Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hello mozzers! So my company is about to launch a large scale content project with over 100 pieces of newly published content. I'm being asked what the date-stamp for each article should be. Two questions:
1- Does it hurt article's SEO juice to have a lot of content with the same "published on" date?
2- I have the ability to manually update each articles date stamp. Is there a recommended best practice? p.s. Google has not crawled any of these pages yet.

So I have a tactical question and I need mozzers. I'll use widgets as an example: 1- My company used to sell widgets exclusively and we built thousands of useful, branded unique pages that sell widgets. We have thousands of pages that are ranking for widgets.com/brand-widgets-for-sale. (These pages have been live for almost 2 years) 2- We've shifted our focus to now renting widgets. We have about 100 pages focused on renting the same branded widgets. These pages have unique content and photos and can be found at widgets.com/brand-widgets-for-rent. (These pages have been live for about 2-3 months) The problem is that when someone searches just for the brand name, the "for sale" pages dramatically outrank the "for rent" pages. Instead, I want them to find the "for rent" page. I don't want to redirect traffic from the "for sale" pages because someone might still be interested in buying (although as a company, we are super focused on renting). Solutions? "nofollow" the "for sale" pages with the idea that Google will stop indexing "for sale" and start valuing "for rent" over it? Remove "for sale" from sitemap. Help!!

I don't want to track external links. I just want to know where they go when they leave. Is that possible? Can I do this with a cookie?

I work for a travel site and we have pages for properties in destinations and am trying to decide how best to organize the URLs basically we have our main domain, resort pages and we'll also have articles about each resort so the URL structure will actually get longer:
A. domain.com/main-keyword/state/city-region/resort-name
_    domain.com/family-condo-for-rent/orlando-florida/liki-tiki-village_ _   domain.com/main-keyword-in-state-city/resort-name-feature    _
_   domain.com/family-condo-for-rent/orlando-florida/liki-tiki-village/kid-friend-pool_ B. Another way to structure would be to remove the location and keyword folders and combine. Note that some of the resort names are long and spaces are being replaced dynamically with dashes. 
ex. domain.com/main-keyword-in-state-city/resort-name
_      domain.com/family-condo-for-rent-in-orlando-florida/liki-tiki-village_ _      domain.com/main-keyword-in-state-city/resort-name-feature_
_      domain.com/family-condo-for-rent-in-orlando-florida/liki-tiki-village-kid-friend-pool_ Question: is that too many folders or should i combine or break up? What would you do with this? Trying to avoid too many dashes.

My company is working on creating destination guides for families exploring where to go on their next vacation. We've been creating and promoting content on our blog for quite some time in preparation for the map-based discovery. The UX people in my company are pushing for design/functionality similar to:
http://sf.eater.com/maps/the-38-essential-san-francisco-restaurants-january-2015 From a user perspective, we all love this, but I'm the SEO guy and I'm having a hard time figuring out the best way to guide my team regarding getting readers to the actual blog article from the left content area. The way they want to do it is to have the content displayed overtop the map when someone clicks on a pin. Great, but there's no way for me to optimize the map for every article. After all, if we have an article about best places to snorkel on Maui, I want Google to direct people to the blog article specific to that search term because that page is the authority on that subject. Additionally, the map page itself will have no original content because it will be pulling all the blog content from other URLS, which will get no visitors if people read on the map. We also want people, when they find an article they like, to be able to copy a URL to share. If the article is housed on the map page, the URL will be ugly and long (not SEO friendly) based on parameters from the filters the visitor used to drill down to that article. So I don't think I can simply optimize the map filtered-URL. Can I? The others on my team do not want visitors to ping pong back and forth between map and article and would prefer people stay on the discovery map. We did have a thought that we'd give people an option to click a link to read the article off the map but I doubt people will do it which means that page will never been visited, thus crushing it's page rank. so questions: How can i pass link juice/SEO love from the map page to the actual blog article while keeping the user on the map? Does google pass that juice if you use Iframes? What about doing ajax calls? Anyone have experience doing this? Am I making a mountain out of a molehill? Should I trust that if I create good content, good UX and allow people to explore how they prefer, Google will give me the love? Help me Rand Fishkin, you're my only hope!

The way our site was built, engineers put the title tag blow the meta desc. and meta keywords. I asked to have it changed based on the best practice of putting the most important content first, but apparently doing this will cause a major ripple effect in the way the site was engineered. Will we lose out on full SEO benefit with this structure? Should I stand down? <title></p></title>

My company is in the process of updating how we track conversions in Adwords and Analytics. One prgrammer suggested importing Analytic goals into the Adwords account. I am extremely hesitant to do that because I know that Analytics and Adwords don't always play nicely together. Does anyone have any experience (positive or negative) around this. Pros and cons? Should I keep the tracking separate? Also, FYI, our flow does not employ the traditional "thank you page" conversion model. We have java scripts and onload events that fire when goals are triggered. I am not a programmer so I am a little out of the loop on how it all works. All I know is that I want conversions/goals to be attributed to the correct channel. Help me mozzers!

I am working on setting up goal tracking. Currently when we receive a new signup, the person gets sent to their dashboard homepage and this is not a valuable a goal tracking destination. My suggestion was to build a "Welcome" interstitial page to send a user to when they create an account. Our tech team suggested using a Virtual pageview instead as it is their thinking that a "Welcome" page adds little value. Is there any downside to using Virtual Pageviews with regards to goal tracking?
Are interstitial page more reliable? 
Can you still use funnel visualization with Virtual Pageviews?