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I'm with Alick300, using an event on the onclick event on the link is the way to go.  If you run jQuery on your pages, it should be pretty easy to select all the links going to tripadvisor.com and attach the goal tracking event code after the page has loaded.  It'll be 1 line of jQuery code... you shouldn't need to go through and add this to thousands of links by hand.

I think all the implementations work just about the same.  We chose to do it in our sitemaps because that was the easiest for our developer to implement.  You should choose one or the other, there's no need to do multiple implementations.

You should be able to can control the rate at which the bot accesses you pages by adding a crawl delay in your robots.txt file. Robots.txt and crawl delay is discussed here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots_exclusion_standard, and Slurp bot here: https://help.yahoo.com/kb/SLN22600.html.

Should look like this in your robots.txt file:

User-agent: Slurp

Crawl-delay: 30

The crawl delay is the number of seconds the bot should wait between pageview (ask your IT guys what's appropriate for you).  I stuck 30 in there, meaning the Slurp bot would only be able to access up to 2 pages a minute.

If you're trying to include this script in the Optimizely editor, it wouldn't work because the code in the editor is already Javascript, so it's like you're trying to next a

I think the script for Universal Analytics (new new version of GA) is built with subdomain tracking built in.  According to this Google article about cross domain tracking, "This document is only for tracking users across domains where browser restrictions prevent cookies from being shared. Tracking users across subdomains does not require any additional configuration."

I'd try the regular script, and see if you can see traffic on both URLs for all of your subdomains.  If you can, then it's working!

Make sure you're set up to track multiple subdomains within your GA set up.  Then it should be the same script on your Marketo landing pages as well as your website.

The set up will be different if the landing pages aren't on your domain, but Marketo does support that.  If you're not doing that, you should!

(This is all speculation as I've never done this before.  There are probably people in the forum that have)

Be aware you're switching from a ccTLD to a gTLD.  Is the clinic primarily for Canadian residents?  In the simplest terms, switching from a .ca to a .clinic may hurt your Canadian rankings, and help your rankings everywhere else.  If you want your site to continue targeting Canadians specifically, you can set that in your Google Webmaster Tools, although I think having the .ca domain itself is a stronger indicator to Google that your site is geared towards Canadians.

Aren't the Marketo landing pages living on a subdomain of your site (and not on marketo.com)?  If that's the case, and you install the GA script on those pages just like any other pages, and have the GA profile set up to look at traffic from all subdomains (not just specifically one subdomain), things should work fine.

We use both Adwords and Adroll.  My preference is always to do everything myself, and Adwords gives me complete control.  With Adroll, you'll have reps who are generally very responsive and good, but you still need them to help manage and optimize your campaigns.  So I'd second what Ray-pp is saying.  Use Adroll when you're ready to expand your reach outside of the Google Display Network, once you're already running (very) profitable retargeting campaigns in Adwords.

In your comment below, it sounds like you're comparing your search clicks with display clicks.  Search clicks are always more expensive since there's implied intent in the fact the user is searching for something.  With $700 CPCs, retargeting is probably really important for you to try and recapture that user once you got them to your site.  You could try some retargeting through YouTube as well if display ads are working.

If you have Adwords reps, I'd strongly recommend trying to get into the SCM beta, which is what the industry generally calls "search retargeting".  This would allow you to target users searching for those expensive queries (on Google, Bing, & Yahoo) after that fact via display ads.  It's in beta, but I think it's a fairly open beta at this point so if you have reps, you can probably get into it.  I couldn't find a good Google article about it, but this sums it up nicely.

Keri has it right, you can include or exclude users based on pages they've visited or actions they've taken on your site.  So you can target people who visited a certain page (or did something like added an item to their cart), and then exclude those who have checked out.

There's a bunch of remarketing features within Adwords, like Dynamic remarketing for retailers, remarketing lists for search ads, & Google Analytics remarketing.  Beyond Adwords, there's Facebook, Twitter, and partners to get remarketing ads on placements outside of the Google Display Network, like Adroll and Doubleclick.

Add it to your site.  You want people to know the blog is part of the site, and you want people to be able to get from your site to the blog and vice versa easily.  Also, you want your site's rankings to benefit from the traffic you bring in via the blog, and vice versa.

To make it be treated as part of your site, you should set it up under a URL like mysite.com/blog, vs. blog.mysite.com.  The subdomain approach will get your blog treated like a new site.

I do!  If you log into Bing Webmaster Tools, and go to the Crawl Settings, you'll see a new checkbox at the bottom, with the option "Configure your site to have bingbot crawl escaped fragmented URLs containing #!."  According to the Search Engine Land post here, "It appears as though this means Bing will crawl #! URLs according to the Google standard. The help information hasn’t been updated, so it’s hard to say for sure."

It sounds like this is the option you're looking for?

Nofollowing links doesn't sculpt link juice, it burns it.  Doing this to internal links is bad, as you're wasting your own link juice!  If I don't want a page on my site on the SERPs, I'd much rather set a meta noindex, follow tag on the page I don't want indexed rather than nofollow links to it.

To explain burning vs. sculpting, here's an example.  Say page A has 6 votes of link juice to pass, and links to 3 other pages, B, C, and D.  If all the links are followed, it'll pass 2 votes to each page.  However, if you nofollow the link to page D, it won't give 3 votes to B and C, it'll give the same 2 votes to B and C, and the 2 votes that should have gone to page D go nowhere.  They're burned.

