omniture has a system that will let you pull in data from 3rd party API's like salesforce and email systems. So it can associate information your sales person gathers, and intermingle it with your web data. This is really powerful for pinning down individual user actions, and obviously good for getting a better feel for your conversion funnel.

Omniture will let you create new goals/segments and apply those retro-actively to your data if possible, where GA will only let those apply moving forward.

Depending on the number of server calls you have, and the tools you use, Omniture will be cheaper than GA premium.

Hope that helps

We use a rewrite rule to do this (301) because we want to keep our analytics easier to manage.

So for example if I have blog.example.com/,  www.example.com/, and example.com/ all tracked under the same analytics setup, and I am not taking the hostname into account then all of my "/" pageviews are pooled together and I don't know if they are blog or www pageviews.

So once I tell analytics to add the hostname to pageviews they come across as blog.example.com/ and www.example.com/, but now I will see www.example.com/ and example.com/ as two different pages in my content reports.

So then I need to have the 301 so my data is consolidated correctly.

This is why I suggest using 301s where you can. This can get tricky if you have a ton of folders and index pages for those folders, but you should at least be doing this for your home page as it will make your reporting life MUCH easier in the long run.

Especially if you aren't tracking across subdomains now, but will want to in the future. If you set it up this way now it will save you some headaches.

Hope that helps!

Do you run a log file analyzer like AW Stats? If not you should be able to set it up and have it build stats for you as long as you have your log files laying around.

The reason I ask is that AW Stats will show you what files on your site are throwing 404 errors specifically. It might be that it isn't a page, but a file that is referenced by multiple pages in your site that no longer exists. This would throw a 404 response, and depending on how your system handles 404's the google bot might be getting redirected to a 404 page when trying to access that file.

It's not highly likely, but I would check into that.

If you are concerned about the 404's causing problems for your rankings you shouldn't worry about it in most cases. Check out the article here for more details: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/05/do-404s-hurt-my-site.html

If it is just annoying you I would dig into the log files and see exactly when the 404 is being thrown, and what the file is that is doing it.

Good clarification on the privacy options.

As for the segmenting I should clarify what I have seen and heard.

GA will let you apply segments retroactively as you are basically telling GA to filter your existing data by a specific set of information.

However, in GA, goals are tracked as goal data, and GA only gathers data for that "goal" while it is turned on in the settings. Any goals achieved by users previous to turning on the goal in GA will not show up in your goal reports retroactively.

It should be noted though that this isn't much of an issue if you remember to setup your goals correctly when you start. This is more of an issue if someone comes to you and notes they want to start seeing X show up in the goal reports. If the goal they describe has been around a while they will only get to see it there moving forward, and not historically. You could mine some of the GA data to get a similar historical record that the goal report would show if it did apply retro-actively. The pageviews, or events would be there, but you would be building a special report just for that purpose, and it may not accurately line up with the way the goal reports track.

I believe Omniture let's you mark something as a goal, and allows it to appear retroactively, but I will double check when I am out at the adobe summit later this week to be sure I am not misinformed :).

VertialNerve is absolutely right about the price.

Basically Omniture is going to let you get more granular in your user profile data, and will let you combine data from other applications, but the more you pull the more it is going to cost.

As I mentioned before GA will get you 95%-99% of what you need.

I see Omniture as the proper tool to use when the expense is justified by the gains you will get by increasing your conversion optimization efforts on an individual user level, especially when combined with Test & Target.

In the end though that expense needs to line up with increases in revenue :).

It looks like those sites update the alexa rankings of the sites they list daily. This means that where a site shows up on those lists will change based on when the site did their scrape, and when alexa updated their information.

The information you see in open site explorer is then based on when OSE did their last crawl of the list sites.

I think open site explorer releases a new index monthly (I could be wrong on that) so it would make sense that it doesn't keep up with a site changing its page content daily.

As for link juice, I wouldn't give those sites much weight in terms of prioritizing link targets for your site.

They seem to exist mostly to serve ads which pretty much flies in the face of what google's leaked document about rating guidelines notes:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/16-insights-into-googles-rating-guidelines

I agree with what is noted above, and would only add that you need to be sure that the old domains get rewritten to the new domain, and that you are sending a 301 redirect when this happens.

