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You blog posts should be indexed and followed. It may just be the default so development pages do not get indexed by search engines.
I would recommend using no index tags on the various category, archive, and tags pages that are created when using a WP blog. These pages can lead to a lot of duplicate content problems.
Check out this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EsW8E4dOtRY
Summary: If you're not trying to stuff hidden text in there then don't worry about it, it's a normal thing on today's web.
The "Google US" means that they are analyzing the top results on Google to determine the keyword difficulty.
Google does not let people use their AdWords API (where Moz would pull search volume from) if they violate guidelines. One of the guidelines was that you cannot scrape search results (which Moz does to determine Google US difficulty). I believe the keyword search volume was switched to Bing data work around this issue. I do not believe there is a way to have the Google search volume display in the keyword difficulty tool.
Any one feel free to correct me if I got any of that wrong.
I've done a little SERP analysis recently to help figure out how much content I really needed to rank well. What I found was that for the queries I researched sites that were ranking in the top ten either had a low PA/DA and a ton of text (2k + words on the page) or a high PA/DA and a low amount of text (~300 words). Obviously sites that had a high PA/DA and a ton of text crushed it in the SERPs. This all goes back to classic correlation does not equal causation.
There seemed to be a point where a page with low PA/DA could still rank well if you had enough content, and vice versa. I would think if the site you are referring to has minimal text on the page its backlink metrics are pushing it to the top of the SERPs. Also, good UX will improve time on site which may help it surface to the top of the SERPs.
Again, correlation does not equal causation. This is just something I've seen for a sample of keywords I am targeting. I've used this to determine which landing pages on my site have low PA and have worked on adding some relevant text to those pages.
I would add some no index, no follow tags to all of those pages as well just to be safe. I've had Google index some stuff I've had blocked via my robots.txt in the past. Also, make sure if you update your sitemap that you don't accidentally include these test URLs.
I wouldn't intentionally create duplicate content. I would talk with your company and stress the importance of avoiding duplicate content creation.
As for where to host the blog. I would recommend hosting it on your site if possible. Links to the blog posts will benefit the domain it's hosted on. The only way to really benefit your site would be to link to pages on your site from within blog posts; however, that would not be as beneficial as hosting the blog on your company's site and building links directly to your company's domain.
As part of your campaign you can't; however, if you want to run a crawl check out http://pro.moz.com/tools/crawl-test. It won't update your campaign but is a great way to get information from your site.
I believe Moz had some issues with their linkscape index sometime over the past few months. The metrics for the last update were put together using a smaller sample size of links, meaning the numbers were down across the board for most sites. The problems were corrected and now the metrics are being calculated using a larger sample size of links, meaning the metrics went back up.
It's possible that Google just feels that the text you have in your H2 is a more accurate description of your page. Is your meta description too long? I know that Google occasionally ignores the Title Tag and displays the H1 or other text in the SERPs if they feel it is more relevant.
If auto-tagging wasn't turned on, were the campaign URLs manually tagged? Did they have utm parameters on them?
It is most likely a case of not having any campaign tags on the destination URLs.
I'm working on a site where dynamic URL extensions to the homepage were automatically redirecting to the regular homepage URL. Though autotagging was turned on in Adwords, the campaign tags were being lost in the redirects meaning that the paid visits were not being tracked properly in Google Analytics. They were being recorded as organic visits.
Double check that the destination URLs of the PPC campaigns are not redirecting, and that any autotagged URL will not redirect.
You have to copy and paste it, for some reason it looks like it's a relative link.
If your content is significantly different you will be fine. There are a lot of websites using the same basic Word Press themes with minimal customization so I don't see how this would be any different. Though Google is getting more advanced at determining the lay out and make up of a page, I'm not sure that theme and design elements are as distinguishable to them.
I would recommend purchasing Screaming Frog. You can crawl the site and sort the URLs by level. Remove the URLs that are too deep from the crawl and export to XML sitemap. Screaming Frog is definitely worth the price to unlock all of its features and have an unlimited crawl limit.
I've been invited to the Moz Analytics Beta; however, I am not seeing any data for any of my campaigns. Do I have to do something specific to enable the beta, or does it take a while for information to appear?
You are essentially cloaking a keyword rich H1 tag. I would not do this as it is against Google Webmaster Guidelines.
Take a look at the text-only cached version of the page. If you are unsure how to do that follow my crude instructions below.
What I do to test if Googlebot can view the content of my homepage:
Do a Google search for 'site:example.com' and find your homepage. Next to the green URL in the SERP listing for your homepage there is a green arrow. Click that and select 'cached'. Then, when viewing the cached version of the homepage, click 'Text-only version' in the bottom right corner of the grey bar that appears at the top of the browser.
If the content you are questioning shows up, there is a good chance Google has obviously been able to crawl and index it. If the content is not there, there is a good chance they can't. If the content is in a hidden div it will likely still not show up in the text-only cache.
Thanks for the response!
I do see that message, which is kind of what confused me. I saw the "We've already migrated at least one of your existing campaigns over from PRO" part and assumed I should be seeing some data. I have used up all of my campaign slots currently so I can't create a new one. I just received access to the beta yesterday so I will give it a little more time to update.
I would focus on the singular version in title tags and URL, then in the copy of the page use both versions as well as synonyms.
Adding the following lines to the bottom of your robots.txt should do it:
Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap/uk/sitemap.xml
Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap/de/sitemap.xml
If you wanted to update the file names to be different it wouldn't hurt, but I don't think you would have any problems with how they are currently set up. If you have submitted them to WMT and they are being picked up ok I think you are fine.