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Thanks Dirk, this is the direction we were leaning.

Thanks for the suggestions Patrick.

The first question to answer is if the site itself is a blog... or if it's a website that also has a blog. If it's the latter and the blog lives at www.yoursite.com/blog/, then the structure should obviously always include the /blog/.

Responding to your 3 examples in order:

Quicksprout's structure is a little odd in that their blog lives at /blog/, but the individual posts do not. A bit strange from both a human usability and bot crawling hierarchy standpoint. Other than that, including the date is helpful in terms of telling the user/bots how current the post is and differentiating it from similarly named posts on the same blog. That said, it pushes the title/topic keywords further out in the URL.

Moz uses /blog/, which again makes the most sense, but they've foregone including the date. This, however, lets them get the topic/title keywords to appear earlier in the URL.

SEO Book, like Quicksprout, oddly strips out the /blog/ directory from the URL. Other than that, their strategy is the same as Moz.

The winner here, in our opinion, seems to be Moz. The /blog/ remains when you're on individual posts which makes sense to both humans and bots. They don't include the date, but historically that's not been critical.

We have a client whose WMT shows a ton of "Not found" crawl errors after a new site launched. The URLs are largely a bunch of files that they had previously uploaded on their old site which have external links pointing at them.

What is their best course of action, if they don't have files on the new site that correspond with these old files? Redirect to the home page? Leave them 404ing? Customize 404 message?

(Note: They're mostly generic, non-human friendly URLs that are difficult to identify like /gallery3.php/ppage/3, g/interior.php/pid/3/sid/24,  /uploads/1213196781.pdf)

Thanks for the tip StreamlineMetrics... Curious though, how are you able to get keyword data, etc. to pass through when Google strips it out. Do we not run the risk of violating some other Google policy?

Thanks for the replies - I think you nailed it JaneCopland! This was our gut, but figured it couldn't hurt to have a few other SEOs weigh in.

Thanks for the quick reply, but after Googling it sounds like they've actually built a feature to allow for what we need, it just works differently than I was describing - data is imported back to GA. https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/2998031?hl=en

And then there's also the Measurement Protocol - https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/protocol/v1/

Thanks for the quick reply, but after Googling it sounds like they've actually built a feature to allow for what we need, it just works differently than I was describing - data is imported back to GA. https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/2998031?hl=en

And then there's also the Measurement Protocol - https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/protocol/v1/

I have a client who tracks leads via URL destination goal completions in Google Analytics - when a visitor hits their "quote form" thank you page, a "goal" is completed and thus a lead is tracked in GA. After that, none of the sales process is passed through to GA - The client enters data from form submissions into their CRM software, without any way of knowing which leads came specifically from PPC, email marketing, social, organic, etc., making determining true ROI impossible.

We're wondering what the best way is to pass through the traffic source to our client, so they can attach it to the individual lead in their completely manual CRM. Mainly they care about CPC traffic.

Any ideas?

My client started a subdivision of their company, along with a new website. There was already an individual page about the new product/topic on the main site, but recognizing a growth area they wanted to devote an entire site to the product/topic. Can we/should we redirect that page on the old corporate/main site to the new domain, or just place a link or two?

Thoughts?

Thanks for the reply, but I actually have a couple of follow-up questions now:

It depends, some redirects do not pass on the referring domain which is what the analytics tool picks up to determine if it is a referral.

What do you mean by "some redirects"? I would be doing 301s most likely.

As for why I'd rather not use the URL building for tracking parameters - Because no one is going to type those lengthy URLs in. This short domain is going to be in direct mail marketing materials (like postcards)... So it makes sense to have "Visit shortdomain.com", but not http://www.shortdomain.com/?utm_source=Direct Mail&utm_medium=USPS&utm_campaign=Winter Promo

I'm just not certain that a simple 301 redirect on shortdomain.com to primarydomain.com would then show in GA what I explained in the original question.

Perhaps redirecting shortdomain.com to the longer http://www.shortdomain.com/?utm_source=Direct Mail&utm_medium=USPS&utm_campaign=Winter Promo is the solution?

We have a client that would like to do some direct mail marketing and the plan is to use a short/simple domain in the marketing materials, which redirects to the main site domain. By default this would show as a referral traffic source in Analytics, right? So any traffic that came through that redirect would be attributed to "shortdomain.com / referral"? Meaning I wouldn't need to do any sort of customized, advanced tracking set up to track conversions that I've already set up (ecomm and goals) and attribute them to this new source?

Just double checking that I'm not overlooking something.

Thanks!

I develop client websites within a subdomain of another website (with noindex, nofollow so that incomplete websites on the wrong domains aren't ever seen by web users). Then, when we launch a client's site on their own domain, we redirect all of the development URLS to the appropriate page on the new live site. (meaning at site launch, all pages on http://client-site.developersite.com would be set to 301 redirect to identical pages pages on http://www.client-site.com).

This system has always seemed to work fine, but today I discovered 94,700 pages indexed by Google on my root domain and found that these were mostly old URLs of sites in development that redirect to the actual client sites. Many are several years old. Any idea why Google would be indexing these pages?

Thanks in advance!

I have a client, a plumber, who bought another plumbing company (and that company's domain) at one point. This other company was very old and has a lot of name recognition so they created a dedicated page to this other company within their main website, and redirected the other company's old domain to that page.

This has worked fine, in that this page on the main site is now #1 when you search for the other old company's name. But for some reason the old domain comes up #2 (despite the fact that it's redirecting). Now, I could understand if the redirect had only been set up recently, but I'm reasonably sure this happened about a year ago. Could it be due to the fact that there are many sites out there still linking to that old domain?

Thanks in advance!

Cool, thanks for the quick reply Andrés. So it sounds like my assumption on that part was essentially right.

Any idea about the second part - H1s showing up in place of title tag on other engines?

Thanks again!

Hi,

I'm noticing two strange things in search results recently. Often I find that if I search for a client's company name, I see just the company name in SERPs where the title tag would normally be displayed. Examples:

'aci northwest'

'lanz heating'

As strange as that is, I'm tempted to assume this is just Google's way of "getting smarter" and showing more relevant results (though I'm not sure exactly where it's pulling from).

But it gets stranger. For the first example, 'aci northwest', when search that key phrase on Bing/Yahoo!, etc. I'm not only not seeing the title tag where it would normally be, but I'm seeing the H1 in it's place:

"When your projects demand more, demand ACI."

Any idea what's happening here?

Thanks in advance!