If you don't set the 301 redirect any pages on the old domains that ranked will not rank on the new domain as they will lose their link and historical google index information, and have to get new links and fight their way back up.

GA will keep tracking the data for your account as long as you use the same code. It is really keeping track of the URI for the most part (the part after the domain name) so sticking with the same code shouldn't cause you any trouble.

With that said you can go through the write up here as they show you how to change how things are labeled in analytics.

Also double check it all works regardless of what we say and check your filters to be sure you aren't doing any filtering based on domain names.

Most responses I have seen for similiar questions is to redirect the country based TLDs to folders based on the country name, but that is usually if you have translations available.

If the content is exactly the same and not translated I would probably just redirect to the .com domain. This TLD gets the most respect, and most users know it regardless of country. Also if you use 301's it will help consolidate your link popularity under the one domain name for people who don't actually check your link and just link to you with example.de instead of example.com.

This way once you do put up translations (Which you should be doing if you get lots of international users) then you can switch the redirect to the appropriate folder at that point and still have your links consolidated.

Just my 2 cents

Keeping it topical is usually best if, as Eppie noted, it is a site you genuinely care about.

Since you have a site I am going to assume you spent some time before building the site thinking about who your audience is.

The litmus test you should use is this.

If you had a link on the site you are looking at, and your audience came across the link would they think it was out of place? Or would the context of the link be a natural fit with the overall theme of your site?

If it is a natural fit, then go for it. If it isn't then it is probably going to be viewed as spammy.

If it is an HTML 5 page that should be just fine as it is the HTML 5 doctype tag.

Check out the info here: http://www.w3schools.com/html5/tag_doctype.asp

It might cause trouble with really old browsers, but if they have that going I would hope they have already thought about the reasons for and against using it

EDIT: even better link: http://www.w3.org/TR/html5-diff/#doctype

This is probably occuring because you are calling the custom variable function after the main track pageview function. Without another track pageview or event tracking call you aren't ever really passing the data back to google.

The talk about this in the setup guide for using customer variables in the GA help documentation: http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/tracking/gaTrackingCustomVariables.html#setup

Scroll all the way down to the bottom and you will see this:

Call the _setCustomVar() function when it can be set prior to a pageview or event GIF request.

In certain cases this might not be possible, and you will need to set another _trackPageview() request after setting a custom variable. This is typically only necessary in those situations where the user triggers a session- or visit-level custom var, where it is not possible to bundle that method with a pageview, event, or ecommerce tracking call.

I will put this into the original posts comments as well so he can update his method, or tell me I am wrong

Do you mean they are marked as duplicate content by SEOMoz, or they seem to be getting treated as the same page by google? I assume you mean the first?

If it is SEOMoz, then I am thinking that there may not be enough content on there to let the bot know that it is different. None of the pages linked above have a large amount of content, and so a bot may think they are too similar to be considered completely different pages.

At least that may be likely based on the content to code ratio...

That is just a guess though, so take it with a grain of salt.

Here is what I posted last time this came up:

I would get those re-written to dashes for a few different reasons:

1. Dashes are known as the best way to separate terms in URLS
2. IMO dashes are easier to read by the user, and easier to remember thus more user friendly (just my opinion though no data behind this)
3. Plus signs are often used in URL encoding or in query strings, both of which are not great for users, and both of which have been thought of in the past to look somewhat "off putting" to search engines compared to dashes.

So while it might be a pain I would say go to dashes.

Also here is link someone posted last time about an article Rands wrote in 2006:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/11-bes...

If it were me, I would serve up the 200, but any time a "no-content" page was served up under a different URL I would use a canonical tag to point Google to a standard /no-content page.

This is an easy way to tell google "hey these are all really the same page, and serve the same purpose as /no-content. Please treat them as one page in your index, and do not count them as spammy variants."

Good catch. I meant to mention that

When you go with GA premium you no longer have the sampling of data.

From reading that article it looks like they are doing this for their webmaster tools, but don't mention if they are combining subdomain links and primary domain links into their SERP calculations as if they were the same site.

