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If you search for the site "ixl.com" in Alexa, for some reason, it's showing the site as "302 Found" instead of showing the website name, IXL.  If you drill into that, it shows the site as ixl.com, but underneath that, it says "302 Found" again.  Every other site I search for seems to show the site's name properly.  I have no idea where it's getting this "302 Found" from.  Does anyone know how to fix this?

Here's a link directly to the search results page: http://www.alexa.com/search?q=ixl.com

As a user, I prefer the URLs without.  Looking at the SEOMoz 2011 Rankings, longer URLs correlate to worse rankings, so do yourself and your users a favor and save them 5 characters.

http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors#metrics-8

One thing you could try is to put the following meta tag on the page, and once Google re-indexes the page, remove it immediately.  This tag will take down the instant preview, but also takes out your meta description on SERPs, so you'll want to remove it as soon as Google re-indexes the page. Once you remove it, Google will (hopefully) create a new snapshot of your page?  I have no idea if when Google re-indexes the page if they'll go create a new snapshot, or dig up the old one to display, but it seems like there should be a fair chance they'll take a new one?

Again, I've never tried this, so I'm only endorsing it as a possible idea, it is not a tried and tested solution.

[http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35304](http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35304)

This is where the adCenter Destkop tool and Excel will be your friend! You should be able to export your whole account, and set it up in Excel to construct your destination URLs using your campaign name, ad group name, and keyword (and any other info you want to add). Then you can re-import this file back into adCenter Desktop and update your account.

If you have questions with specifics, let me know.

The best thing to do is set up the geotargeting in Webmaster Tools for Google, and for other search engines, set the country and language you're targeting on the HTTP headers or in a meta tag (see here).

Your English version is probably a lot more popular and has a lot more backlinks to it than your regional versions, so it will rank better as compared to your region-specific subdomains.

To make it easier to find the right version, you could make it more clear on your site how to find the different international versions.  For example, if you can't read English, you won't know to click a link that says "international versions".  We got around this on the site I work on by using flags in the UI, since most people are familiar with the concept of each country having a different flag. (see http://au.ixl.com/ for example).

It's not considered cloaking when you're giving the same information in two different ways, an improved version for users, and a different version for the search bots which they can read. If you look at http://code.google.com/web/ajaxcrawling/docs/getting-started.html, the HTML snapshot method they're recommending is serving the bot an HTML snapshot of a page, rather than using AJAX to render it (or parts of it). This sounds similar to what you're doing.

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.

301 redirect chains are bad.  If it's important to you to get the link juice to get from page A to page D, you should change it to just one redirect from A --> D.  Matt Cutts talked to Rand about it on a whiteboard Friday http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-interview-googles-matt-cutts-on-redirects-trust-more:

Is It a Bad Idea to Chain Redirects (e.g. 301-->301-->301)?

"It is, yeah."

Matt was very clear that Google can and usually will deal with one or two redirects in a series, but three is pushing it and anything beyond that probably won't be followed.  He also reiterated that 302s should only be used for temporary redirects...but you already knew that, right?

Thanks Nick!

Hey guys!

Suppose I disallow search bots from indexing anything on my secure server in my robots.txt, and 301 redirect all of my secure server traffic to my non-secure site.  Will the search bots see the redirect before they realize that they're disallowed from accessing that page?  Or will they see that page is disallowed and not follow the redirect?

Should I change my robots.txt to allow search bots to crawl my secure site so they can find the redirects?

Cyrus mentioned this in his whiteboard friday here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/title-tags-is-70-characters-the-best-practice-whiteboard-friday

Second is write for users. Here at SEOmoz our title tag is the same as the title of our post on our blog because we think it is important to meet users' expectations. When they see a title tag in the SERP and they click through to your page, you want them to feel like they've arrived where they thought they were going to arrive. So, it doesn't always have to match the title of your post, but something similar, something to make them comfortable, and something to talk to the users.

You're serving pages for http://allrmc.com/, http://www.allrmc.com/, and http://allrmc.com/index.php.  It looks like you implemented a rel canonical to point all of these to the www version of your home page.  Ideally, you could just 301 redirect all of them to the www version, but since they're all the same page, Google should respect the canonical.  If you do a general redirect for all of your pages to go from the non-www to the www version, that would fix this for the rest of the pages on your site, which also suffer from this and don't have canonical tags on them.

It won't matter for the SERPs really if you go with the www or non-www version everywhere.

From Google Webmaster Blog, April 9th, 2010 http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/04/using-site-speed-in-web-search-ranking.html:

While site speed is a new signal, it doesn't carry as much weight as the relevance of a page. Currently, fewer than 1% of search queries are affected by the site speed signal in our implementation and the signal for site speed only applies for visitors searching in English on Google.com at this point. We launched this change a few weeks back after rigorous testing. If you haven't seen much change to your site rankings, then this site speed change possibly did not impact your site.

Thanks for the answers everyone!  It's still crazy to me that these pages actually work.

Do these mile-long pages with a call to action at the bottom really produce more conversions? For example, see http://www.keywordelite.com/. Has anyone A/B tested this format vs. breaking up the content into tabs or some other format with multiple pages? Personally, these turn me off as they seem disorganized, they take forever to read, and they always sound like scams.

Using the Adwords tool works to find the high volume and low competition keywords. You should have an instinct for which of these will convert best. Build your content around those, and over time you'll see which keywords produce the highest value. I don't know of a tool that will measure the value of keywords for you. Since everyone's site is different, I have a hard time picturing how that would work.

What you've got there looks good to me!  The iframe method is what you want to do for the widget.  I'd be wary of trying to load additional Javascript on other people's web pages.  The physical link ends up on their page, so it should count.

Note that by putting the link on their page, all their CSS is going to get applied to it, so the

and <a>tags might not look the same from site to site, but it should be consistent with the style of the page they place it on.  If you want the text and link to stand out a bit, you could add your own styling to the text (specifying color, size, font-family, hover, etc).</a>

<a></a>

<a>And if you'll allow me to nitpick, I'd say "is provided", and put a period between the</a> and

.

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.

Having two homepages sounds weird to me. I'd definitely opt for 301 redirecting /Index to your regular home page to pass all the link juice to one page.  The old /Index page isn't really an "empty" URL, it will redirect to your regular home page, so people who try to navigate there will see your regular home page.

How to implement the redirect I believe will depend on what you're running your server on (Apache, etc).

From http://www.seobook.com/smx-east-2011-recap-seobook:

"At this point it seems Google will crawl a page if +1 is present, regardless of the robots.txt. This could possibly create issues with trying to not crawl certain pages to avoid dup content. More information found here:http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4358033.htm."

My guess is that they'll ignore your noindex tags too if you have a +1 button on your page.