Suspect it's just a wrinkle as a result of the change from seomoz to moz, but on seomoz the remember me checkbox had a time to live of a few weeks, possibly a month, which was excellent.

Since the great rebranding and migration (which is excellent by the way), time to live from ticking remember me is in the order of a couple of hours, which is pretty annoying.

Any chance the web folks could bump it up a little, better yet put it back to 30 days?  

It's also worth bearing in mind that if you submit your site to DMOZ some categories no longer have volunteers dealing with applications, so your submission may sit in the queue for the next several years going nowhere.  So even if it is important, it's not necessarily achievable  

So submit and then instantly forget about it and stop caring.

This week's crawl results were a little crazy for us too.

We dropped to 1 error (-171), and to 48 warnings (-538), yet most of the issues not reported this week are still most definitely there.  I guess roger was having a lazy week?  

I've been trying Bing for about the last two months.

Still early days, but we imported our Adwords campaign and it's thus far working really quite well - we're getting some good traffic at a lower level than adwords, and clicks work out cheaper.  Strangely our best performing key words on Google aren't turning out to be those doing best on Bing.  Still early days, but it is proving worthwhile.

Beyond that it would certainly be worth hearing someone out, but I'd be asking many questions on who's in their network etc.  Obviously you'll want to be reassured that any web properties they're showing ads on are relevant to your niche, and the right sort of visitors.

Unfortunately the only way to be sure with most forms of advertising is to throw a hundred pounds or two at it and see what happens!

It's a bit hacky, but you can 301 them simply.

Create a directory in place of the pdf called document.pdf or whatever, then inside that folder add a default index php (or whatever you're using) to 301 them from http://www.yourdomain.com/document.pdf/index.php to wherever the pdf now lives.

I'd be tempted to hang fire a little while before "fixing" the problem, and give it a while longer to shake out.

We had something very similar around the time of Penguin 2 on one of our sites, and like you for only a selection of our keywords.  Half of the dropped keywords have returned to roughly where they were.  Of the other half most have increased, but are still down compared to pre-Penguin.

One keyword went from 3rd to not in top 50 and back to 4th this week.

Aside from burning a fair bit of time trying to figure out what was going on and if we'd been partially Penguined, I'm not sure I'm any the wiser!  Nothing notable going on with key competitors, nothing news worthy or topical in the sector - just temporary obliteration of around a quarter of keywords.

If they're in your industry it's not going to do you any harm.  But from a low authority site it's not going to a huge amount of good either!

So if it's going to take several hours of time to get them to agree to link, it's probably not worth the effort.  If it's a 10 minute of email back and forth, go for it.

Never discount a link if it's a company site though - it's not quite the same as a dodgy seo directory of everything - a directory is never going to get better authority for the page linking.  A company site may grow in stature as they work their own site and seo efforts, so in a year or two the link might have significantly more weight.

Likewise, never discount the human, rather than purely seo, value of a link - if it's a company in your industry, it might attract actual, interested, visitors.

I suspect the answer is something along the lines of "soon" (tm) with a pinch of "when it's ready".

Having been in software far too long, the absolute worst thing they could do is unleash it as beta to us when it's still a little flakey or inconsistent.  Analytics that aren't consistent and correct are of marginal use (yes, ok I know about Google Analytics issues), and would probably generate a whole load of support requests - time that will be better served polishing and completing the service.  Would probably lead to a lot more questions along the lines of "are we nearly there yet?" too!

I'm sure there's a few carefully chosen alpha testers who are willing to put up with pain, compare with Google and other analytics and not rely on it for any sort of decision yet.

Me, I'm happy to wait until they think it's resilient, consistent and accurate enough to survive us, the great unwashed.

At which point I hope to be very happy to have the option to kick GA into touch.

Personally I think infographics and videos are both in very overcrowded spaces these days.

As it's likely far more time-consuming to create one than a blog post or page of content their creation is a fairly inefficient way of getting a link.  But if it goes viral of course...

Mind you, it's not just about the link.  If you have something compelling or unique they can, and do, still work - slide decks and videos tend to attract different searches and searchers so they can still be a good way of drawing human traffic to the site.

