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Thank you everybody for providing the answer I was seeking! This is exactly what I thought was the case and now I have more opinions/links to back me up.

The thing is our submission doesn't yield a unique Thank You page. Instead it wipes the form and reveals a Thank You message in the form's place. For whatever reason this is how my boss wanted it done and I disagree and want a new page to come up (even if in a new window) to ensure an event's triggered and analytics doesn't lose it.

Mark - Is there any sort of "event" that I can trigger which won't load a new page or affect anything the user sees per se? I feel like my only option here is to do as EGOL is saying. And to be honest, that's what I want to do anyway. Why would a user want to stay on the page they were just on after filling out a form? What use is that page to them after they've filled it out and are waiting for a response?

Bah! I swear 80% of my job is convincing site owners that they're thinking is backwards and having to essentially "argue" (for lack of a better word) with them about it.

Anyway, thanks fellas.

Here's the Question:

If a person clicks a PPC ad and hits the landing page, and the landing page has a form to fill out embedded in it without having to click, does that count as a bounce if the person leaves the page immediately after filling out and submitting the form or does the submission negate the bounce tally?

Hope this makes sense and thanks in advance.

301 Redirect one to the other. That's it that's all.

I talked to Danny Dover briefly at MozCon about his experiences with SEO and adult content. It's interesting because people who like certain "pages" on those sites won't necessarily link to them or share them with friends the same way they would other content...

I'd search "dover + adult seo" or something to that effect and see if you can find anything he's written on the subject. He's a smart dude.

Uhh... Good luck with that.

Isn't that what Moz Pro is for?

Good ideas Charles, thank you!

I've been playing with Twitter's Bootstrap for a few hours now and I almost feel like that's a viable solution. It's so clean... but it forces me to learn even more HTML/CSS than I planned to.

I'd much rather get a designer involved... my CEO is being a stickler on the finances of this for some reason. Our company is entirely web-based... it's our storefront. Why wouldn't you want to spend money on the face of your company, you know? Anyway... thanks

If you don't mind I'd like to do a brief thread-hijack:

Why Joomla?

I'm looking for a CMS (might end up designing with bootstrap if I can't find one in the end but really don't want to fiddle with the trial and error of that) but am having trouble. Wordpress I can't get installed on our servers.. (waiting on our engineer who's out) and Joomla seems to suck. But I'm not sure if that's accurate as everyone else seems to love it.

My problem is I registered for a demo Joomla account and there are 3 templates available that all look the exact same and I can't figure out how to completely modify/revamp them. Is this just because it's the demo? Am I missing something? Do you have any examples/reasons why you're moving to Joomla?

Sorry again for the hijack I just saw an opportunity to get some feedback/insight.

I've built a mockup in Balsamiq and I really wish I could get it translated to HTML/CSS somehow but alas I'm stuck.

Thanks!

Thanks Chris your site looks AWESOME and is damn near exactly the style I'm shooting for.

Convincing my CEO to fit it in the budget will be another story.. I may be contacting you shortly.

Thanks to all as well.

Mike,

That was very helpful, thank you. It is a small site. Currently sitting at 72 pages but that includes a ton of blogs and support articles which are all easily copied and can be done quickly by myself if I'm able to dump content into layouts. Without blogs and support pages it's more like 30 pages.

More I think about it the more I want to experiment with Wordpress. So I'm going to fool around with it this week if I could just figure out how to install it in a sub-directory... (so far I'm getting nothing but 403s just trying to install... not going well!)

In the meantime I'm going to take your advice and start contacting local firms and requesting quotes. I am in the Seattle area so it shouldn't be too hard to find.

Or maybe it's time for me to learn Wordpress, eh....?

So I feel like I've almost convinced my boss to hire out a re-design for our website (which is SORELY needed.)

I'm at the step where I need to start finding quotes and site builders.

I want a responsive design site built modern and professional... Love the moz site but not responsive enough. My current favorite example is at www.hasoffers.com

Does anybody have any suggestions of where to go?

