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Hi Lindsey Our engineers have confirmed that rogerbot will flag pages that are 100% identical but can sometimes miss pages that are 99% similar. The crawler is deliberately written to err on the side of not reporting false positives which means it sometimes can report false negatives which has occurred in your case. Using a combination of tools such as Webmaster tools can help isolate any pages we have missed. Hope this helps!

I know crazy right

I would go with the 301 then. That way if anyone lands on your old site (say through a link) they'll be redirected to your blog, where you want them to be.

I've been using phone extensions  for dozens of clients, some generate thousands of calls per month, and I have never experienced this problem.  Are you routing ppc calls to a separate phone number?  I would investigate your own phone number.  How long have you had this number?  Are you sure people are misdialing the adwords phone number? .....or could they be misdialing your ppc phone number?  Did your phone number previously belong to another company?  Try routing your ppc calls to another phone number and see if the problem persists.

To be fair in your example, the Adwords click did (on average) have some effect on the ultimate sale.  If the customer never came through the door looking for red widgets, they may not have purchased the blue widgets from you?  There are a few different reports in Analytics that can help you see this: Conversions > Multi-channel funnels > Attribution Modeling Tool (I think this is available to everyone now).  If last-click interaction is by far the most important for you, you can select this in the tool and select the primary dimension of Source/Medium.   Drill into Google / cpc and you should see the data you're looking for there. Conversions > Multi-channel funnels > Top conversion paths.  Select primary dimension Source/Medium Path.  This will should you the different parts that Adwords played in each conversion.  You can also pick a secondary dimension of Adwords Campaign Path to see more info.

Did you know we have a feature request forum at https://seomoz.zendesk.com/forums/293194-seomoz-pro-feature-requests where you could submit that idea? Do keep in mind that we don't have access to Google's algorithm either, so it would be our idea of how it is influenced, not what Google thinks about it.

I agree 100% with MagicDude. After watching Everett Sizemore's E-commerce webinar I tried an experiment. We had a huge block of SEO copy on our home page. We were #2 in Google for our most important keyword. I removed the copy and put it into the blog instead. We dropped to #4 in Google. I took the copy back out of the blog and returned it to the home page. Hopefully, we will recover the two spots we lost when I removed it. I know people are saying this doesn't work. Maybe it's the quality of the writing that's the problem. We go to great lengths to make sure that any copy we include for SEO purposes reads well and is of some use to visitors.

Arafah, I respectfully disagree with loss of ranking and "link juice" (I hate that term - I prefer "page authority") being a misconception. Matt Cutts himself states that 301-redirects do not pass all the value of the original link. Here's a link to Eric Enge's article/interview with the quote directly from Matt Cutts: http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2010/03/google-confirms-301-redirects-result-in-pagerank-loss.html

You know it Brian!

Technically it is gaming, but it happens more often than you think. I, personally am a bit of a perfectionist and wouldn't be able to put my name to anyone else's work.

It depends on what your branding strategy is, are you trying to develop more of a brand and reputation as Joe Smith, owner of Acme Widgets, or do you want Acme Widgets to be a well known resource for all things widget related? I personally think doing both is a great idea - it takes more time but you get the benefits of both. You will have a little bit of a harder time as a business rather than an individual though, people want to see  human faces in their stream, not logos - you should still use a logo or mascot that represents the business though, otherwise this will be confusing. People are generally leary about following businesses and dont want to be marketed to.  Due to this uphill battle you will have to really focus on a great content strategy to connect with users, provide useful information and go out of your way to find and answer questions. It also doesn't hurt to humanize your brand a bit.  Use words like "We" a lot and not "our company" or "Acme Widgets" - make jokes and be transparent.  You can also add a picture of the individual behind "@AcmeWidgets" to the twitter background to help give it that human element. Also regardless of which account you are on, concentrate on connecting to users and sharing great content - don't spend the majority of your time talking about yourself, your company or your widgets.  People will get turned off by the over-promotion.

Agreed, plus the answer that you marked as good really is the best answer for this question

I personally go with the "Ghostwriter" option, as having a real person is key - and creating a real "Face" for your Brand is even more important. I know alot of people on here would suggest the "Create A persona" option and i think there is even a whle webinar on it - But I would completely disagree with this and think as you say it is icky and dishonest - but I know some niches a face is hard to come by Shane