It's hard to say without knowing exactly what's been changed on the site/inbound links, but I wouldn't be surprised if it had something to do with the backlinks... this graph does not look normal and it appears a lot of backlinks have disappeared in July - https://ahrefs.com/site-explorer/overview/subdomains/?target=www.weddingphotojournalist.co.uk

Edit - make sure to select the "One Year" tab for the graph

Here are some options for closing the loop between web leads and closed sales -

1. Capture visitor data using the GA cookie and pass it along with each form submission. This is against GA's TOS so do it at your own risk but here is a blog post telling you how to do it - http://cutroni.com/blog/2009/03/18/updated-integrating-google-analytics-with-a-crm/. (The author of this blog post actually works for Google Analytics so it's kinda funny he tells you how to break their TOS...)

2. Use a contact form that automatically tracks conversions for leads, such as Convertable - (full disclosure - I'm a co-founder of Convertable but it solves the issue you are having). You can also try other similar paid services like HubSpot, Salesforce, BestContactForm.com, etc.

I highly recommend checking out Long Tail Pro. It uses the GAKP but its interface is much easier to use rather than using Google directly. Also, you can plug in a couple of keywords and generate thousands of long tail keyword phrases and filter by search volume, organic competition, keyword difficulty (uses the Moz API), etc.  While the data is still from Google and the keyword data may not be 100% accurate, I think it will get you a lot closer to what you are trying to accomplish than you would using any of these other tools.

I'm a big fan of testing keywords in AdWords before choosing the ones you want to use for SEO. You can set up the AdWords campaign today and get actual data on the number of impressions (number of times the keyword is searched), CTR and conversions generated by each keyword in only a few hours. I'm not sure how familiar you are with AdWords but it is absolutely critical that the campaigns be set up correctly from the get-go, otherwise you will get inaccurate data and may drain your budget quite quickly.

Since your goal is to test the keywords for SEO, make sure you are only using [Exact Match] keywords. And it is probably wise to uncheck the option to "Include plurals, misspellings, and other close variants."

Also, make sure you are not opted into the Display Network but rather just the Search Network (ideally just Google, not the search partners as well).

Finally, I'd suggest using a tool called LongTailPro to instantly come up with thousands of long tail keywords that you might not have considered yet. You can sort/filter by CPC, advertiser competition, organic competition, keyword competitiveness, search volume, etc. It gets the keyword data from Google and also uses the Moz API to check organic competition. It's definitely my favorite keyword research tool and one that I don't ever really see talked about on Moz.

Also, have you tried "Fetch and Render" as Googlebot in GWT? Is the rendered page in GWT the correct Converse page or is it still the wrong URL?

The Google cache date is June 17th so something is obviously causing Googlebot to associate the Converse page with that particular URL. When did you do the "pop in" for the Converse page? So when users went to http://shop.nordstrom.com/c/converse, they were displayed some kind of pop up banner ad?

Any chance you can share the URL here or via PM? Also, for the fake page showing up in GWT as the top priority, did you click on the link to see more details? Such as where it is being linked from? That might provide some insights as to why Googlebot is still trying to access that page.

I just wanted to chime in that Convertable provides multi-touch attribution modeling. When a user submits a lead through the contact form, you will be able to see how many visits the user made to the site, date and time, the source of every visit, every page they viewed on each visit, how much time they spent on the site for each visit, and so on. This information allows you to determine which traffic sources, ads, keywords, etc. should actually be credited with the sale at the end of the sales pipeline.

Yeah, it's definitely still in place.

But I don't really understand why, especially since Google loves to track everything everyone is doing but doesn't want to allow anyone else do it. Also, I'm not sure how much they enforce it, especially because Google Analytics' own Justin Cutroni has written about how to capture personally identifiable information in GA many times in the past -http://cutroni.com/blog/2009/03/18/updated-integrating-google-analytics-with-a-crm/. (Although he includes a disclaimer about the privacy policy, he still writes the post...)

Anyways, Keri is right that the policy is still in place so if you rely heavily on Google Analytics for your site, it's probably best not to blatantly violate their TOS since we all know Google can and will bring the hammer down anytime they feel like it.

