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I agree with Richard and Joel. No more than 3 levels deep for categories. And I'd like to add, that it's good to create redirects for alternative categories or links. If a product can belong to 2 sub categories, have both links work. eg. domain.com/category/subcategory-primary/product.html -> would be main link domain.com/category/subcategory-secondary/product.html -> would redirect to above And while this is not necessarily an SEO advantage, having clean, short and organized categories helps create a good user experience and easy way finding for your users and leads to higher conversion rates.

Horribly inaccurate! Google hasn't provided much in the way of explanation. It use to be worse because the numbers were based on the combined volume of both the search and all their networks. They changed this some time in 2010. Here are some other considerations that affect your impressions volume:

• Is your bid and quality score so high that your ad is literally running at #1 ALL the time?
• Are your campaigns capped or cut off by budget or scheduled time to show?
• Do you have any negative keywords applied to the campaign?
• Are using exact, phrase or broad match? Google supposedly bases the volume on exact.

It is not wise to completely rely on the Keyword tool local search volume. The other metrics like total search results, and competition help craft a better keyword list for your campaigns. I also like to export the entire data set, and look to see how the local volume is changing over time. Is it trending up or down? Is it a consistent average?

A new site popped up that has completely replicated a site own by my client. This site is literally a copycat, scraped all the content, and copied the design down to the colors.

I've already reported the site to the hosting provider and filled a spam report on Google. I noticed that the author changed some of the text, and internal links so that they don't link to our site anymore. Some of these were missed.

I'm also going to take a couple preventative actions like change stuff in .htaccess, but that doesn't help me now,  just in case it happens again in the future.

I'm wondering what else i can or should be doing?

What keywords are you trying to rank for? The title for your home page reads: Lancaster, PA | Lancaster County Information Center

If I type "Lancaster PA information", your home page ranks well. I'm guessing you're trying to rank for something else, so why not start with the basics and optimize the title/description and headings to target your chosen keywords?

I'm sure you're well versed in how Page Rank works, but some times it's good to have someone else explain it with a metaphor. And what comes to mind is Ian's old post on this here:

http://www.conversationmarketing.com/2010/09/pagerank-without-math.htm

Following his line of thought on the subject, I'd say yes overall restricting the amount of links in the menu will be beneficial. Some of your sub-sub pages may lose some PR value, but it will also likely increase the PR value of your main pages, and give you a good chance of ranking higher for more competitive keyword terms.

Yes, a direct copy of another website's content will have an adverse affect on your rankings.

If you find something interesting about an article on another website, perhaps you can make a post that only quotes a part of it and links to the original if your readers want to read the whole article. And also add your own commentary as to why you found the article worth sharing with your readers.

I've faced a similar issue before. His company served clients nationally, but many people searched for his services locally, typing "xxxxx california" or wherever they were located. We did several things, and depending on your budget you may consider some or all of these:

1. PPC campaigns targeted to local/regional keyword searches. Ad copy that gave highest conversions used words like "nationwide" or "largest provider"
2. Consistently wrote and published blog posts and articles on the difference between local and national provider and why the national provider had advantages
3. Wrote and published articles targeting regional or state keywords with the highest searches, and explained how the national company knew that area better than any local provider.
4. Leased and employed some exact match keyword domain for 302 redirects. And also bought and developed some exact match keyword domains as lead generation sites.

Of all of the above, PPC will give you instant results. And depending on your product and the CPL you want to target, it can be very successful.

I've read in the past that geo-targeting is about 85% to 95% accurate. That's the short ball park answer.

While search engines are getting better at geo-targeting, I'd say that right now it depends on how specific of a market you're targeting. Done on a national, state or (major) city level and it's going to be pretty accurate to about 95%. If you're narrowing down on specific zip codes, or using custom shapes you will see clicks from non targeted areas.

Eventually they may, especially if too many people start to exploit it. It took them over THREE years to negate the link farms. And that's the main frustration. You can stay purists and avoid any/all unnatural or black hat tactics, but in the mean time it feels like a missed opportunity too.

You mean the link in the profile bio? I don't think Google is devaluing or negating those types of links yet, and may never. So far the current news and attention has been specifically on link farms and .edu links. Forum profile links will likely still boost rankings.

And while there's no official definition or framework on what types of links are considered "natural" I'd say creating a boat load of forum profiles for link value is an unnatural tactic.

PPC and organic results do not affect each other. Period.

Your organic results are being affected by something else.

Totally agree Roger, that setting is only good for those humongous campaigns with tons of data points. To circumvent the issue, for smaller campaigns I sometimes:

Start/run campaign entirely on basic/default settings. Even ad rotation. Days. Bids. Everyything. No smart anything. Everything bare bones basic, as if I were dealing with the Adwords interface from pre 2005. Then once enough data has collected I automate things one by one. Nothing beats the pure raw data in the beginning to give a better picture.

I can think of several things you could do, and depending on your campaigns, one or a combination of these could work for you:

1. Change the Ad Schedule settings and use "Bid Adjustment" to be more/less for desired days.
2. Change your Ad Delivery settings to Optimize for conversions. Let Google naturally automate this for you.
3. To create a hard daily budget for each set of days, run two separate campaigns with specific days in the settings. (I don't actually recommend doing this unless the other settings don't help you accomplish what you're looking for.)

Client has two website addresses:

• Website A is a redirect to Website B. It has one indexed page. But this is the URL being used in collateral. It has the majority of back links, and citations everywhere list Website A as the URL.
• Website B is where the actual website lives. Google recognizes and indexes the 80+ pages. This website has very few backlinks going to it.

This setup does not seem good for SEO. Moreover, the analytics data is completely messed up because Website B shows that the biggest referral source is... you guessed it Website A.

I'm thinking going forward, I should:

• Move all the content from Website B to Website A.
• Setup Website B to permanently 301 Redirect to Website A.

Is that the best course of action?