I'm willing to bet that on some page of your site, there is a link pointing to www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/shure-se-earphones which is missing the "http://" at the beginning. So if Bing or a user tried to click on that link, they would be directed to /StoreFront/category/www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/shure-se-earphones instead of the correct link.

I would make sure to use the rel="canonical" tag to designate which URL Google should consider to be the primary URL, regardless of any parameters appended to it. Here is some additional information -

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139394?hl=en

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2013/04/5-common-mistakes-with-relcanonical.html

I would also recommend not using robots.txt in this case.

I'm a big fan of WiredTree. I'm not sure if they offer shared hosting but their dedicated/virtual hosting plans are very reasonably priced and we've never had any issues with slowness/downtime. And their technical support is top notch, often responding with answers to every question literally within minutes.

I'd also suggest checking out http://www.webhostingtalk.com/ for reviews on other hosting providers.

Honestly, my first suggestion would be to follow Jen's advice in creating another profile within the same Google Analytics account to get access to 20 more goals. You could create a profile for each specific section of the site and/or specific kinds of conversions you are tracking.

Another option would be to use Event Tracking rather than using goals in this scenario. Check out https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/gajs/eventTrackerGuide for more info.

Based on the information you provided, yes, I would recommend a 301 redirect to do what you are trying to accomplish versus a 302 or no redirect.

The rel="canonical" tag needs to have the URL that you wish to be the primary designated URL. This tells the search engines only to index this version of the URL and no other versions, and it also tells the search engines that links to other versions of the URL need to be counted as pointing to the canonical version.

So if your page is www.mysite.com/boats.php and you use www.mysite.com/boats.php?utm_medium=adwords, etc. then the canonical tag should be set to www.mysite.com/boats.php so the search engines don't bother messing with the URLs with the parameters in them.

I'd suggest spreading out the proposals, especially if all of the bloggers are within the same niche. It will be obvious to blog readers interested in the niche that the reviews are paid for if every blog is essentially promoting the same product/category of products within the same time period. I would also suggest varying the products if possible (although I don't know anything about the products you are offering) just so 150 blogs aren't reviewing the exact same product, which again might turn off blog readers and could even raise some flags with the search engines as being "sponsored posts" (especially if they all show up at once).

That being said, if you are looking to generate some publicity for a new product launch, it might be a better idea to do some blogger outreach combined with press releases and articles/interviews with major news outlets just so it comes off as more "legitimate" buzz instead of simply getting a bunch of bloggers to review the same product at the same time.

Is your default page/site in Google Analytics set to "index.php"? If so, I would recommend changing it to http://freshstarttax.com instead of index.php.

Here's a blog post describing the exact same issue - http://blog.gadodia.net/google-analytics-appends-indexphp-to-urls/

I'm not sure why you would want to remove the sitemap.xml from the SERPs, but I'll answer your question anyways.

One option would be to remove the URL via Google Webmaster Tools.

Another option is to use the X-Robots-Tag directive in the HTTP header and set it to noindex. Here is some more info on how to set it up http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/07/robots-exclusion-protocol-now-with-even.html and http://sebastians-pamphlets.com/handling-googles-neat-x-robots-tag-sending-rep-header-tags-with-php/

I use several tools for rank tracking:

1. CuteRank - Simple and easy to use keyword rank checker and best of all, it's free. http://cuterank.net/

2. Market Samurai - Great software for keyword research and includes a keyword rank checker. http://www.marketsamurai.com/

3. SEMRush.com - I don't really use this site for keeping track of my keyword rankings over time, but it is invaluable for discovering new keyword opportunities since you can see all the keywords your site and your competitors' sites rank for. One way it helped me is that on one of my sites, I discovered that a random PDF was ranking #1 for a popular keyword but since I was only using Google Analytics to track my website visitors, I had no idea the PDF was getting any traffic. So I redirected the PDF to an actual page with the GA tracking code, website navigation and a contact form in order to convert some of those visitors in potential customers.

Have you tried using ahrefs.com? It seems to update its index on a daily or almost daily basis, which is much faster than OSE and GWT.

I'm willing to bet that the reason you are seeing a 98% drop in traffic from simply changing a theme is that the Google Analytics tracking code was not properly installed on the new theme.  I know you already mentioned that you checked with your programmer and didn't find any problems with the tracking code itself, but I can see that the GA account numbers are two different accounts. I checked the source code of a page using the current theme as well as a cached version from the old theme and the Google Analytics tracking account numbers are different.

