Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Christopher. There are quite a few of these depending on what it is you're selling. Things like SaaS providers who are providing a managed service for an entire enterprise typically have a very robust sales process but within analytics they'll do things like associating goal values with watching a video, downloading a PDF, attending a webinar, number of pages on the site visited, and so on. All these actions get tallied into a score that is associated with the lead and best case recorded into the CRM so that sales has an understanding of which leads are closer to purchase than others or how qualified a new lead might be.

Avinash Kaushik also goes into great detail on this in several places on his blog. Here's one such example: http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/web-analytics-tips-identify-website-goal-values/  You'll hear these called goal values, micro conversions, lead attribution (in the context of valuing multi-channel work), and so on. Basically it's everything that isn't a sale in the classic sense, but could be associated with a value in terms of "free" marketing, engagement, life-time-value, and so on. Sales are often included in the full model as well, but nearly any business starts out tracking those. Hope this helps your study further. Cheers!

As Leonie states, the search engines are for public facing content. If your site is completely private then you'd be more interested in making sure it's not found anywhere other than by members, however it sounds like you have some aspects of the site that could be public or created to attract new members. Typically in these cases you pull small topical samples from the site that are shown to benefit the members and help articulate why membership is valuable.  It may be a matter of having what is practically like two sites: the public facing, membership recruitment site, and the private, non-indexed membership site.  Cheers!

Ah. Regarding #3: If you have a disallow in the robots.txt the search engines won't pick up the noindex. Ensure the noindex code is in place on the applicable pages, remove the disallow, and the pages should be removed after they're crawled.  getting that relationship straightened out might help with some of the other things as well. Cheers!

Like EGOL mentions, going after unnaturally long links--and the type of copy that falls afield of some of the Adwords policy--is likely to cause issues in your work to aggressively link internally. What is fine is remaining factual and linking to your 'green widgets' page with the link, 'green widgets'.  Just look at Wikipedia's level of internal linking...

Leave the best of stuff to review sites or pages.

All great finds Dirk! Thumbs up on this. Jake should have plenty of things to add to the list now.

Hi Tamir. Even though Google is a registrar itself and could see the change in ownership on the domain name, if there are a lot of spammy backlinks associated with Holidayshuahin.com, it'd be best to disavow them as part of your new ownership.  You'll also want to register the site in GWT, Bing, etc to display new ownership, and make sure any of the old content is changed.

As far as links to and from your sites go, you'll want to make sure it's done in a reasonable manner. There's an older WBF on that here: http://moz.com/blog/interlinking-your-sites-whiteboard-friday along with a Matt Cutt's example outlined by Barry Scwartz here: http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-linking-20-domains-together-likely-a-cross-linking-scheme-167089.  Those should give you enough guidance to right the ship.  Cheers!

Hi David. The benefits associated with 301 redirection come from either relocating your site, combining sites, cleaning up 404 pages, aligning page names within your site architecture, things of that nature. If you have links or visits to those third level pages and want to house all pages on your root domain instead of third levels, then 301 redirection would be the way to go. Cheers!

Read: http://moz.com/blog/most-important-link-penalty-removal-tool-your-mindset. Very much so. Google knows what a natural link profile looks like so well that you're best bet is gaining external links as naturally as possible. Sites with super high percentages of anchor text links, followed links, and conversion page specific links are running red flags in front of Google's eyes.  Take Eric's advice from above.  Cheers!

Jake, I wouldn't rely on Google's presentation of the one-box bio and map in the search results as a yes or no indicator of negative SEO. I just ran the search for the company name (no quotes; lowercase; without the LLC) and got the box... I also wouldn't use the ability to rank a company homepage for the company brand name searches as indicator of ranking strength.  With consistent NAP, domain registration, and registration via GWT most any web software--flash, html, php, asp, whatever--that simply loads should do the same within a short time frame after launch.

I also get the companies contact us page when running a search as you described.