Videos and images can appear in Google organic results, so increasing your presence.

So they're worth considering as part of your strategy so you have a presence on some different content sites in the hope of gaining exposure to different groups.

Is that a signed out, no cookies search giving you #1?

As I've just searched Google UK and can't find you in the first 10 pages, so it seems the ranking report is about right.

If you were ranking and have suddenly dropped, how's your link profile?  Amy messages in Webmaster tools?

I think it's equally probable both are right!

There are SO many variables that making a clear case one way or the other is unlikely.  For example techies are unlikely to ever click ads - and for many even see them as they'd have AdBlock installed.  At the other extreme there's many non web literate folks (yes, even these days) who, frankly, haven't distinguished between ads and organic:  Top link = top answer.  Even if that link is an ad, or an injected ad due to the malware littering their PC.

In the middle there's a massive group who are aware, see ads and likely choose when / if to click ads.  Different intent will lead to different likelihood of clicking ads in different circumstances.  If searching for a product to buy I think most people will factor in sponsored results, at least at some point - perhaps organic didn't give the desired results, they want the widest range of products or companies to choose from so open every link, etc.

The Nielsen article seems to be talking more about branded search, certainly not money out searches, whilst the Wordstream infographic is talking of high commercial intent searches - ie money out searches.  Unfortunately their sources are a bit small to make out and aren't clickable so I can't look back further.

But given the difference in search intent between the two pieces I'd be comfortable with them both being right!

"... if still want my tag pages to be indexed in Google, but i don't want to to influence my traffic negatively?"

Don't forget to consider how much value landing on a tag page gives to a site visitor (clue: usually none).  It's all very well indexing and ranking for some extremely long tail term via tags, but what's the human who lands on in going to make of it?  (Most likely contribute to that page's 100% bounce rate).

By all means keep tags, and use them consistently to categorise your posts, but as a means of keyword stuffing (as I'd suspect it is with nigh on 600 tags), the time is long since past  

Good luck!

Your first point: creating fresh, relevant content on a regular basis, is the key one.  This then hooks into catching long tail searches relevant to your business.  The more you talk around the subject and business, providing use-cases, how-to guides, 37 things you never realised about x, the more long tail searches you're likely to catch.  It's also far easier to place on the site as a blog post than trying to constantly produce evergreen content for the site and find some suitable place to put it.

It's also the logical place to inject a little opinion or humour - which perhaps will lead to some discussion or following.  For the most part that's going to look out of place on the main site in amongst the sales pages.

For many small businesses, in many sectors, building a significant following is unlikely, unless the posts are very far removed from the business:  perhaps drain clearing, dentistry or invoice factoring.  In such a case you're never, ever going to build the same following as if you were in some entertainment or tech sector discussing the the latest iThing.  I'm sure there's one or two exceptional folks out there who've managed to gain following for some dry, dull industry, but that's infinitely more about them, than the topic.

Many of the businesses that blog, highly successfully, are blogging about topics incidental to the business - for many web businesses the topics that catch notice and generate responses are the discussions about programming or some problem they encountered with scaling or the tech they're using, rather than the payment service, or the service they're actually offering.  The posts on the actual service they provide getting much less traction and sharing by comparison.

But it's also about getting awareness, so that post on some uncooperative aspect of Wordpress or Apache might introduce new people to your actual service.  Of course this perhaps easier in tech, but in any sector there are connected and related sectors where the same can apply, so the wider the topics the better even if not directly related to the business.  That's not the same as saying constantly blog about iThings on your dentistry site of course!

Establishing self as authority.  Again for many sectors, this is a bit of a stretch.  With the best will in the world, the most surprising, enlightening posts on drain clearing are unlikely to get much traction on Google+ and Facebook, yet the engines are taking social success as a clear sign of authority.  I've seen several valiant attempts to make "unsexy" businesses succeed on social, and to an extent, they have.  As an example a ladder and scaffold rental business spent much effort sharing photos of ladders in silly places, and achieved some success.  Up against shares of an iThing, cats and zombies, not so much.

