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I think this is the information everyone is looking for, https://www.seroundtable.com/google-sitemap-index-count-drop-is-a-bug-20608.html  It seems there is a bug in GWT with sitemaps.

Moz is a tool, and like any tool, it is as useful as you make it. If you only use one or two features of it, it could only be useful for a limited amount of time, but if you choose to use all of the features and continually work on your site's SEO it is useful longer.

Did you recently update your site? It seems like a lot of the pages it is pulling were once on your server.

Jon,

I have never done it with a robots.txt, one easy why that I think you could do it would be on the page level. You could add a noindex nofollow to the page itself.

You can generate it automatically too and have it fired depending on the url by using a substring search on the url as well. That will get them all for sure.

One method that I have had really good results with is Rafflecopter. Like everything else it is not a miracle program, it all depends on how you use it. If I had your budget per giveaway this is what I would do.

Use $500 instead of $1000, Once it gets to a point, the monetary value means little for the entries.

I would use the remaining $500 to contact 3-4 good high traffic bloggers and see if they would write a short article on their site about the giveaway. The best way to do it is find bloggers in the same market arena as your client company. I would also submit the contest to all of the contest sites on the internet. There are actually people that sit around and fill out contests all day long. If you company falls in line with what reddit likes, I would consider posting their also, they can achieve some great results.

For the actual contest, in Rafflecopter, the way I would set it up is this.

5 points for liking on facebook

5 points for following on twitter

5 points for tweeting a message (have the message be about the contest, and have people be able to tweet about it daily)

10 points for writing a blog post OR a forum post about the contest (use the custom method and have them submit the url)

10 points for signing up to your mailing list (if you have one, if not disregard)

And also set up viral sharing, so people can use the send to a friend for more entries.

Depending on how much you want to push things, the policy of your company, and the local laws, I would also email the entrants a couple times during the contest to remind them that they can enter again by tweeting. Using Rafflecopter, everyone that enters, you will get their email address.

Some of the things are open to be tweaked and changed. Like with the bloggers, if you are at a major company that people like, you can get away with not paying bloggers. You can also get away with rewarding them by adding a entry option to like their facebook page. But again that all depends on the company you are at and the image they portray.

Hope this helps some.

I do not know if it related, but ther has been a pretty big gmail issue all day. It seems that they understated the problem this morning, but re-adjusted it this evening saying around 50% of accounts were affected. It might have something to do with it, who knows how Google's networks and infrastructure is actually set up. http://techcrunch.com/2013/09/23/gmails-ongoing-email-slow-down-nearing-resolution/

I will be honest, I don't trust Google with PageSpeed. There are too few questions asked about how it actually fits in with the metrics and what is used. One example is Google says resources like Google Analytics do not count against your score in the SERPS. But in the test they do. If you use several Google assets like Adwords, Analytics, fonts, ect; you will show a very low score. Using them will actually block you from seeing other things that you can fix.

What we have started doing is figuring out what Google actually needs and presenting it to them. We started hiding tracking codes from Google. Bing, Facebook, ect from them. We hide our analytics tracking script from Google's crawler. I figured out that Google's test servers have the FA library and also their font library locally on the machine, so we have started hiding those from it as well. Any 3rd party script we have that Google does not need to see has been hidden as well, segmentify, olark, anything really. Doing these things has raised our score quite a bit.

The reason I like Rafflecopter is the points system. As far as analytics, they are so-so in the scope of a contest I feel. It is mostly about exposure to people that will enter a contest. There is a market segment of people that will buy your product and be life long devotees, but will never enter a contest. Then there are people that will never buy your product, but they will enter a contest for everything. There are two keys to contests like this, exposure and not preaching to the choir.

Honestly, my market segment is e-commerce, with social media I think a lot of people cannot see the forest for the trees. Social engagement is nice, but honestly it means nothing. I have clients that have huge numbers of facebook, twitter, pinterest, and other followers but convert little to any. I hear so many people say social media is where it is at. For some companies it truly is, but others it is a waste of money. With my clients the goal is to increase sales, if that happens by increasing social engagement, great. The best way I have found to increase social engagement is by increasing the social reach. That is where not preaching to the choir comes in. You minimally want to advertise the contest to current followers on facebook, because you have already captivated them. Why preach to the people you already have? You want to reach different people, that is where the bloggers come in. You are reaching out to people are not in your network and might not be aware of your product. Those are the new followers you want. They interact with the blog, they follow it, they can do the same for you.

i know this is going to be an unpopular opinion, but I think the whole affiliate marketing companies are skeezy and have low interest people. People do not frequent affiliate sites, so why are they going to frequent yours?

Think about it in perspective, lots of us follow Matt Cutts and Rand, people read every word they say and love it. Those are the kind of followers that you want. Not the kind that come from affiliates. Honestly what value do affiliate sites hold? their followers hold about the same value.

I saw this today, I don't know if you are familiar with it, http://www.notprovidedcount.com/  and this http://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-gone-100-provided-secure-search/70799/  They could also be affecting things.

My best guess is that your mobile menu is throwing it off. You might try disabling it and testing in the Mobile Friendly test. https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.wolfautomation.com%2Fdrive-accessory-safety-sto-module-i500

Oh, that is way excessive. I thought that he was installing it and setting everything up on the account and goal side as well.

I honestly would have a hard time paying that. I mean really if you think about it, he is saying that he worked on it all week, 8 hour days (with an hr lunch break). I guess the major questions I would have for you are; have you used him before? does work with Wordpress much? Did he actually create a dynamic module, or just install it on the form? I could see the cost being that high under the circumstance that he created a module that you could easily use GTM any where on the site. But other than that, he should have known better.

If you want to post your site or email it to me at lesley@dh42.com I can tell you if you have a canonical tag on your site. You can also view source and search for it as well.

We are adding json+ld data to an ecommerce site and myself and one of the other people working on the site are having a minor disagreement on things. What it comes down to is how to mark up the category page. One of us says it needs to be marked up with as an Itempage, https://schema.org/ItemPage  The other says it needs to be marked up as products, with multiple product instances in the schema, https://schema.org/Product

The main sticking point on the Itemlist is that Itemlist is a child of intangible, so there is a feeling that should be used for things like track listings or other arbitrary data.

Bob,

Just to add to what Umar said, it looks like Google is integrating adwords into youtube in an interesting way. I just saw this, this morning. http://www.trustedreviews.com/news/google-bringing-buy-option-into-youtube-ads

I personally would make them separate. The reason being is we do not know specifically how all of the crawlers are designed. Some might pick it up, others might not. I would look at it a better safe than sorry type situation.

edit: Sorry for the ninja edits, but I ran a couple of pages through a few crawlers and none picked up the meta description. The itemprop is throwing it off. I would do two different tags, the tradition and the rich ones. The reason being there is a collision in the naming convention and I honestly have no data on what crawlers would support in that sense. From what I have observed, and I could be wrong, but I think google might actually use a different crawler for rich markup. The reason being is that normally I can get pages indexed on the first crawl, but it takes a lot of time for the snippets to get indexed. Either they use a different crawler or some kind of review process.

There are lots of attempts at tools, but there is nothing remotely even close from my looking. Especially for as specific as you want.

This might answer your question, http://moz.com/community/q/opensite-explorer-and-just-discover-links