I'm actually a co-founder of Convertable. We created Convertable to do exactly what Ricky is looking to do because we ran into the same problem not being able to use Google Analytics or AdWords conversion tracking to identify the source of any individual lead. And to add onto Guillermo's comment, yes, you can definitely track which specific AdWords campaign, ads, keywords, landing pages, etc. generated each lead by using our Campaign Tracker tool.

Please let me know if anyone has any more questions or suggestions for things to add to Convertable since we are always looking to improve the service for our users!

• Patrick

It's definitely a good idea to 301 redirect index.html to your root to consolidate link juice. I am assuming you have an .htaccess file so the following lines should work -

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /

redirect html pages to the root domain

RewriteRule ^index.html$ / [NC,R,L]

If you want to redirect all index.html(s) to their roots, then try this code -

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^index.html$ / [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^(.*)/index.html$ /$1/ [R=301,L]

And yes, Google will treat them as 301 redirects so your juice will be transferred and consolidated.

You can use the Google AdWords Traffic Estimator to get a rough idea of a recommended budget and estimated CPC - https://adwords.google.com/o/TrafficEstimator

I did a search in Google to see the pages from your site that are indexed, and I discovered there are several pages with pharmaceutical drugs on them, which likely means your site was compromised.

For example, site:www.pokeronamac.com returns this URL - www.pokeronamac.com/somas/ which redirects to some online pharmacy.

So basically your site has been hijacked and pages are being redirected to an online pharmacy, so that explains the drop in traffic.

I'm not exactly sure how the hackers were able to gain access to your site, but it's relatively common with WordPress sites. Check out http://codex.wordpress.org/FAQ_My_site_was_hacked for some answers.

If you are using an Apache server, you should be able to redirect the index.php file to the root by editing the .htaccess file with the following lines -

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^./index.php RewriteRule ^(.)index.php$ http://www.mydomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

If you are using WordPress, there are several plugins available which will allow you to configure this automatically so you don't have to mess with the .htaccess file manually.

I would suggest installing WordPress SEO by Yoast. It allows you to choose which pages you want to index. I usually index Categories and block Tags, but you can try one or the other.

(not set) keywords are usually visits from a Google AdWords campaign where the Google AdWords account is not correctly linked to the Google Analytics account. http://support.google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2820717 and http://support.google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1714454

(not provided) keywords are organic searches from Google but are being hidden from your website since Google is encrypting searches from users who are logged into Google or otherwise using the secure version of Google.

The good news is that you should be able to fix the (not set) issue but unfortunately you won't be able to do much regarding the (not provided) keywords.

EDIT - (not set) could also mean visits from all other traffic sources, such as Direct or Referral sites, which inherently are not coming from keyword searches and that is why (not set) is showing up in Google Analytics if you try to look up the keyword used by either of those mediums.

Here are a few quick words of advice for starting a brand new AdWords campaign -

1. Select only "Search Network" and don't bother with the "Display Network" for the time being.

2. Only use Exact Match keywords, meaning your ad will only show up if the exact phrase you are bidding on is searched by the user. You can designate Exact Match keywords by putting [brackets] around the keyword.

3. Start out with a small budget, like 5-10 bucks a day and keep a close eye on the performance. Gradually increase the budget once you get an idea for which keywords are performing well.

Here are some of my favorite PPC resources -

Google AdWords Help Center - http://support.google.com/adwords/?hl=en

Inside AdWords blog - http://adwords.blogspot.com/

PPC Hero - http://www.ppchero.com

I'd suggest using absolute (full) URLs whenever possible just to ensure you don't accidentally miss any relative URLs if you happen to move content/pages around. Yoast actually has a great blog post about why it makes sense to use full URLs whenever possible - http://yoast.com/relative-urls-issues/

I get this question a lot from my clients. If the domains are brand new and they've never resolved to a site before, then there won't be any kind of impact for SEO, positive or negative. Just make sure the domain names 301 redirect to the primary URL instead of pointing them/setting them up as aliases.

The only time there could be a positive impact is if a domain name used to resolve to a website and that site ranked in the search engines and links were pointed to it. Then you could 301 redirect those domain names to a new URL to transfer at least some of the link juice.