This is the page in question - http://www.incredibleinfant.com/safety/pacifier-use/

**Current theme -  ** _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-28262936-1']);

**Cached theme - ** _gaq.push(['_setAccount', 'UA-32310484-1']);  (Google cache from April 5th, 2013)

So if you are looking at the Google Analytics data for the 323 account, then that's why you are seeing a 98% drop in traffic once the new theme was installed. The actual data should be captured in the 282 profile, which you hopefully have access to.

And it's not surprising that you've noticed some rankings drop since that often happens when doing a site overhaul if the site architecture, internal linking structure, on-site SEO are not kept exactly the same. This decrease in rankings is likely only temporary as the search engines will recrawl and reindex the new versions of the pages.

Hope that helps!

Hi Adam,

I am a big fan of Long Tail Pro for keyword competition research. It allows you to add as many of your own keyword phrases and check the competitiveness, but I find it more useful by putting in 5-10 keyword phrases and then it will use the Google AdWords Keyword Tool to come up with literally thousands of related phrases to analyze by competition and search volume. Click on an individual keyword phrase and you will get a more detailed competitive analysis of the top 10 results in Google. I'm pretty sure there is a free trial but I found it to be one of the most useful SEO tools I have come across in years so it is money well spent.

Here is their site - http://www.longtailpro.com/long-tail-pro-software/

This can be done within .htaccess. The code below should work -

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

The link juice will be transferred since it is a 301 redirect. And you can set your preferred domain within GWT but ideally you still want to use 301 redirects as well.

What kind of business does your client do (ecommerce, lead generation, user signups, etc.)? And what are you counting as conversions (ecommerce sales, contact form submissions, phone calls, newsletter signups, user registration, etc)?

Here are the main KPIs I would normally report on for SEO -

Total organic visits - compare month-to-month, quarter-to-quarter, year-to-year. Ideally this number will increase each month as a result of your SEO efforts.

Total organic visits from unbranded keywords - usually these are the keywords you are targeting with the SEO campaign. By "unbranded" I mean any keyword excluding those which include the name of the company/product, personnel, address, phone number, etc.

Conversions generated by organic traffic - the specifics of this metric largely depend on whether its ecommerce, lead gen, signups, etc. If you can prove that organic traffic (especially from unbranded keywords) is generating an increase in qualified contact form submissions, then you're golden. Especially if the client is able to provide you with figures on how much they pay per lead from other marketing channels, like if they are used to paying $300 per lead from radio commercials and you are charging $1,000/month for SEO and generating 10 leads a month, then you are cutting their acquisition cost by 66%!

Revenue generated - this is more easily determined for ecommerce sites, but it can be done with lead generation sites. You can use Google Analytics conversion tracking to track the initial conversions but hopefully you and/or the client are keeping track of the leads throughout the sales funnel so you can determine which leads convert into revenue for the client and then you can attribute that number back to the original source. So if you find that your SEO efforts generate 10 leads a month and 3 of those leads result in sales, generating $5,000 in revenue, then you can confidently make the assumption that the ROI of the SEO campaign is 400%!

Hmm, I am seeing your original page rank #7 for "iphone 5s abonnement" here in the US on Google.com and then #3 when I try searching on Google.nl... are you still seeing them at #33?

And, do the include pages have any original content or are they exact duplicates? Rather than redirecting them, I might suggest putting original content on them in order to rank for each individual product.

I'm going to answer your second question first. I am a HUGE fan of www.longtailpro.com to come up with keyword ideas. You simply enter in 4 or 5 base keywords and it automatically generates thousands of other relevant keywords using the Google AdWords keyword tool. The best thing about LTP is that it also determines organic search volume and competitiveness as well as the SEOmoz API to determine keyword difficulty so you can uncover keywords with decent search volume and low competition to instantly rank well and start getting traffic from. I've praised LTP many times before in this forum but I feel like it still hasn't really caught on in the mainstream SEO community, probably because I think the webpage looks kinda spammy. But I promise it's legit so it's certainly worth checking out.

I also want to recommend checking out http://www.hittail.com/ which analyzes your current organic traffic and uncovers long tail keywords that you could rank higher for if you create more content to target a particular keyword.

