What technology is being used for your navigation? If you are using javascript for dropdowns or links that will definitely effect your link juice flowing to internal pages.

In my experiences there is no direct correlation with ppc and organic. However, i have noticed one indirect benefits of pay-per-click overall. When running a ppc campaign through Google they re-scan your site very often to create your keyword's quality score. Due to this increase in crawling i have found that new content gets indexed faster.

Once again, this is an indirect benefit. In no way does a quick indexation mean a higher rank. it just simply means you turn around on releasing content can be faster.

I definitely agree going down to one domain is a good plan and janmi is correct. You will want to make sure you redirect your specific language site to the relevant directory. In regards to increasing your rankings, focus on your on-page optimizations for each language. I am currently going through this myself and got some great feedback a couple weeks ago:

http://www.seomoz.org/q/international-seo-3

In regards to tracking your success, use your analytics to track the increase of traffic per language with an advanced segment of non-paid search.

Good luck!

I'm sure we have all read about the latest round of Google's algorithm changes also known as the "Panda 2.5" updates. This latest update seems to have hit some pretty large press release sites including PR Newswire and Businesswire (both of these have a great page rank and domain authority making them a great tool for SEO's in regards to inbounds links).

Ultimately this update has directly affected their sites traffic, keyword rankings, and the number of indexed pages in Google. But what will this do to our smaller sites that benefit from these great links? Will these panda updates continue to target these content farms and lower their domain authority? Will that extrapolate out and effect the domain authority of our sites?

What are your thoughts for those of us that utilize these services, should we re-evaluate our process?

I look forward to a great discussion.

Regards - Kyle

Joshua - thank you for the reply, it is always helpful for me to compare stats with others in the industry.

I also found it odd that the direct wasn't higher, however they domain has a great keyword in it so they benefit quite a bit from that. Other than that they have a pretty low domain authority (less than 20).

Hey Mozzers - i was hoping to have a discussion with you guys on conversion rates and would love any feedback on comparative metrics. I plan on keeping my client anonymous and feel free to do the same if you would like.

Lets start with some background. This client is an online retailer selling golf training ads, the products range from $20-40, he is based out of the US and this site is targeting consumers (B2C).

So far i have assisted him with some site analysis and setting up some pay-per-click campaigns. I feel like his site is doing pretty well conversion-wise but i have little experience with conversion metrics with ecommerce (mostly just lead generation, etc).

Here is a quick break down on channel conversion rates:

PPC: 0.8% - 1.7%
Organic: 6.8% - 15% 
Direct: 6.2% - 13%

His overall site conversion rate is between 2-3%

So my question is to you guys. Is this average, above, or below in your past experiences? Based on my research a site conversion rate of 2-3 is pretty good for ecommerce, however i felt like my PPC conversion rate is kind of low.

Thanks for the insight - Kyle

That was going to be my assumption but i wasn't 100% sure how they worked with sub domains. Are you able to supply a little more information on implementation? It is extremely important that it only blocks: sub.domain.com and not domain.com

This is a pretty quick and simple (i'm hoping) question. What is the best way to completely block a sub domain from getting indexed from all search engines?

One item i cannot use is the meta "no follow" tag.

Thanks! - Kyle

Agreed, i just found it odd that they currently rank for "print and apply" but not for "print-and-apply" it leads me to believe that if we did target one way or another it could influence rankings. I would be intrigued if anyone else has seen this before.

I have a client that has been optimizing for "print and apply" for the past 5 months. Yesterday they decided it was more grammatically correct to use "print-and-apply."

There question to me was "is this going to effect our SEO?"

So...

I checked the difficulty using the keyword analysis tool, both keywords had the same broad/exact adwords traffic as well as difficulty percentage. When reviewing the top 25 listings for each keyword it looks like the same sites rank in the SERPs between 1-8 and then after that it is completely different.

So, is there a better keyword to target? Are these two keywords different enough to truly have separate search results?
The top 8 results didn't even target "print-and-apply" in there content or title tags...

Thanks for the input/discussion - Kyle

Well the reason i asked to see an example was to ensure that you had the correct doc type and markup for the title tag. I may be just misunderstanding you, but the title tag is not a META tag. It is its own tag all together for instance:

<title>HTML5 Exampletitle>

Instead of the depreciated tag:

Do you have an example of your page to review?

I personally have never had an issue with the customer support tickets, always quick and courtesy. As for the "private questions" i have found them to take a full week (7 days) until i get a first response. I'm not sure if they are taking that long to formulate the best response or if they are just that busy?

I have had some hit and miss experiences with Joomla so i couldn't give you a great recommendation. However I have had success with a few other open source CMS/Ecommerce solutions that work well on shared servers and have SEO friendly URLS:

http://www.opencart.com/
http://www.magentocommerce.com/

From what i have read Google wants their crawler and end users to see the same content and have the same experience. Based on that, if you have a header image that says "Great Deals" and you want search engines to read that, simply place that content in your ALT tag (SEOMoz has even posted studies showing that the ALT tag holds more relevance than the

in regards to keyword placement).

So my question to you is why would you need the

to be their in the first place?

Well this may be a self promotion, but the company i work for has a great development team specifically in regards to custom CMS sites that utilize the .NET platform. We also have a growing web design and marketing team, feel free to check out our website and portfolio: http://www.hileman.biz/

Some external references for our company:

http://www.kentico.com/Partners/Hileman-Enterprises-LLC.aspx

https://adwords.google.com/professionals/profile/org?id=03470296118255362028&hl=en

I see what you are saying, just seems so strange that some directories are okay and some are not. Maybe the its authority they have for instance yahoo vs absolute directory?

None-the-less, thank you for all the feedback, definitely helpful in making my decision.

You made a very good point. What about directories like dir.yahoo.com? Or association sites that are directly related to their industry?

I am not disagreeing with you i am just trying to understand if there is a line of black and white or if it is gray.

Thank you for your reply!

Have any of you ever purchased a directory listing with Absolute Directory (http:www.absolutedirectory.com)?

I was thinking about suggesting it to some of my clients since it was inexpensive, had a good domain authority (58), moz trust (5.81), and didn't seem to be filled with any ads or obtrusive content. Any thoughts? Is this to good to be true?

Regards - Kyle

I have always been under the impression that top level (or root) domains can hold different domain authority than that of a sub domain. Meaning that sub domain's and TLD can hold different ranks and strength in search engine result pages. Is this a correct or just an assumption?

If so when i add a root domain and subdomain into the campaign manager i get back the same link information and domain authority?

www.datalogic.com
www.automation.datalogic.com

Have I made an incorrect assumption or is this an issue with the SEOMoz campaign manager?