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.

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 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.

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/

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.

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.

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.

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

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...

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.