So, yes, it's very necessary, particularly for the very noticeable effect of long tail traffic.  For the other factors, treat them as nice-to-haves and blog accordingly.

The other key thing about blogging is nearly everyone gives up far, far too early, so keep at it.

goto Pro Dashboard

goto campaign settings (text link under the view campaign button) for whichever campaign you need to change competitors for and the competitors are at the end of the page

What strikes me is at the same time as your pages crawled fell off a cliff your page load time doubles.  What changed round about then that would have caused an increase in load times?

If that was around the time you switched CDN, I'd be double and triple checking the new one was set up perfectly and is an improvement on cloudflare.  Did all your pages suddenly get markedly bigger, perhaps due to another plugin being added?  Pingdom tools is also great for picking apart load times.

That would be where I'd start...

Moz crawl your site weekly and any updates to duplicate content issues will get updated at that time.

The actual day it gets crawled varies depending on account I believe.  You can check when it's due in the Crawl Diagnostics section of the campaign overview.  At the bottom right you should see last crawl date and when next is due.

So any fixes you're making won't be reflected until the next Moz crawl.

It's all about link profile.

GoDaddy may appear to get away with site footer links on domain holding pages, but they have a massive link profile, not least of which they gained during the whole SOPA/PIPA outrage.

Chances are it's not harming their ranking overly much, but it certainly isn't helping it much either.

Whereas a small web designer with a site wide footer link on every site they create could well have those as the vast majority of the total links - leading to a heavily skewed and very unnatural link profile.

Now then I'm sure that some of the larger web design and service outfits got where they are with the help of site wide footer links, site widgets etc, but Google moved the goalposts so you can't take that route any more.

Whilst you can't get at the actual keywords behind "not provided", you can do a lot to mitigate the black hole using rank tracking.

You can add an Analytics event to track rank, which also shows average rank on not provided, per landing page.  This doesn't give actual keywords, but you're now in a place where you can infer a lot.  Assuming you have enough site traffic for it to be meaningful, you can now infer likely keywords based on what keywords bring traffic to those pages when you do have the data.

For example clicking into top events, you can now see a list of landing pages behind (not provided).  Each page is shown, along with the number of events triggered (meaning visitors), and average value (meaning search rank on whatever hidden keywords were used).

Of course you have no way of knowing when someone used a unique long-tail search, or if for whatever reason the spread of keywords in "not provided" is actually different to visible keywords.

But it is enough to be useful, and vastly better than having no info at all on 20%+ of your traffic.  Or in our case 40%+

To set up event based rank tracking, see this post from AJ Kohn : http://www.blindfiveyearold.com/new-ways-to-track-keyword-rank

The info you need is about half way down that post.

No, doesn't mean single word, simply means just one set of

tags per page.

The crawl is presumably finding pages with more than one h1 level title on the page.

Have to say I haven't done it your way round - we've completed three rounds of email outreach then submitted a disavow file, so I don't want to guess to far on advisability of doing it the other way around.  For starters I've no idea how well / quickly Google handles domains removed from a disavow list.

Your first assumption needs comment though - every domain we're removing links from was from a spammy website (zero quality SEO directory), as a result of a submission package they bought years back before I joined.

We managed to get about 50% of the list removed from that email outreach process.  Granted one was a directory network with over 100 domains, but even counting their domains as one that we got about 40% success.

Around 10% responded with a demand for a fee - ranging from 99c to $50.  Clearly all those were instant place in disavow list

So to summarise I was really surprised how successful the email outreach part was - we'd been expecting next to nothing by way of response rate rather than around 50% success.

Even if you do it disavow first, hoping for a Penguin update in the next three weeks so the file is actioned prior to your season starting is a little optimistic!

I'd be inclined to make the equivalent of a URL rewrite rule in the ASP equivalent of htaccess to only serve www.mysite.com.  Sorry I don't know ASP so can't help with syntax there.

Then I would use canonical url to tell bots which page is actually the index.

Lastly I'd scan your site and ensure that all links on your site, which link to the home page have just a slash, as it's very likely there's a few of each:

Home

This way all to the home page that crawlers see are just the canonical URL.