If instead you set a meta tag on page D to noindex, follow, the link juice will flow in and out of page D, so that would be much preferred.

Add canonical tags to all the https pages that have a http counterpart pointing to the http version.  Here's the original Google Webmaster Blog post about canonical tags: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html

Setting pages to 404 should be enough to remove them after Google indexes your page enough times.  Google has to be careful about this, because when many sites crash or have site maintenance, they return 404 instead of 503, so Google wouldn't want to remove pages from their index until they're sure the page is gone.

Google talks about removing pages from there index here.  The Google Webmaster Tools URL removal tool is only intended for pages that urgently need to be removed, so I wouldn't recommend that.  Google recommends:

• If the page no longer exists, make sure that the server returns a 404 (Not Found) or 410 (Gone) HTTP status code. This will tell Google that the page is gone and that it should no longer appear in search results.
• If the page still exists but you don't want it to appear in search results, use robots.txt to prevent Google from crawling it. Note that in general, even if a URL is disallowed by robots.txt we may still index the page if we find its URL on another site. However, Google won't index the page if it's blocked in robots.txt and there's an active removal request for the page.
• Alternatively, you can use a noindex meta tag. When we see this tag on a page, Google will completely drop the page from our search results, even if other pages link to it. This is a good solution if you don't have direct access to the site server. (You will need to be able to edit the HTML source of the page).

Is there a reason you are 404'ing these pages rather than redirecting them?  If these pages have new pages with similar content, you should do a 301 redirect to keep the link juice flowing and to take advantage of these pages being linked to.  If you do continue returning 404 for these pages (or even if you don't...), make sure your 404 page is a useful one, that helps users find the page they're looking for (Google help article).

Also, Ryan, I'd be interested in hearing the results of using the 410 status code.  I would imagine that status code would do the trick!  I'm surprised I haven't read about this more, or why it's not mentioned in the help file linked to above.

You used to be able to do this, but PageRank sculpting is no longer valid.  I wouldn't nofollow any internal links.  Nofollowing links burns the PageRank rather than sculpting it.  Here's an example:

Page A links to Page B, C and D.  Page A has 6 link juice "votes" to cast to these pages it links to.  Page A passes 2 votes to each page, B, C and D.

You nofollow the link to page D. Now page A passes 2 votes to page B and C, and no votes to page D.  2 votes are lost by the nofollow.  It doesn't pass 3 votes each to pages B and C.

It won't hurt the site.  You only need one if you want to disallow parts of your site to search engines, or disallow different search bots.  If you don't have any pages or directories to disallow, I wouldn't worry about it.

Let me preface this with saying that if someone contacted me like this, I would assume it's a bunch of hogwash.

That being said, one of the (smaller) factors in quality score is an overall account quality score metric, so theoretically if someone does have stellar quality scores, and puts your ads in their account, you could see higher quality scores on your keywords and possibly lower CPCs.  However, I doubt his quality scores are that good if he's taking on clients who are struggling and adding their campaigns to his Adwords account.

The standard way to do this would be to set up your own Adwords account (like you have already), and you would allow him access to it through his MCC (My Client Center) Adwords account.  I don't think it's standard for him to be running your ads in his account.  If you guys decide to part ways later, what will happen to these campaigns?  He'd delete them, and you'd lose all your account history (this is worse than it sounds if you're not familiar with Adwords... even if you export the old campaigns and import them into your account, your account history will be all gone).

Learning how to do it yourself is a viable option like EGOL says.  These days, there's _so _many different dials to turn on display advertising, if you get into that, you should learn the basics but you might want to get help.  For search ads though I think it's still viable to set up and run with a limited amount of self training.  They're adding more and more features to that though every day though (e.g. demographics for search, remarketing lists for search ads, bid adjustments by device, etc).

Adwords will attribute the conversion to the last click, provided it happened within the last 30 days.

Some examples may help clarify this:

• If someone 2 weeks ago clicked an ad, and later clicks a remarketing banner and converts, the remarketing campaign will get the credit for it, and the search campaign will not see a conversion.
• If someone clicked an ad 6 weeks ago, and comes back directly to your site and converts, no Adwords campaign would get a conversion.
• If someone clicks an ad, and then viewed a remarketing banner, and remembered to go back and buy from your site without clicking the ad, then the original ad would get credit for the conversion, and the remarketing campaign would not show a view-through conversion, since the conversion is being attributed to another campaign on your site.
• If someone visited your site organically, and then viewed a remarketing banner, and remembered to go back and buy from your site without clicking the ad, you'll see a view-through conversion for the remarketing campaign.
• If someone clicks an ad 6 weeks ago, and then sees a remarketing banner, and remembered to go back and buy from your site without clicking the ad, then you'd see a view-through conversion for the remarketing campaign (since it's outside of the 30 day conversion window).

You can see the different conversion paths within Google Analytics.  My favorite report is the Conversions > Multi-Channel Funnels > Top Conversions Paths report.  I usually view it with a primary dimension of Source/Medium Path, and add a secondary dimension of Campaign Path (make sure at the top Path Length is set to "All", and you have the appropriate types of conversions selected).  This will show the conversion paths for all of your conversions.

Hope this helps!

I believe that Googlebot doesn't look at anything in the URL after a #, so you should be fine.  Check out this from trusted Google engineer John Mu, or this.  You should be fine in terms of duplicate content, and I don't see why Google would associate this as an affiliate or paid link or anything like that.