Here are some content strategy resources I have found useful

http://overit.com/blog/content-strategy

http://www.slideshare.net/randfish/the-content-marketing-manifesto (the above article also links to this)

http://www.problogger.net/archives/2010/07/31/blog-content-strategy-101/

http://thecouponproject.com/2011/02/blogging-series-five-ideas-for-hooking-your-readers.html

It looks like the crawler is being caught in an endless loop, most likely a result of using relative URLs somewhere on your site. Yes, this is a problem for the site as a whole so I highly recommend implementing absolute URLs throughout the entire site.

Edit - I just looked at your site and this is exactly what it is. The links in your navigation are relative, such as "<a <="" span="">href="</a>../development/default.aspx"" so just change it to absolute URLs such as http://www.yoursite.com/development/default.aspx and it should fix the problem.

Yup, IFTTT is the way to go. I use it for several Twitter accounts.

(Also, I had written a more detailed reply but I got an error message from "incapsula" and then I lost my response, ugh. So maybe Moz should look into this...)

moz.com -

Access Denied

Error code 15

This request was blocked by the security rules

For a brand new site, I would start out with targeting the less competitive keywords as your top priority so you will hopefully see some progress rather quickly. If you start out focusing on the highly competitive keywords, you might get discouraged since it is awfully hard to rank for competitive keywords with a brand new site. I would suggest gradually moving onto the harder and harder keywords as your site grows and establishes itself as an authority down the road. If it is not feasible to target some of your phrases with individual product pages, then I highly recommend adding a blog to the site to target these keywords. Good luck!

Try this -

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI}!^/subfolder-1/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI}!^/subfolder-2/
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

I'm a big fan of putting some kind of contact form or at least a call-to-action on every single page of your site, so great idea. Anyways, that's not your question, so if you need to switch to index.php in order for your form to work, then go ahead and do so. But make sure you 301 redirect index.html to index.php since search engines will consider them to be two different pages. I am assuming your site is hosted on a Linux server with access to .htaccess so you should be able to accomplish this by adding the following lines to the .htaccess -

RewriteEngine on RewriteRule index\.html index.php [NC,R]

I'm assuming you are referring to using the pipe symbol in Title tags, correct? If that's the case, Google does not care about pipes or dashes in the Title tag. Here is a video from Matt Cutts explaining this - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2_7PTio3Qc

You may run into problems if you are using pipes in your URLs, so in that case, you should use hyphens instead. - http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/023052.html

Definitely Long Tail Pro. It uses the GAKT to pull in keyword data but it is much more powerful than just using the GAKT for organic keyword research. You can enter in 4 or 5 base keywords and it will automatically generate thousands of related keywords, which you can then filter and sort by a number of metrics, including organic competition which uses the SEOmoz Keyword Difficulty API. It's by far my current favorite organic keyword research tool.

I am referring to Web users. If a user or search engine tried to view those directory listing pages, they will get a Forbidden message, which is what you want to happen. The content in those directories will still be accessible by the pages on the site since the files still exist in those directories, but the pages listing the files in those directories won't be accessible in the browser to users/search engines. In other words, turning off the Directory indexes will not affect any of the content on the site.

http://ahrefs.com will show you the links you have lost.

I've redirected tons of sites and sometimes there is a temporary decline in rankings/traffic as a result of the search engines having to crawl the old site, follow the 301s and replace the old rankings with the new pages. But usually the decline isn't too drastic and only lasts for a week or two, if that. It may be different with a site with thousands of pages though. How long has it been since you added the 301 redirects? If you'd like, feel free to PM me your URLs and I can take a look.

Simple answer, yes, most SEO tactics would work just fine in this case as long as the 301 redirect is set up correctly.

Actually, you are correct. Google's PageRank algorithm has always been all about links. Check it -

PageRank works by counting the number and quality of links to a page to determine a rough estimate of how important the website is. The underlying assumption is that more important websites are likely to receive more links from other websites.

More on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank.

This being said, Google's toolbar PR is not nearly as influential as a ranking factor as it has been in years past.

There's nothing wrong with your robots.txt file as far as I can see. It is likely that Google tried accessing the robots.txt file when your server was slow/down for a split second and that's why you are seeing the error. Are you sure that the site hasn't been crawled in 10 days? Have you checked your server log files to verify that? Regardless, once Googlebot does eventually come back, it should read the robots.txt file correctly and then you should be good to go.

