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I'm leaning toward quality over quantity. Looking at those individual pages, they don't seem to be offering much in the way of unique content.

I have to make this decision within the week. I guess I can't ask people to advise me when I have no data to give them.

Well, this has brought to my attention that somehow the CMS has neglected adding the analytics code to those pages, probably because they're in a sub folder, so this is a bigger shot in the dark than I thought.

We have a gallery here with our main categories of patches. https://www.stadriemblems.com/gallery/

If you click on one, say Fire Patches, you'll be taken to a page of just fire patches. https://www.stadriemblems.com/fire-patches/

But here's the kicker: If you notice of the fire patch page, there are also sub-categories to that. So if you click on say, Fire Rescue, you get taken one level deeper. https://www.stadriemblems.com/fire-patches/fire-rescue-patches/

I'm redoing this entire site (a project over five years overdue), and I'm wondering if it's really worth it to keep these three-level deep sub pages. I originally created them with long tail SEO in mind, making us be the only ones who come up when people search for very specific patches. But it's a big undertaking to redo all of them, and are they really adding any value?

Still the same for me. The expanded text ads are converting at half the rate of the regular.

I think it would be nice to get a consensus from more people.

The day expanded text ads came out last week, I immediately jumped on it and created them for all my campaigns. I still left some of the old ads running in each ad group so that I could compare.

Looking at the conversion data from the last week, the conversion rates are between 2-7x lower on the expanded text ads, and as a result, the cost per conversion is 2-5x higher as well. Basically, they're performing horribly. The click-through rate is mildly higher, but who cares if they're not converting?

I know it's only a week's worth of data, but it seems the difference is enough to be statistically significant. I'm wording what everyone else's experience has been.

Yeah, expanded text ads are out. I jumped on those the very same day.

Anyway, good to see I'm not the only one with the problem and that Wordstream probably jumped the gun.

Yesterday Wordstream announced that AdWords rolled out device-level bid adjustments for tablet for everyone, but when I go into my campaign settings, it's the way it's always been, with no ability to adjust for tablet. I'm wondering if anyone else is experiencing this, or is there perhaps some kind of setting I have to turn on?

http://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2016/07/26/device-level-bid-adjustments

I am so excited about this change, seeing as our cost-per-conversion on tablets is always twice what it is on desktop, and not having control over it was maddening.

"If there is one different word in each description, that is presumably enough to stop them being seen as duplicates?"

Yes, if there's only one character different, they won't be seen as duplicates, at least by machines/bots.

"Also, I was intrigued that you said "Google doesn't officially use meta descriptions" - is there some doubt over this? I thought they'd confirmed it themselves?"

It's just that Google doesn't reveal exactly what they use in their algorithm to determine ranking, so its up to us to figure it out as best we can with observation and experimentation. Sometimes they will confirm or deny using a specific factor, but it's still up to the individual to choose to take that at face value or not.

"I think the choice I have to make is, is it better to have 100% unique descriptions that are too short (keyword only, as at present), or much less unique ones that are 130+ characters. I guess the latter wins."

Probably the latter, but in the case of meta descriptions, I would make that decision based to what is best for the user/customer rather than what we'd speculate Google would want.

Having duplicate meta keywords will trigger red flags in the Moz tools and other site quality tools, but only because it's a potential user quality issue. Google doesn't officially use meta descriptions as a ranking factor, so as long as the meta descriptions are appropriate and as best as they can be for what's on the specific page, it doesn't matter how different they are from each other page-to-page. Just keep in mind that this is what shows up in the SERPS, so make them interesting enough to make a user want to click your page over the ones surrounding it.

I guess this is the most logical place to share this with you. I do SEO for many sites. I've recently been focusing on two in particular for the same client. We used Netfirms SEO services to get links--he insisted--which basically consists of writing articles in broken English and placing them all over blog networks with our desired anchor text.

On the other site, I simply refused to employ those services. This was the client's main site, and was way too important to mess around with. I built links myself, the legit way.

Long story short, for months I watched the shady, black hat site climb and climb in the SERPs, while the white hat one kept falling.

This morning, I checked my SEOmoz campaigns and my white hat site went from #8 to #2 and my black hat site went from page 2 to no longer being in the top 50.

Just another example of what's been happening with Google lately and how great it is. Interestingly, the black hat site never got a warning in GWT about buying links.

Now I just have to figure out a way to break the news to my boss and tell him I told him so without actually using those words.

Whether those companies actually deliver on that promise or not is moot. You'll have thousands of "fans" who couldn't care less about anything you post. And since Facebook apparently only shows your posts to a certain percentage of your followers, if you have a lot of fluff in there, you're decreasing the amount of real fans who will see your content. The best case scenario is that it will make you look bigger than you are and give you that "social proof" that may encourage more people to like your page. Worse case scenario is you get banned from Facebook. Seriously, I'd advise against it.

It's generally agreed that a best practice in this regard is to use target="_blank" any time you are linking out to a different website. You should keep your internal links within the same window or tab unless you are linking to a part of your site that's totally unrelated or if you really don't want the user to leave the page they're on.

Additionally, if you are not using target="_blank" make sure all of your pages have clear, easily-understandable navigation, especially when it comes to linking back to your main page.

The latest Whiteboard Friday should answer all of your questions.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-do-i-find-a-good-seo

I will leave you with one piece of advice. My number one rule for finding an SEO company is this: You find the good guys; the bad guys find you. In other words, do NOT respond to those solicitations from India. Go out and do some research.

Here's a really good post to check out as well: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-many-seo-consultants-actually-know-what-theyre-talking-about

It definitely depends on how you're doing it. Without seeing it, I can't say for sure, but usually this method only hides things from the user, not the search engines. I'd recommend running your page through a service that shows you what the spiders see.

Try: http://www.iwebtool.com/spider_view

If you see your text in the results, you're probably safe.

One of the sites I designed, customwovenlabels.com, uses this with javascript. If you go there and look at the copy on the homepage, you will see a link that says, "read more." Google sees all the text and doesn't distinguish the difference between what's initially seen vs. hidden.

So if you discover that your method isn't ideal, there are always other alternatives.

While the SEOmoz industry survey states that the majority of us are in-house, it seems that the individuals who work for agencies and the entrepreneurs are the most active in this community, especially as far as blog posts go. I was shocked to learn the real ratio.

I'm in-house, by the way.

I would strongly advise against this. I looked at your site, and those are all very important navigation links. It's rumored that Google only crawls the first 100 links on a page, so that's why SEOmoz returns that warning. It's not something you need to be overly worried about, especially if your site is user-friendly and logically laid out, and if your links are relevant, all of which seem to be the case on your site.

I used a very similar service that promised 25 edu backlinks for 25 dollars. It was a huge mistake, as all they did was place spam comments on dofollow edu blogs. We actually saw our ranking drop a couple of spaces because of this. I learned my lesson and will never do anything like this again. Hence, I do not recommend this. Any company that charges to get you links usually only acquires poor quality links.

That whole "If you build it, they will come" scenario only applies to well-established sites that have thousands of followers. You can create the best site in the world but what good does it do you if no one sees it? And how do you get found and well-established in the first place? Oh, right: SEO!

Could be. I don't see why they'd waste any effort trying to dominate a result they're irrelevant for and no one will click on, or if they do, will bounce.