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Other issues to be aware of: lots of our social counts went back to 0s, as lots of URLs changed, and it wasn't possible to migrate comments from the old system, so those have gone back to 0 as well. We wonder if this might be affecting both users and search engines perception of the site.

Yes, anytime content changes and it gets crawled it will influence rankings/perception. However, it does not mean you will necessary lose any positions.

Also, any site migration you will typically drop in traffic (unless it's a small site with all the correct redirects). It happens, but as long as the traffic doesn't drop significantly--you did your job. Just keep monitoring it.

If you don't have concrete requirements, you are right do it hourly as scope creep will eat up a fixed budget quickly. Some of the tasks have different market rate ranges (based on what Cole/William stated)--but if you are comfortable at $50 an hour and have capacity, go for it.

A simpler way is just export your phone bill and match it up w/the customer's number in your crm or other system. If you are measuring attribution to campaign, you can just get a bunch of numbers and use them for that campaign (ie- flyer or whatever).

For best results, you will need to utilize a service that supports DNI (dynamic number insertion) and integrate it w/your crm. This will help provide source, medium, campaign, ltv and etc. but require much time to set up. These services also can connect w/GA. Some of these providers are callrail, dialogtech, convirza and etc.

Good luck!

I would wait to see the rankings positions in a week or two.

Many things could cause the fluctuations and it would relate to your site or the competitors. If your competitors gain some good inbound links, it may push you down. If you lose some inbound links, you could be push down. There are hundreds of factors for this.

Just stay on top of it and adjust accordingly.

I believe pagerank is mostly measured by the number and popularity of inbound links. So by having a high pagerank increases your traffic instead of the other way around.

However, is traffic a component of the Googl Algo? There is some debate on this and the only ones that really knows is Google.

Once the organics show the new url, I wait aprox 90 days to remove. However, if you have many inbound links to the old pages, I would consider keeping them longer.

IMHO, page extensions doesn't matter for ranking (the spiders are more concerned on what is on the page). However, there are positive aspects on being consistent.

Changing the page to .html and having the proper redirect will most likely yield no change. However, there is discussion on a dampening effect, but I don't think anyone really knows (except G's engineers). Great article on it.

First thing to focus on is the user experience as everything is secondary. Prominence and H1 are factors in SEO, but are not weighed as high as they once were.

Typically a heading would be under a menu, and I would stick to this.

I think what Paul meant was that the data collected in Analytics is not used for ranking purposes. There are many sites that do not use GA, and it would be unfair to use for that purposes. However, Google offers GA for free and I am sure that there are mining purposes that may affect different Google products.

Yes. I would also distribute a press release and have the email link to it (or a link to your landing page) for additional info to keep the email minimum in length.

Probably nothing to worry about (Google will index content in hidden divs). The first post was just a rule of thumb.

Can any other mozzer's chime in?

Please read: http://www.seomoz.org/q/do-domain-extensions-such-as-com-or-net-affect-seo-value

IMHO, .com is much better for the fact that is looked on as more desirable than .net (human perception).

However, is the .com favored more by the algorithm anymore? The juries out on that one...

According to this source (6 years old and college demos) :

• Higher requests occurred on weekdays than on weekends – as one would expect.

• Diurnal traffic patterns were observed – i.e. More requests occurred during the day than at night.

• Steady increase in traffic to youtube from 8am until 1pm

• Steady state of peak traffic between 2pm and 6pm

• Steady decline in traffic between 7pm and 7am

• So: Best time to upload your video to Youtube is:

  • During the week
  • Wed or Thurs is best
  • Submit your video between 12pm and 1pm as it can take up to an hour to upload and process your video. This way your video will be live during peak traffic at 2pm – that is the target.

Good eyes--Fixed!

If the site is simple and you don't want to spend a ton of resources on it, just create it via: http://www.dudamobile.com/ (has limitations, but can create a site in 5 minutes).

I agree with Andy. Many of our search result pages rank well (and actually convert quite well). I don't think you need to disallow them unless it's for content that doesn't exist. Even at that time, you may still want them up because you may offer complementary products and etc.

I talked to GetStat at MozCon this year and believe that they can help you out on this. No guarantees though. Good luck!

I think the best place to find stories and etc are actually on the forums (webmasterworld, warriorforum & here). There are countless stories of people messing stuff up and remedies for those issues.

Hope it helps!

If you are a smaller firm and you wear all the hats, here are instructions on how to give yourself a hug (yes--real instructions).

Great answer Donford. We have a large site, with many items that are basically the same but usually have one different attribute value. So Google will typical index a parent page and list the rest as:

Results 1 - 15 of 15 – Medium Duty - Swivel Top Plate - Capacity to 400 lbs ...

So even though the page may not be in the primary index, it will still help the visitor get to what they are looking for. So I would advise grabbing a snippet of text on a page not indexed and using it as a query to see if this is the case.