When you used the old GAKT, did you specify Exact Match? If not, then that's what's happening here. The Keyword Planner only displays Exact Match by default, so the numbers are going to be much, much lower than Broad Match using the old GAKT.

It looks like it does not have a nofollow tag on the link, so that's good news. And the site looks pretty credible and that page is indexed in Google so I think it is a pretty solid link. Since I am not sure how much you are paying for the listing, I can't say whether or not it's worth the cost.

When were the products on GMA and when did you see the rankings drop? There have been several algorithm updates recently so it's possible that the drop in rankings is unrelated to the GMA appearance and it's simply a coincidence. A mention/link from GMA should definitely be helpful for SEO, and I have not heard of "temporary freezes" put on sites before due to a big increase in clicks. Also, the backlinks and internal links might not have shown up yet in GWT but they should eventually (also depending on when the products were on GMA).

Hi there,

I am doing a crawl on the site listed in your profile (www.abdserotec.com) using Screaming Frog SEO Spider using Googlebot as the User Agent, and I am seeing many more URLs than the 14,000 pages you have. The bulk majority of these excess pages are the Search Results pages (such as http://www.abdserotec.com/search.html?searchType=BASIC&searchTerm=STEM CELL FACTOR&cat=&Filter2Name=GO&Filter2Value=germ-cell development&filterCount=2&type=&filter1name=Spec&filter1value=STEM CELL FACTOR). While these URLs are not showing up in the Google Index when you try searching your site with the site: command, Google is still definitely accessing them and crawling them. As Tuzzell just suggested, I also highly recommend configuring the parameters within GWT.

Well, all they do is switch the names of the accounts. I'm not sure what Tourism Australia's username was before, but Twitter switched their username over to australia and that way Tourism Australia's followers and tweets transferred over automatically. And since Tourism Australia's username is now australia, which was previously your username, then that means your account had to be moved to a new username which in this case turns out to be Australia1_. Unfortunately I don't think there's much you can do about it at this point.

Can you share the URLs here? Or feel free to PM me the URLs and I can take a look.

Can you share your URL so we can take a look? Feel free to PM me if you want to keep it private.

I know that Amazon shows ads from AdWords since they are considered part of the Google AdWords Search Network (not the Display Network). I haven't used AdWords to advertise on Amazon since late 2011, but I just checked out a Amazon product page and checked out the Sponsored Links. The URLs are being sent through A9.com, but the landing page had the "gclid" parameter appended to the end of the URL which leads me to believe that these are AdWords ads.

I had a lot of success advertising on Amazon product pages by offering the product cheaper than Amazon did and including the price in the copy of the ad. For example, a ping pong table was on Amazon for $300 and so I created an ad for the exact same ping pong table and listed it for $279. Even though my site did not have the reputation/credibility of Amazon, shoppers were more than willing to click on the ad to visit a third party site for a better deal.

Anyways, that didn't really answer your question, so if you want your ads to show up on Amazon under the Sponsored Links, I suggest setting up an AdWords account and choose the Search Network.

Where are the 301s taking Googlebot on those IP addresses? And are they the same IP addresses every time? Have you narrowed those IP addresses down to any particular datacenter/country? It could be possible there is some configuration with your server that treats IP addresses differently depending on the country... it could also be that the IP addresses getting the 301s are known blacklisted spam IP addresses but are masking themselves as Googlebot so your server's blacklist software is keeping them out. It's really hard to say without looking into the data myself but I'm definitely interested in what you find out.

Google Analytics does offer conversion tracking for all sources of traffic. You can set up Goals in GA and use a virtual pageview to load anytime the "Success" message is displayed to the user via AJAX. This might help - http://support.google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1032720

As for using Convertable on your site, it should work on http://www.nhfinehomes.com/Real_Estate/Canterbury/residential/4166838. Convertable actually uses AJAX/JQuery to display the success message so there is no traditional Thank You page either. If you have any other questions or need help signing up, feel free to email me at patrick@convertable.com.

Interesting, I am now seeing what you are talking about...

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'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

Great call on both the canonical tags and breaking out of the frame. I imagine the site will be indexed properly within a week using these tactics.

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.