Welcome to the Q&A Forum

It really depends on your goals from here. Are you looking to boost traffic from social sites? If so, you're going to want to learn what your audience wants and start creating it, sharing it and participating in conversations on these platforms to earn their trust and engagement.

If your goal is to provide customer service and reputation tracking/management, you can set up alerts through services like Google Alerts (www.google.com/alerts) and many other services (this Quora thread is quite helpful on tools that can assist on that front: http://www.quora.com/Are-there-any-free-tools-available-to-track-Twitter-mentions-and-ideally-sentiment)

If you're seeking to boost SEO rankings using social media, you'll need to build up an engaged contingent of friends/followers who will share/like/tweet your content.

Some good resources include:

• http://www.seomoz.org/blog/social-media-marketing-facebook-twitter-arent-enough
• http://www.seomoz.org/blog/comparing-seo-social-media-as-marketing-channels
• http://www.seomoz.org/blog/a-visual-tour-through-the-basics-of-social-media-marketing

Best of luck!

Dejan's solution is solid, but you may also want to try writing a redirect rule, using mod_rewrite for Apache (or ISAPI_rewrite in IIS). More info here - http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection and here - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/url-rewrites-and-301-redirects-how-does-it-all-work

I hear you - it's a frustration, but in a system that needs to crawl 30K+ sites each week without hitting anyone's server too hard, being a bother to a SysAdmin and keeping up with a massively complex, ever-changing queue, it's the reality.

That said, we do have a custom crawl tool you can fire anytime and usually get data back within just a few hours! It's here - http://www.seomoz.org/labs/cc

The intent/value behind the crawl inside the campaign is much less about a specific, one-time crawl, and more about having data every week, with historical information showing progress, updates and warnings (in case something goes wrong). There's lots of good free tools as well for single-purpose crawls, e.g. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/xenu-link-sleuth-more-than-just-a-broken-links-finder

Also, just to be totally clear - the system running the crawls for the web app in you campaigns is different than the Linkscape web index (which only updates every 3-4 weeks). Eventually, the two might merge, but we didn't want to bias any crawling inside Linkscape when we launched the web app last September.

Three things I'd recommend checking out:

1. This video on SEO basics - http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo (at the top)
2. The Beginner's Guide to SEO - http://guides.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-search-engine-optimization
3. This guide to on-page optimization, which can help answer a lot of the specific questions you've got here - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/perfecting-keyword-targeting-on-page-optimization

As Joel pointed out, the on-page optimization tool that's part of PRO can also be helpful, but it's good to have an understanding of the what and why, too.

This powerpoint deck might also be helpful if you like PPT format as a way to run through things - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/a-comprehensive-intro-to-seo-powerpoint-slide-deck-

Wish you the best of luck!

In the PRO Web App, the CSV export of your crawl includes the list of sources for all 404s/500s/etc. that can help. You'll also find these in Google Webmaster Tools for your site.

There's a few popular ones:

• SEMRush
• KeyCompete
• SpyFu
• Compete.com

They all use large-scale results scraping to get data (except Compete, which uses ISP/clickstream info), so make sure to check the quality of data sources.

Hi David - I'm looking at the top pages report and don't see those (but only browsed through a few pages, so they could be further down). I suspect what's happening is some sort of misconstructed redirects or links to those pages. If you use the PRO Web App's crawling functionality, you can create a campaign for kpmginstitutes.com and see not only where those errors happen, but download a CSV and get the sources of the 404s, too.

You might also find this information in Google Webmaster Tools.

It isn't YOUTube, but we did cover http://www.wistia.com which allows you to make embeds that point back to your site, automatically creates Video XML Sitemaps for you and generally rocks

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/video-seo-basics-whiteboard-friday-11080 and http://www.seomoz.org/blog/creating-online-video-strategy are both good posts on the topic.

Don't think that's an entirely accurate (or at least, not comprehensive) explanation of PageRank. Simply generating more pages on a site regardless of their ability to generate external links, is likely a way to dilute the site's ability to be crawled/indexed/ranked over time. See http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-pagerank-works-why-the-original-pr-formula-may-be-flawed and http://www.seomoz.org/blog/google-says-yes-you-can-still-sculpt-pagerank-no-you-cant-do-it-with-nofollow for more.

Pamela - I'd also make a recommendation to use http://www.whitespark.ca/local-citation-finder/ to help identify some good sources AND definitely make sure all the information is up to date on old listings in the local results for your client. Google Places relies on these citations to do the rankings, so you can seriously help them by being on top of those listings

Yeah - htaccess is the way to go for rewrite rules. Check out http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection for more depth/detail, too.

If that's the timeframe, it's most likely not the recent Farmer Update. I'd guess it's most likely to be a penalty of some kind (manipulative linking practices, cloaking, thin/duplicate/scraped content are the most likely culprits). You might check out these posts for more detail:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-handle-a-google-penalty-and-an-example-from-the-field-of-real-estate

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/pagelevel-algorithmic-penalties-on-the-rise-from-google

It really depends on the situation. If you've got a Facebook page that can get an extremely high number of likes/shares, but the webpage/domain version of that same page couldn't earn similar quantities of links/social mentions, it's possible the Facebook page would outperform. That said, due to the limitations and restrictions of the Facebook platform, and because it's a property someone else owns and controls (Facebook), I'd never go that route by default unless I knew it was a very specific, short term campaign.

I don't think I could get by without the mozBar. It makes my SEO browsing so much faster and I always feel like a power-SEO in front of others when I can show it off, particularly the page overlay vs. having to click "view source" or "inspect element" to find issues on a page.

Hi Kristina - I actually wrote an in-depth post about this and did a whiteboard Friday on the topic:

• http://www.seomoz.org/blog/understanding-root-domains-subdomains-vs-subfolders-microsites
• http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-the-microsite-mistake

Basically, the answer is "sometimes" subdomains will be connected with the root domain and other subdomains in the eyes of the engines, but other times, this isn't the case.

In the specific one you're describing, my guess is that much of the root domain authority and ranking power will pass to the subdomain, so long as there are good links passing between the two (indicating a relationship, rather than a new, separate site).

best,

Rand

You probably don't need to worry about the noindex tag, just the rel=canonical should be enough to get the engines recognizing the right page (and I'm not 100% sure how the noindex might interact).