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Just a suggestion to add to the answer by Gary:

1. Clicktale: the free version and bronze option are not enough to see the recorded sessions of more than the most visited page. Being the form page the second, you would not be able to see any record. Subscribe for an higher option (silver, for instance) for just one month. Time enough to record a sufficient number of sessions in the form page
2. Clicktale offers also the possibility to see a form funnel analytics, that show you if people has filled or not a field.
3. To verify if people is not filling the form because of the phone number, you could ask to your client customer care (or who answers to phone calls to that number) to simply ask to the client how he got to know the number itself
4. Heatmaps can give you hints about the google maps success.
5. Another way to track the use people of the form is to use jQuery and Google Analytics as explained by Duncan Morris in this post on Distilled: http://www.distilled.co.uk/blog/conversion-rate-optimisation/using-jquery-and-google-analytics-events-to-track-form-abandonment/

Every content that is behind a login is not crawlable, therefore it won't be indexed by search engines. So, no, it is not necessary to SEO those content, even though a basic SEO should have to be done just because it is a way to have a clean site.

For instance, this Q&A will be totally crawlable in two weeks, when it will be visible to all the not PRO members, therefore not behind a login access.

"Buy" is clearly a better proactive call to action than "shop for". Anyway if you want to catch also not transactional traffic, I suggest you to include also to include a not transactional call to action.

E.G.: Buy "keyword" now, and check out our offers about "category related to products"

David is totally right.

If you want to experiment, Instead, why do not transform that 404 page in a Parking pages, as the ones announcing a new incoming website. Put preview content and follow with the experiment.

Hi,

duplicate content per se is not cause of penalizations, but it penalizes the performance of your eCommerce in the rankings.

Infact:

1. Search Engines would rank one of the duplicate pages and not the one you would like your site would rank for (domain.com/categories)
2. People could link to a duplicate page and not the the main one, so wasting link juice
3. All the duplicated pages consume you crawl budget, therefore you could have your site indexed for duplicates but not for more important pages.

I suggest you to read this "Learn SEO" article http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/duplicate-content and this post by Ben Jarriola that can give you solutions to this problem: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-block-redirect-or-canonical

Hope this help you.

Ciao

I have to follow the line of David and Sai: turn that site into an UGC driven one.

Brainstorming here:

Put professionals and potential clients in contact inside your site, using a meritocratic chart list, were the the highest evaluation is from the clients the highest is the ranking. Evaluation based over tips and tricks and actionable help to answers made by the "clients"

More over, if Google thinks other pages could be shown as Sitelinks, it will present them to you in the same submenu page. maybe it is showing you also possible sitelinks in english.

Mmm... to SEO that subdomain exactly for the 5 days promotion: no I would not do it.

To SEO the subdomain for a keyword like Brand Name Promotion (+ another couple of keywords), yes. It is not very difficult to do and you can gain more brand visibility.

Errata corrige: the link to OpenSiteExplorer I gave is wrong. Here it is http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/

Ciao

If you mean as natural link profile an X number of links which have different anchor text (and sometimes that means the Brand name and/or the URL as anchor), from different kind of websites and with a certain % also of nofollowed link... well, it is not properly a ranking signal, but the metrics of those links surely are.

Majestic SEO is a wonderful tool, but being a PRO member you can use http://www.opensitexplorer.com

It is based on Linkscape and it offers you a very strong portrait of your (and your competitors) link profile and from some hints Rand gave in several posts, it is going to be revamped in the next months.

In the first case traffic, in the second increase of fans/followers. But in my case I was especially referring to small business presence in social media.

In the case of big Brands, I suppose that a well planned social campaign could lead to bigger numbers. That's what I see happening here in Spain with a very nice campaign for a Ron (Ron Brugal) that targeted university students: it was a very savvy mix of social, viral and offline marketing.

mmm... well.

Even though I would stay on alert in order to see if the link profile of that portal is going to affect the ranking of the portal itself, therefore the link to your client site, if its competitors are there also your Client site should be there.

But that link would have been just one of a rich link profile, so that something bad can come from it, it won't affect the general health of your client site.

Personally I have not seen any change actually. And reason is simple: the farmer update still is not alive in the regional Googles, as advised Matt Cutts in its post.

What would be interesting would be to see:

1. how the web farms affected in the Google.com ranks in the regional Googles? This can be especially interesting examining all the english based regional Googles (discounting the localization factors);
2. how big the difference in traffic will be when the algo update will affect also all the Googles, as - I suppose - then we will see its effects over all the translated/international versions of the websites, which are seriously vampirezed from local farmer sites.

If your site - I imagine - is targeting the French market, therefore Google.fr, therefore I believe you don't have seen any change yet simply because the farmer update still in not alive on regional Googles (as Google.fr is).

But mine is just an assumption, not knowing the real target (therefore Google version) of your site.

Question: did you checked the MozTrust metric of that site? And the MozTrust of those supposed link farms?

Because that should be the main metric I would look at.

If I link a to site that links to poor trusted feed, I risk to see reduced my trustrank metric; so I would prefer to no submit my site to it, as I believe the trust metrics of sites are going to play an even bigger role in rankings.

Hi Geoff,

personally when it comes to social media campaigns I look at two KPI:

1. Traffic generated from the campaign to the landing page + conversions generated by the campaign itself
2. Number of new followers/fans the campaign generates and, therefore the "long term" traffic growing to the site.

The % tend to be different, obviously.

In the first case (short term results of the campaign), I consider a success an increase around the 20% - 25% and a conversion rate of 5% . Obviously, to obtain those % the campaign must be very strong.

In the second case (middle/long term results), the KPI is to increment the traffic from Social the source of the 10% - 15%.

Obviously, those % have to be tailored depending on the topic of the campaign and the kind of business behind the campaign. For instance, in B2B social media campaigns the short terms % tend to be lower, while the long term one can be bigger (and viceversa when it is B2C),

Hi,

IMO the 20 point jump was the conseguence of cleaning the paid links. And the fact you are not anymore on first page is a conseguence of the correction too, because it represents the real position of your websites without that links and the juice they were passing.

Therefore, the only way to return to the original ranking is planning a new - licit - link building campaign.

Hi...

what you describe is somehow a sort of syndication of your content. A manual one, but still a syndication.

I believe that the guy, when he says he will give you full credit for the content, was meaning an optimized full link to the original article.

If it is so, I would say yes to that guy. If not, ask him to do it.

If her name is her brand... therefore use it for branded searches. For instance: "her" movies, "her" songs, "her" humanitarian activity...

that way you can also work on an aspect she is surely very paying attention to: reputation.

Anyway... give us tips about who's her? #gossipmoment

When it comes to English... I just advice that there are ways to make "different" a content. Just think to how different Brits and Americans write many words. Then all the classic International SEO tactics (links for the country your site have to rank, IP, address...)

Apart that, if you have the international sites with their corresponding Tld (.co.uk, .au, .in...) and you specify that the .com is for the USA Google, actually Google is quite good in noticing what site should have to rank for any country.