Knowing if it affected SERP calculations is more important. Have you seen any articles on that (going to search shortly for that ;))

That would be more interesting to me as our site currently has at least 6 subdomains for publicly accessible sites, and while I would love to move them all under sub folders it requires a decent bit of effort on our side. If Google just counted them all under the same link profile for rankings then it would save time and money, and give Google a better view of our web presence as a whole. This would be better for the end user as the end user would be able to get to our blogs, forums, portal, and API knowledgebase easier from search results when just searching for our company name. So I can see it being useful for Google since it is useful for users.

For that article (webmaster tool purposes) I think it makes sense as it helps simplify reporting for the "www" subdomain. It makes it easier to aggregate your data, and see it how Google really sees it (especially if you have a rewrite from www.example.com to just example.com or vice versa). So it sounds good to me

So let's say I am working for bloggingplatform.com, and people can create free sites through my tools and those sites show up as myblog.bloggingplatform.com. However that site can also be accessed from myblog.com.

Is there a way, separate from editing the myblog.com site code or files, for me to tell google to stop indexing myblog.bloggingplatform.com while still letting them index myblog.com without inserting any code into the page load?

This is a simplification of a problem I am running across.

Basically, Google is associating subdomains to my domain that it shouldn't even index, and it is adversely affecting my main domain. Other than contacting the offending sub-domain holders (which we do), I am looking for a way to stop Google from indexing those domains at all (they are used for technical purposes, and not for users to find the sites).

Thoughts?

When you have a higher mozrank, but are getting beat out it always seems to me to come down to anchor text distribution and in your case it might also be location based URLs.

For the location point, if you are doing a search on google.co.uk, I have to think Google is going to give more weight to the URL that is using "keyword.co.uk" than "keyword.com". This is just based on how I have seen their rankings come back for other region specific google sites.

As for the anchor text let me give you an example.

I have people beating out my site for terms like "Dedicated Server Hosting". They have 524 linking root domains, and I have 2,500+.

Unfortunately 99% of my link text is my brand name, and not the keyword I would want to rank for. 80% of their terms ARE keyword specific, and this is what gives them the boost for that term.

So this may be a case where your keyword diversity is hurting you when compared to the other site.

If you take a look at the profile they have, and dig into the sites the first thing I would do is check to see if the links are obviously paid links or article spam links. If so then you should go report them :).

Other than that it looks like you might have your work cut out for you.

Looks like a case of lots of on page content with an exact matching domain for the country based google search. Just another example of how exact matching domains with matching content are BIG factors in ranking.

It would be interesting to follow it over time to see if it did drop off over time. But if you look at it from Google's perspective it makes sense:

1. Search is made on google.hu - The site is using a .hu domain
2. The Search is on "Viagra" - The domain is "viagra.info.hu" so this checks out
3. The content on the page is formatted to be read well by a search engine, from title tag to header tags to links, and it uses the search term
4. The page is simple so it tends to load fast

From that standpoint if I am Google I am putting some trust in those factors over just links. And the fact that it is a localized site for a localized search probably helps it out a TON as they would want to show a .hu site over a more general viagra site, especially if it is using the correct language.

Makes me wonder how many people should be buying local exact match domains, putting up some relevant content landing pages, and then have a call to action pointing back to their normal site to drive leads.

I don't have a lot of experience with this, but here is my 2 cents for what it is worth.

Obviously if you are running a multi-lingual site you would want to use the correct characters for the corresponding language on that version of the site.

If you are however running an english site, and writing an article on why it is important to learn to say "Donde esta el baño" then I suggest doing some quick research.

Going to google I can see that the suggested searches it shows as I type in the query don't use the "ñ" character. If you look at the results for the search without the "ñ" character the first set of results do  have that character in them. This suggests to me that Google will recognize either as the same thing for this specific word.

I recommend doing research like this for your specific situation as you might have a conflicting word (e.g. the word changes meaning depending on the use of the character). In which case hopefully the engine can pick up on the context of its use.

Also try multiple engines and match up your strategy to what engines your market tends to use.

Sorry I couldn't be more specific as I haven't had this problem.

This is how I would go about testing, and planning for a solution though