Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Both Colin and EGOL make great points.  It depends on the niche, and really depends on how much you're willing to put into it.  A lot of goes into keyword selection, bid adjustments, and other optimizations, all covered in the book EGOL recommended.

If you're looking for a good place to start, I'd recommending doing some remarketing campaigns.  If you have lots of goals and audience segmenting set up already in Google Analytics, you can take advantage of those within Adwords.  Read more about that here.

I looked a bit more.  If I had to guess why you're being penalized it's because your site doesn't have much in the way of original content.  For example, go to a product page, like this one for a Brother ribbon cartridge.  The description reads "Brother Black Ribbon Cartridge. This brand new Brother 1230 black ribbon cartridge is manufactured by Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM). 100% Manufacturer Guaranteed."  If you stick that in Google, you'll see that you, along with every other printer site uses basically the same description, like printert.com, 123cheapink.com, inkcircus.com, etc.

You need to provide original content on your site that doesn't appear as duplicate content to Google.  The blog is a good start.  Having customer reviews, testimonials, and articles custom to your site are also good.

You might try taking a look at your competitors that are doing well in searches, and see what they're doing in terms of original content on their sites.

Google can index and render both CSS and JavaScript, and has an uncanny ability to sort out bad intentions, so if you're trying to mask links with these, Google will (eventually) figure it out.  Your developer's assumption is wrong.  Google has come a long with with this, and can even index some AJAX content (when JavaScript loads additional content to a page from the server).

Lots of navigation use accordions and other widgets that will display or hide navigation links depending on the page state.  That's fine.  Just don't go out of your way to hide links.

SEOMoz has a list of recommended consultants/agencies here: http://www.seomoz.org/article/recommended.  Hopefully you can find someone there!

A 301 redirect for this can be tricky, as the other responses have said in this thread, it can create an infinite redirect loop.  I'm pretty sure it can be done, but I don't have enough technical know-how to tell you what's wrong with your conf code there.

A simple way around this is to put a rel=canonical tag in the of your home page, pointing at your root directory (i.e. "/").  You can include this in the in the file, so it'll show up when the page is accessed under both / and for /index.html.  The HTML for this would look like: .  Make sure your internal links point to the canonical version, as this method may lose you a little pagerank (pagerank coming from /index.html to /).

You have a canonicalization problem for your subdomain too... meaning you're serving the same content for both http://www.jacksonvilleacservice.com (with www) and http://jacksonvilleacservice.com (without www).  I'd pick one, and then do 301 redirects from one to the other, rather than solving that issue with canonical tags.

Google doesn't care, but Bing may not like this.  Read http://nickroshon.com/seo/google-bing-disagree-on-relcanonical-implementation for more info.

No problem!  We had the same spam problem on a form many years ago, and this reduced the spam submissions to zero.  Hopefully it'll work for you too!

Here's all the things you can do to try geotarget your content for the search bots:

• Register each subfolder as a separate site in Google Webmaster Tools (e.g. example.com/ca/, example.com/us/), and geotarget it (see here).
• Set meta tags or http headers on each page to let Bing know the language and country (see here).
• For duplicate or near-duplicate pages across different English speaking localities, you can try out the hreflang tags to clue Google in that they're the same page, but geotargeting users in different locations.  I haven't personally implemented this myself, so I can't speak to how well it works, but you can find more info about it hereand here.

Setting nofollows just stops PageRank from flowing, but bots can still follow these links, so I wouldn't do that.

Yeah, this page should return a 404 status code as a 404 page, not a 200.  Otherwise search bots (like Googlebot and Roger) will think this is a regular page on your site, and as such this page could appear in search results.

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.

I think you could use a redirect plugin for this, for example this one here.  This way you don't have to manually edit .htaccess.  Just make sure the resulting URLs are using 301 redirects.  It looks like there are a lot of plugins for this, so try a few out and see which you like the best!

As you change your URLs, keep track of the old and new URL mappings, and add those redirects to the plugin.

I had a similar problem, Google was picking up

<noscript>text and using it as the description for our pages in some SERPs.  We didn't want to remove them, so we tried using "googleoff" and "googleon" tags, which are just HTML comments that Googlebot can read.  You can read their documentation <a href="https://developers.google.com/search-appliance/documentation/68/admin_crawl/Preparing#pagepart" target="_blank">here</a>.  We wrapped the text in the <noscript> with these comments, and it worked like a charm, so it does look like Google respects these tags.</p> <p>If I were you, I'd go ahead and add the syntax if it's easy for you to do (i.e. only have to add it a few places in the code, not in thousands).  It's probably not great for your SEO that Google thinks your site is about Javascript.  Or you can do what Frederico says and remove it.  Only you know your user base, but he's probably right.  Almost everyone for the most part everyone has Javascript enabled these days.</p> <p>I originally read about this in the Quora thread <a href="http://www.quora.com/Quora/Why-hasnt-Google-banned-Quora-for-hiding-answers-from-search-engine-visitors" target="_blank">here</a>.  Quora Uses it to control what text Googlebot can index on their pages.  If you want to see an example of it on my site, you can view one of our skills <a href="http://www.ixl.com/math/pre-k/identify-circles-squares-and-triangles" target="_blank">here</a>.</p></noscript>

I agree 100% with EGOL to look at your quality scores.  If your scores are low for particular keywords, but the keywords look like they should be well-targeted, you might want to change your match type for those keywords.  Google has several: broad, modified broad, phrase, and exact.  If a broad match keywords isn't doing that well, you might want to change it to phrase, or exact.  The broad matching might be matching queries that aren't a good fit.  Here's what Google says about their match types.