And as a bonus, if anybody is brave enough to ballpark what a site like this would cost that would be awesome. Doesn't have to be exact or even that close...

Thanks for any advice given.

The issue is you're missing title tags and you should add them..

??

That will help with the duplication issues in a temporary fashion but redirecting is the only true way to solve the issue we're talking about here. Mainly because canonicals don't pass link juice so if any links are pointed to the non-www they won't carry through.

If I were you I'd avoid adding that line until after the redirect is done just because.

Yes contact your hosting company. The process depends on whether they are running an Apache or IIS server. I'm sure they will know how to handle it for you.

Good luck!

Excellent points Dana and I think you're absolutely partially correct. I strongly agree that there are a "whole lotta things all working together" that need to all be addressed. For sure!

As for the "how big of a deal is this redirect" discussion, I think it depends and differs case-by-case.

I also discovered this issue at the company I'm currently working at when I started there 8 months ago. I also discovered a ton of other weird issues related (like 2 index pages.. !?!?!) that I literally had to argue with the engineers over for days.. (They honestly believed we needed an index.htm and index.html page with identical content.. I think they still do even. ugh)

Anyway I FINALLY got them all redirected and we absolutely saw improvement. (Also, going from PR3 to PR4 is a big deal!! I'd throw a party for a PR bump!) We saw improvement in almost every one of our target keywords.

Here's why I think our cases differ: It all depends how the links were built prior. Meaning if you have links built to domain.com and to www.domain.com equally, the juice will be split between them and when that redirect happens your main domain will get a bump. This is what happened in our case and I knew it would going into it as I did a nice long scouring of our link profile prior.

So I'm guessing in your case they had all correctly built/gained links to the same version of the domain keeping it from being split.

Still it is my experience that when you get a link some people go domain.com and some go www.domain.com and in this case if the two are different you will definitely lose out on some great juice.

Nonetheless Dana, you are absolutely right that there is no end-all be-all in this business. (That's why we all love it so much, right?!) And it's also why I tried to stress that this person go through your list as well as heed my advice. Your list is much more thorough and a great launching pad for anyone looking into a similar issue.

Onwards!

+1 to Egol. Drop that article on your blog located on your domain and promote it socially and get people reading it. Forget sharing your article and spreading it out.. Duplicating it is a bad idea anyway.

If it's great it's going to draw attention. Make that attention point to you.

Everything that Dana said is awesome. Look into it all. But before you do any of that, fix this huge problem:

Your site is duplicated. Very possible you have a panda problem on your hands if your rankings have tanked as you say.

You need to either pick the www version or the non-www version and redirect one to the other. This is the most vital thing you can do quickly and easily and is an absolute must.

You don't even have a canonical tag in there. (NOTE: You cannot fix this with just a canonical. You need to 301 redirect one to the other.) But right now google sees two separate sites. One at www.in2town.co.uk and the other at http://in2town.co.uk

Do this and then address what Dana handily listed out for you.

P.S. All of those sites outranking you have 301 redirects in place... This is huge you should heed my advice.

is the rel canonical pointing to the right page or are they all just pointing to themselves?

A lot of times Wordpress or similar creation tools will drop a canonical tag on each page that points to itself. What you need to do is ensure that the duplicated page is pointing to the one you want indexed...

If you cut and paste an example in here perhaps we can be more helpful.

This is so crazy. Let's keep working on it. I hope that together we can come up with a way to handle this for people in the future.

Thanks for reaching out to me. Very interesting stuff.

"this guy might not be a good client.  In that case refer him to your competitor."

^THIS!!

Haha Egol you crack me up.

I would do everything these guys are saying. Explain to him EXACTLY what you are going to do. Draw up a plan and provide the intended/potential results. If he wants to do it, great. If he doesn't, great.

If you get a month into this and he isn't seeing results (which he probably won't be in that short of time) and this frustrates him, refer him back to the write-up you presented which explained this all carefully. If he wants to fire you, refer him to your competitors. Damn I love that.