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It's all about quality unique content.  The reason a lot of .edu's do well is because they have a lot of domain authority and a lot of them have been around for a long time.  The directories that pass good link juice have this going for them as well.  If you create a link farm on an .edu domain, you won't be fooling the search engines.  It'll be a brand new site with no links to it that has no unique content which links out to a bunch of sites which may also be spammy, aka a link farm.

I'm not sure what your goal is with this site.  If your goal in creating the site is to give an SEO bonus to these site you're linking to, I doubt it do any good.  If your goal is to create a site that is a directory that is useful to people, and people start using it, linking to it, sharing it, then it could work.  If your goal is to put up a site that has some links for your own enjoyment, go for it!  If Google thinks your site is a link farm, it's not like they're going to dispatch agents to your house in the middle of the night or anything.

The NCAA site does seem to be pretty well put together.  Like you said, their TITLE changes from page to page, which you need for decent SEO.  Also, once you figure that out, you should also be changing your META description tag within the HEAD on each page on your site, so it describes that page you're on.  In the meantime, I would recommend removing your meta description altogether from all of your pages if you can't set it on a page by page basis.  That way, the search engines will try to pick out the most relevant text from your pages (and relating to the user's search query) instead of always using "Auto Insurance from Universal Insurance Group – Trusted. Fast. Service." (also you're missing some punctuation here between Group and Trusted).

Working within this platform, one thing which the NCAA site is doing well,which I think you could try to do is to get that nasty session parameter out of your URLs.  I think you only need that if you're tracking the user's session?  The NCAA site doesn't include it until I click the member login link.  Since the Googlebot won't be signing in, if you can manage to get rid the these parameters when people aren't signed in, that would improve the SEO of your URLs.

The more of these random directories you can get out of the URLs, the better.  So it looks like the way it's configured right now, is the URL doesn't change, except for the WCM_GLOBAL_CONTEXT parameter at the end, which is setting the content of the page?  The NCAA site is getting the WCM_GLOBAL_CONTEXT parameter to appear at the end of the URL, like it should be, rather than as a parameter.  That is much more natural, and I would imagine Google rather see keywords in the URLs rather than in parameters in URLs.

So... if you have these set up as separate profiles, and have a profile that's just for the www.example.com subdomain, and have set up the scehdule a service action as a goal, you should be able to see this in your conversion paths report.  Go to Conversions > Multi-Channel Funnels > Top Conversion Paths.  Select "Source/Medium Path" as the Primary Dimension.  Now, if you filter by "example.com", this should show conversions that involve referrals from your subdomains (that aren't a part of that GA profile).  If you have many goals and only are interested in the schedule a service goal, then select only that goal at the top.

As is the case many times in Google Analytics, there's more than one way to skin a cat, but hopefully this works for you.

This is no longer allowed.  Notice when you do this from interests, it says "People who have expressed an interest in or like pages related to SEOmoz.org".  This isn't necessarily mean you'll reach people who like the SEOmoz page, but people Facebook thinks are similar to people who like their page.  To reach fans of a specific page, you have to be an admin of that page.

Twitter does the same thing for their targeting, you can't target people who follow a specific account, but you can target people like those that follow an account.

As far as its paid discovery goes, we didn't have much success with conversions.  It's great for getting people to your site, but since people just stumble from site to site, our traffic from them had a really high bounce rate, and not very many conversions.  I believe they've come out with better targeting options since I've tried it, so I can't speak to those.

Here's a post from someone who had a spike of traffic come from StumbleUpon.  The tl;dr; the author gives there is "From this, I’d sum up that, while StumbleUpon users are just as likely to stay to read as anyone else, they will probably leave after they've read the stumbled page, and are not likely to engage further with the site."

According to this infographic here, Stumbleupon is pretty huge traffic-wise.

Also, Digg is dying a slow death.  Reddit is where it's at.

Google. Pick a few sentences or phrases in the article, and Google them. If you put quotes around them, Google will only return results with exact phrase matches. If any of the phrases show results, look and see if the article is the same.

A few other things to note for having parameters in URLs:

• In Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Tools, you can instruct the search engines to ignore certain parameters, so that they'll treat domain.com/topic?keyword and domain.com/topic as the same page (if ?keyword doesn't change the page content)
• You can also place the rel=canonical element on pages.  So you could set domain.com/topic?keyword to rel canonical to domain.com/topic to pass its pagerank along.

Anytime!  Happy to help.

