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Dr. Egol - thank you for the thoughtful answer. I'll give it a try!

Thanks, Britney!

Hi Jono, Yes, you have to check into Google Analytics for this. You can also try to change the model attribution of the conversion to see what's the part of the Adwords Ads into the process. Regards, Jonathan

I watch my traffic increases and decreases.   You can do that with google analytics.  I do it with clicky.  When I see an important page show traffic losses, I go looking. One of my retail sites suddenly was not selling a certain product category very well.  I looked into it and hundreds of "made in China" blogs had scraped my content. Then, I have images that are often grabbed.  I watch image search traffic and watch for them. I have tens of thousands of pages on the web.  Its hard to monitor all of them, but it is easy to monitor when you can download a traffic spreadsheet that has % up and % down, sort it and then investigate.  So, I am being responsive instead of proactive.  And, really, I don't look at it as ROI, it is loss prevention.

I've found a solution and am posting it here in case anybody else is having the same problem: RewriteRule ^([0-9]{4})/([0-9]{2})/([^/]+)/[0-9]+ /blog/$1/$2/$3/ [L,R=301]

On your cdn, you have an option to disallow se's to index files on subdomains by robots.txt so you can keep a copy on cdn.example.com as well, and noindex it via robots.txt for better  user experience

I already do. So maybe it's not necessary to worry about the blog's root page? Thanks.

This used to be best practice... but I suspect the technique has lost most of it's usefulness. The reason is that Google can now render CSS - and has been able to for some time. It's also better at context analysis - meaning it knows and understands sidebar content vs. footer content vs. editorial content. What is important is how much of your content is above the fold and prominently displayed to users. PRO tip: Enter your URL into the Browser Size tool from Google to see how visitors see your page. http://browsersize.googlelabs.com/ If you find that you have too much non-essential content in your code that over-whelms your more important, unique content (such as the elaborate drop-down menu you describe) - folks often see improvements in rankings by trimming down their navigation and reducing their template footprint. Something to consider. Hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO!

I think Guy Warner nailed it. I wrote the copy for my home page back in 2004. I've tweaked it over the years, but it remained largely the same. During that time, lots of others have been copying the text for their own websites. Now, if you search for an exact match, a few of the other sites come up even higher in the SERP than my own site! I've done my best to get folks to remove the copies (and serving DMCA complaints when necessary) but I think my time is better spent simply rewriting the home page. It's frustrating on one hand, but it's also good to finally have an idea of what the problem might be. Thanks, Guy!

Thrilled to help!  I know it's a pain, but it's worth it!

Note to self, and to others who see this thread later, the 301 for this situation is: RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} x=([0-9]+)&y=([0-9]+) RewriteRule ^product.php$ http://www.example.com/product.php?y=%2 [r=301,nc]

On my site, I have a sidebar widget that links to 10 random pages on my site.  I would love to have it link to 10 relevant pages on my site as EGOL suggests...It's on my list of things to program one day!   I do feel that these are helpful to me.  The main reason why I like this widget is because I think it helps me keep my pages in Google's index.  My site has over 3000 pages and I think many of them would end up in the supplemental index if they were not regularly linked to internally like they are. Also, I have it set so that they link using my desired anchor text for the page.  This may help somewhat in my SERPs for each page. Oh, and all of these links are followed on my site.