Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I'm getting very interested in Amazon Web Services lately as an alternative to reseller hosting. Anyone have experience on their cloud with Wordpress sites?  Would be nice to be able to spin up sites to faster service if needed, but not sure if its more pricey and not ready for that adoption yet.

I am trying to install goal tracking for a client to measure leads from SEO, and I'm running into problems with the Google Analytics goal tracking not working.  The only thing that I can think of that is preventing goal tracking from working is that the URL confirming page request URI looks like "contact/#contact-form-4475" and perhaps the hashtag is causing problems.  I wanted to ask the community if any of you have run into basic conversion tracking problems like this, where you need to track form fills on a website via a confirmation URL/destination URL goal, and what you did to solve it?  I appreciate any input on how to get data on conversions either by fixing the goal in GA or using a different tracking tool.  Thanks!

I have seen several websites recently that have have far too many webpages indexed by Google, because for each blog post they publish, Google might index the following: www.mywebsite.com/blog/title-of-post www.mywebsite.com/blog/tag/tag1 www.mywebsite.com/blog/tag/tag2 www.mywebsite.com/blog/category/categoryA etc My question is: if you add a robots.txt file that tells Google NOT to index pages in the "tag" and "category" folder, does that mean that the previously indexed pages will eventually disappear from Google's index?  Or does it just mean that newly created pages won't get added to the index?  Or does it mean nothing at all?  thanks for any insight!

The site in question is www.homeanddesign.com where we are working on recovering from some big traffic loss. I finally have gotten the sites articles properly meta titled and descriptioned now I'm working on removing low lying content. The way there CMS is built, images have their own page (every one that's clickable).  So this leads to a lot of thin content that I think needs to be removed from the index.  Here is an example: http://www.homeanddesign.com/photodisplay.asp?id=3633 I'm considering the best way to remove it from the index but not disturb how users enjoy the site. What are my options?  Here is what I'm thinking: add Disallow: /photodisplay to the robots.txt file See if there is a way to make a lightbox instead of a whole new page for images.  But this still leaves me with 100s of pages with just an image on there with backlinks, etc. Add noindex tag to the photodisplay pages

I just got an email for one of my client websites from Google Webmaster Tools letting me know that the Google Bot could not access the website?  The notification indicated that there may be a robots.txt issue that prevented crawling, but that they would try something to crawl it again. In this situation, we had just created a new Webmaster Tools account for the client, and there were (are) two GWT accounts now for the website, one that is incorrectly set to http://clientwebsite.com and the other that is set to www.clientwebsite.com.  One of them reports zero errors, and the other reports an odd crawl error. Anyone encountered this type of thing before?

Is anyone here familiar with the concept of data clustering, and how it is significant to practicing SEO?  I've heard the term used a bit recently and would love to hear from anyone else who has run into it...Thanks! Will

I'm looking for reasons why Google Analytics goal completions would appear to be fewer than the actual known number of online sales for a company, and I'm wondering if disabled javascript is likely to be the primary cause of a discrepancy.  Thanks for any insight you have.

I have a client who runs an e-commerce website, and I noticed that 40% of his traffic and 25% of his sales are all attributable to Direct Traffic.  At first, I tried to solve this problem by tagging all of the previously untagged links in his e-newsletter, which I expect to be very helpful. However, then I looked at the landing pages for his direct traffic, and I see that it is almost entirely filled with thousands of unique URLs that begin with a question mark followed by the name of his e-newsletter or shopping cart vendor.  It would be the equivalent of having a url like the following: "www.willmarlow.com/?constantcontact=keya;sldkfjsdlfkjdf;sldkjf" If we have this amount of information in the link, shouldn't there be a way to add additional parameters to the URL to move this traffic out of the Direct column?  Has anyone encountered this before? Thanks.

I just discovered that my company's 'dev website' (which mirrors our actual website, but which is where we add content before we put new content to our actual website) is being indexed by Google.  My first thought is that I should add a rel=canonical tag to the actual website, so that Google knows that this duplicate content from the dev site is to be ignored.  Is that the right move?  Are there other things I should do? Thanks!

I recently renamed a small photography company, and so I transferred the content to the new website, put a 301-redirect on the old website URL, and turned off hosting for that website.  But when I search for certain terms that the old URL used to rank highly for (branded terms) the old URL still shows up.  The old URL is "www.willmarlowphotography.com" and when you type in "Will Marlow" it often appears in 8th and 9th place on a SERP.  So, I have two questions: First, since the URL no longer has a hosting account associated with it, shouldn't it just disappear from SERPs? Second, is there anything else I should have done to make the transition smoother to the new URL? Thanks for any insights you can share.

I was looking at the Search Engine Optimization reports for one of my clients in Google Analytics, and I saw that their two biggest landing pages are www.website.com and http://website.com.  Does this mean that Google is serving both the 'www' and 'non-www' versions of the website, and thus harming the website's overall ranking? Thanks for any input!

I started my website as a blog over at Posterous, but decided to turn it into a full scale business website with a self-hosted WordPress theme.  Shortly after transitioning from Posterous to WordPress, I noticed that Google was indexing not only my old blog posts, but the URLs of my blog posts based on the tags they have.  Is there any reason why this is a problem?  I'm sure it shouldn't qualify as duplicate content, but for some reason it just feels a bit sloppy to me to have all of these pages indexed...Is this a non-issue?  Should I just be more discriminating with my use of 'tags' if it bothers me? JiGLH.png

I decided to create a page on my website where I would list all of my favorite resources and 3rd party tools.  There are now 35 links in the main content section of the page, all with anchor text, pointing to  websites in my industry.  My question is this: what is the best practice here? Should I add nofollow tags to the links? Should I do something else to indicate that these links shouldn't be crawled? Frankly, I don't mind passing some link juice to these tools (in this case, and from this particular website), but I might make a different decision with a client's website.  Does anyone have any thoughts on this?  Here is the page I'm referring to, in case anyone wants to look:  http://willmarlow.com/resources-2/the-digital-marketing-toolbox/. Thanks!

When a newspaper article or magazine article writes a story about your company, some people like seem to immediately write blog posts about the press hit, and then in the blog post they link to the press hit.  Other businesses have entire "In the News" sections in which they post links to news stories that reference or link to the company.  Does this in any way hinder or the cancel out the link juice that should come from the original inbound link by making it look like a link trade or link swap, or for any other reason?  Just curious if anyone has any thoughts on this...Thanks.