This means so far the only consistent thing to note is that Google's display of the company search is similar to how it handles other company searches (not an N-SEO indicator) and the use of flash on the site is in conflict with recommendations Google has made public, and made public shortly prior to some of the changes you've seen. (Late 2014).  Correcting those on your site would be beneficial.

As for the ROR, yes those are annoying!  Hopefully with more positive press and presence on high strength domains (Hoovers, et al, mentioned earlier) you can get it so far from the front page as to make no impact. The disavow tool remains an option for the links you've been getting from suspect domains.  In the meantime, change what you have ready access to (the issues Dirk mentioned) to ensure that's not a part of the larger picture. Best of luck!

Meta description will be what you write as the suggested description for Google to display in the search results, but Google will often rewrite the description to better match someone's search and their understanding of your page. They'll either pull text from another location on your page that matches terms or related terms of a user's search, rewrite title tags from time to time, or display what you write.  See: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35624.  Cheers!

On your own site you might consider removing the text based link or being more specific and linking to the calculator page on: www.solarguide.co.uk.  I'd also do an analysis of visits from www.renewablesguide.co.uk to www.solarguide.co.uk via the calculator text link in order to see how users behave when following that link. Is there a higher bounce rate than average? Are they viewing many pages on the solar site? Few? And so on.   You'll get a decent idea though of the user experience from those specific visitors and whether or not the link is worth keeping or in need of better UX optimization in order to really benefit your users.  Cheers!

You can do either option for the sitemap file.  Kate Morris has a nice post around using multiple sitemaps here: http://moz.com/blog/multiple-xml-sitemaps-increased-indexation-and-traffic but it's mostly a question of site size.  Congrats on getting your mobile site up and running!

Hearty thumbs up to Dr. Pete's (and Dirk's) analysis here.

Jake, you might not like the conclusions but their leaps and bounds better than what you'd find from most other sources. Please heed their advice.

I see. If you had a site that was hacked and were unable to get rid of the hacker inserted content then Google would see that content as pure spam.  Please do read through the Google guidelines as they're pretty clear on what they want.  Cheers!

Hello Madhukar!  It's likely that Zopim has blocked some resources (javascript, css, etc.) from crawlers on their URLs (not yours). What you'll want to do to get more granular detail though is do a fetch and render of a specific page with the error then scroll to the bottom of that page where it will list the blocked resources.

This discussion on Google's Product Forums outlines the process that a user with a similar issue used to get visibility into it: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/webmasters/vwQnFkGCNaE

The main point form that discussion in relation to your question being, "[when checking] the zopim.com urls, more specifically the us30, they have their own robots.txt file blocking all from the crawlers.  I would assume the remaining zopim.com urls all block crawlers as well." That is most likely what is generating the errors that you see. Cheers!

Right. It's kind of a combination of categories you want to rank for and ones that are populated and active enough to rank. Brand C Shirts would be fine, but Brand C Short Sleeve shirts could be too diluted. You're on the right track.

Also, there are some instances where the Moz tool just doesn't align with what you would not consider duplicate content and in those cases feel free to ignore it, especially if those pages are ranking well and performing well in terms of conversion / funnel.  Cheers!

You're welcome. Great insights as usual. And this just further emphasizes the importance of content as well as how it relates to organic rankings. If a company has no interest in using words written well, search doesn't have much interest in it.

The obvious problem would be that their website address hasn't been verified and linked to their Google + profile... Linking them together in GWT and Analytics would help too. After checking those things I'd check other settings, like use Google + as site.

It looks like the added portion is going to prevent recognition for the overall meta description tag. Is this a custom tag being used to identify products / pages internally to the CMS? For meta description, you'll want to use the syntax:

There was a nice discussion here on tags: http://moz.com/community/q/wordpress-tag-pages-noindex that still applies. In general they tend to eliminate duplicate content issues when noindexed.