There are a lot of features and targeting options that Adwords offers that you might not be taking advantage of.  Do you have sitelinks for your search campaigns?  Does it make sense to show ads on Google Image search?  If appropriate for your site, have you tried a remarketing campaign?  Have you tried YouTube advertising?  Do you run display ads with Banners/Rich media ads and text ads?  Have you tried targeting the display network with topics and audiences?  Are there sites and pages you always want to advertise on in the display network?  Most people start with keyword-driven campaigns for search and display, but there's a lot more too it.  Some of our best converting campaigns aren't keyword driven.

In my case, Enhanced CPC never really did any better than regular CPC, and conversion optimizer has consistently shown an improvement over regular CPC bidding.  I've heard other people say that conversion optimizer didn't do much for them.  The only way to know is to try it out and see how it goes and compare it to the history when you were CPC bidding.

If the new name is more than 5 characters, I think you can just go to https://www.facebook.com/username and submit the request.

if that doesn't work or it's less than 5 characters, I recently had success through the following channel, and believe me I've tried everything to get an email for a real person or a real person on the phone.  When you log into your Facebook account, there should be an "Email support" link in the left nav.  I picked "Other" and send in information for the request, and someone actually contacted me and they processed our request!  Note that we have ~35K likes, and do spend a bit on advertising ($1-5$K/mo).

I would suspect they'd redirect the old URL to the new URL so it shouldn't be a problem to change it, but you'll want to confirm that with Facebook.  https://www.facebook.com/seomoz goes to their new moz page URL, so that's one case confirming my suspicions.

Exact match keywords are likely to have higher quality scores, but they're going to match a lot less queries than the other match types, so you may not be capturing all the traffic that's profitable for you.  I don't think it's an efficient use of time to add every query as an exact match.  You could spend that time building out new keywords, creating new campaigns, and optimizing them.  They have a lot of different targeting options now!

You can do this in a few different ways, an aggressive way, or a less risky way.  The more aggressive way I would tackle this is to create different campaigns for each of these different ad types.  I'd create a campaign for modified broad, phrase, and exact matches for the keywords you're interested in.  You can do this with Adwords Editor pretty quickly to create identical campaigns with different keyword match types.  For modified broad, you'll want to get rid of a lot of those small filler words, like "in", "the", "for", since you won't want to insist on those words being in the query, so I'd export your phrase or exact match campaign, and in Excel remove those words and add all the +s.

If you a little more risk averse, you can start with an exact match campaign, see how it does for a bit, and then try the same keywords at phrase match.  If that's going well, then you can try modified broad, and if you're happy with your CPA/CPL there, then try broad match.  With broad match, be a little more careful.  I'd keep a close eye on what queries are actually triggering your ads, and add negative keywords as you queries that aren't converting.

By the way, "*" is not a valid keyword character, so you would probably want to put in "3 star london hotels" instead.

One post I came across that could be of interest here regarding Bing.  It's a little old, but probably still accurate.  It sounds like you could get flagged by them, but only if the number of inbound links suddenly increases by orders of magnitude in a short period of time.  Here is the relevant part of the article:

Going unnatural

So what does it mean to go unnatural? It means you're trying to fake out the search engines, to try to earn a higher ranking that the quality of your site's content dictates as natural through manipulation of search engine ranking algorithms. This chicanery can range from relatively benign but useless efforts to overly aggressive promotion to outright fraud. And as the major search engine bots are continually crawling the entire Web, we see what is being done, the relationships between linked sites, the changes to links over time, which sites link to one another, and so much more, we account for these cunning behaviors in our indexing values applied to those pages.

Examples of potentially conspiratorial hocus-pocus that might be perceived as unnatural and warrant a closer review by search engine staff include but are not limited to:

• The number of inbound links suddenly increases by orders of magnitude in a short period of time
• Many inbound links coming from irrelevant blog comments and/or from unrelated sites
• Using hidden links in your pages
• Receiving inbound links from paid link farms, link exchanges, or known "bad neighborhoods" on the Web
• Linking out to known web spam sites

Even though the recipes are the same, I doubt they'd be penalized for having duplicate content.  If the search engine decides that it's duplicate content, it may filter out one or the other, and may knock one page down in the search results.  If your first page of results was all the same page from different domains, the search engine would have failed you.  The duplicate content penalties you're thinking about are more for spammers and spam content, where they're duplicating a lot of content, and doing it intentionally.

In your example, there is a lot else on the page other than the ingredients and the recipes, so that also should mitigate some of the duplication, and they're also laid out a bit differently in the HTML between the two pages, one with divs and one with tables.

Sources:

• [Google Webmaster Central Blog '08](Google Webmaster Central Blog '08 )
• High Rankings Advisor (Jill Whalen) '10

The A/B testing provider I prefer is Optimizely. You can do this all within their interface. Their support is fantastic so if you have issues they can help you resolve them quickly, even if it's just help on how to set up a particular test.

They also have a 30-day trial and you can test out their editor on the spot without installing anything to see how it works, just by entering your URL on their home page.

You can only target to fans of pages you're currently an admin for.  Assuming this isn't the case, there is no way for you to do this as easily as "Target fans of page [competitors name]".

There are lots of other targeting options available on Facebook.  If you can somehow figure out who your competitors fans are (i.e. e-mail address, phone number, or Facebook ID), you could reach them with a Facebook custom audience.

Oh, and I just came across this http://www.sabahan.com/2007/08/06/find-out-how-many-subscribers-a-blog-has-even-when-its-feedcount-is-hidden/... if they're using FeedBurner, and if the blog owner has the FeedCount activated in his FeedBurner account, you'll be able to view the actual number by following the instructions given there.  The article is a bit old so I'm not sure if it'll work; I didn't try it myself.