If it returns a 200 OK code, it can be indexed as a page and may appear in search results, which isn't great since you don't really want to be bringing people in to your 404 page.  According to Wikipedia, this is a "Soft 404".  Since there is a section under Crawl Errors in Google Webmaster Tools for Soft 404's, I take it that it's better to return a 404 code.

This may be obvious but I'd start with Adwords.  They have a huge reach over their display network, and the most control over your site retargeting campaigns.  You can create different ad groups depending on whether the user visited different pages, or have been away from your site for different durations of time (so you can control the ad text and bids for longer intervals).

We've also used BurstMedia and they've been able to hit our CPA targets.  I'm still looking into trying Adroll, Retargeter, Adbrite, Valueclick, Criteo, and Adify (Cox Digital Solutions now?) to name a few.  Have you tried any of those (to turn your question back on to you)?

If you have any questions about retargeting in Adwords, let me know.

Take a look at this Whiteboard Friday; Cyrus can answer your question better than I can: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/beyond-exact-match-anchor-text-to-next-generation-link-signals-whiteboard-friday

You need to 301 redirect all these old URLs to their new counterparts.  If you just block them, people who have linked to these pages across the web will be getting 404 pages, so you'll be losing potential customers.  Also, you won't be passing the Pagerank along.

You can set up the goals in the subdomains profiles if you want to view goals there.  That's entirely up to you.  Each profile is its own thing.  When I say "filter", I mean write "example.com" into the search box there, and search by it.  You can also click "advanced" next to the search box, and make the search more granular if needbe.

For one, the hreflang markup tells Google which pages are similar to this exact page in your other localizations, which is not specified at all in webmaster tools.  From my understanding, the hreflang tags will swap out a page to the correct localized version on search result pages, which is doing a lot more than simply telling Google that the content in a subfolder is localized to a specific location.

Hey all!

Does anyone have any experience with the following ad management platforms (or any other ones they'd like to weigh in on)?  I'm going to be using one in-house, not as an agency.

1. DoubleClick Search
2. Marin Software
3. Acquisio
4. Kenshoo

If you have the check my links extension in Chrome, it makes it easy to find URLs that 404 on any page.  You can install it here: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ojkcdipcgfaekbeaelaapakgnjflfglf.

ref=nofollow is incorrect (according to this).  If it's ignored, it will pass all of its link juice.

You have this right, more or less.  For display remarketing, they only require 100 people to be cookied to start serving ads, according to this.  People will cycle in and out of the list based on when they were cookied, like you outlined in your question.  So the list will increase for 60 days, and then likely will steady out if your traffic is relatively steady as new visitors arrive and non-recent visitors are removed from the list.

If you get Adwords remarketing up and running and it's working well, try it out on more pages or flows on your site.  If you want to try it out based on events on your site, you try Google Analytics Remarketing without adding more code to your site (note that this type of remarketing is not supported for search remarketing).  When it's time to branch out, there are a few more larger platforms you can try out remarketing on:

• Remarketing outside of GDN (we use and like Adroll for this)
• Twitter
• Facebook

You'll be serving identical content from two different URLs, even though they're on different domains.  It sounds like you'll want www.newdomain.com to do well in it's rankings in its country, and it's probably not as important that www.mysite.com/countryname/ URLs do all that well everywhere else.  If that's true:

1. You should rel=canonical (what's that?) all URLs under www.mysite.com/countryname/ to their corresponding page in www.newdomain.com, so the pagerank will flow to those URLs under newdomain, and you won't have duplicate content issues with the search engines.  Google does support cross-domain rel=canonical tags (source).
2. For newdomain, set up Google Webmaster Tools, and set it so you're geotargeting that country (source).
3. For newdomain URLs, set the Content-Language so other search engines (like Bing) can understand the geotargeting.  This can be done in a variety of ways (source).  We found it easiest to set it on our HTTP headers.

Think of it this way.  Each ad group is a cluster of keywords that will all trigger the same ad or ads.  When someone searches for Bay Windows, you probably want your ad text to use the words "Bay Windows" in it, and you'll want to link to a landing page discussing Bay Windows, so you'll need an ad group dedicated to Bay Windows.  It'll have keywords like "install bay windows", "buy bay windows", "insulation for bay windows", or whatever is relevant to your business.  You could have another ad group for garden windows doing the same.

If you need fine grained control over your budgets for each of these, then you'd need them to be in separate campaigns.

Also, don't be surprised if Google goes over budget on any given day. You set a daily budget for a campaign, but Google is allowed to overspend that by 20% each day.  If they overspend over for an entire month and you haven't changed the budget, they'll only charge you 30.4 times your daily budget, and refund you the difference (I've never had this happen).