From my understanding, you don't necessarily need to have an active AdWords campaign to use the Google AdWords Keyword Planner (which is replacing GAKT). You will need an AdWords account but you should be able to sign up and never run a campaign but still have access to the Keyword Planner to do what you need to do. (At least I assume and hope this is going to be the case...)

I know this can be done with location insertion, which requires the use of local extensions. I am not sure if you will need an actual physical presence/Google Places listing for each city or not, but this blog post should help you get moving in the right direction - http://adwords.blogspot.com/2012/04/get-local-with-adwords.html

I highly recommend using this plugin to scan your site for malware/exploits and automatically fix them for you - http://wordpress.org/plugins/gotmls/

Then once the site is confirmed to be clean, submit your site to Google within GWT to get them to review your site and remove any malware warnings from the SERPs.

I just did a search for site:http://www.tidy-books.com/ on Google and am seeing 3,220 pages from your site in the Google index, so perhaps it's just an issue with GWT taking longer to update.

Hi Sida,

I was running into the same issue, not being able to track the traffic source for any individual lead submission using Google Analytics. We couldn't find any affordable solutions that offered exactly what we were looking for, so we decide to build a lead tracking tool ourselves. Now we can identify the traffic source of each lead as well as update the status of the leads throughout the sales lifecycle, which thus finally enables us to get a much better grasp of the ROI of our marketing campaigns. Our tool is currently completely free, but we will likely add premium plans in the future for users who want extra features. Feel free to check it out at http://convertable.com and let me know if you have any questions or suggestions for how to improve it.

Or if you'd rather simply use your existing form and track leads in Google Analytics, this blog post will show you how to do this with a little bit of coding - http://cutroni.com/blog/2009/03/18/updated-integrating-google-analytics-with-a-crm/

Long Tail Pro - It's invaluable for finding long tail keywords that have decent search volume with low competition. Simply plug in 4 or 5 keywords and it automatically and instantly retrieves thousands of related keywords from the Google AdWords Keyword Tool. Then you can sort and filter by various criteria, but what is most useful is sorting by competition which uses the SEOmoz Keyword Difficulty API. It's by far my favorite keyword research tool at the moment. http://longtailpro.com/ (the website kinda makes it look like a spammy "Internet Marketer/Get Rich Quick" product but I swear it's legit!)

Yes, the canonical tag is the best route to take in this scenario.

I have to admit, I am still trying to get used to it. For some reason, I feel the old version of the Q&A was easier to read and just flowed better. Perhaps it was the variety of contrasting colors combined with smaller fonts that I liked in the old one. This new design seems too white and sterile. And the bright light blue color of the links against a white background is killing my eyes. :-X

That being said, I am still getting used to it so I'm not ready to come up with a final opinion just yet! Overall, I LOVE the new design of the site and the branding changes and can't wait to try out Moz Analytics. Congrats to the Moz team on the big launch!

I'd recommend re-purposing the pages with expired listings. I imagine a lot of those pages rank pretty well for longtail phrases (for example something like "part-time dump truck driving job in rome, georgia") which are highly targeted and likely have minimal competition. Even if the job opening is no longer available, there is still value in keeping that page alive for the sake of ranking in the search engines. A couple of suggestions -

1. Set up a contact form/email opt-in for users to fill out to "let me know when jobs like this become available." This enables you to capture useful contact information from your users which you can use as you see fit.

2. Provide links to similar job listings that are available. For example, put on the page "this job listing has expired but check out other jobs in Rome, Georgia or dump truck driving jobs within 50 miles", etc. This way you keep the user on your site instead of them going to a competitor's site.

Otherwise, if you decide to delete a lot of these pages then you'll lose any existing rankings/traffic as a result.

Try this -

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI}!^/subfolder-1/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI}!^/subfolder-2/
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Does the data show up when you use the GAKT directly? https://adwords.google.com/o/KeywordTool.

If so, then I imagine there is something going on with SEOmoz's connection to the Google AdWords API. I'd suggest contacting their support directly at https://seomoz.zendesk.com/anonymous_requests/new.

This can be done within .htaccess. The code below should work -

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

The link juice will be transferred since it is a 301 redirect. And you can set your preferred domain within GWT but ideally you still want to use 301 redirects as well.

Relative URLs are not inherently bad for SEO, but they oftentimes trip up webmasters if less than 100% of the links on the site are valid. For example, using a link like "../blog" will tell the search engines to go to http://www.mysite.com/blog/blog and then http://www.mysite.com/blog/blog/blog and so on, causing the crawlers to get trapped in an endless loop which is obviously not ideal for SEO. So as long as you are on top of making sure the relative URLs are always valid, then you should be fine.

If you want to redirect all index.html(s) to their roots, then try this code -

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^index.html$ / [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^(.*)/index.html$ /$1/ [R=301,L]

And yes, Google will treat them as 301 redirects so your juice will be transferred and consolidated.

It's definitely a good idea to 301 redirect index.html to your root to consolidate link juice. I am assuming you have an .htaccess file so the following lines should work -

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /

redirect html pages to the root domain

RewriteRule ^index.html$ / [NC,R,L]

I'm not sure why you would want to remove the sitemap.xml from the SERPs, but I'll answer your question anyways.

One option would be to remove the URL via Google Webmaster Tools.

Another option is to use the X-Robots-Tag directive in the HTTP header and set it to noindex. Here is some more info on how to set it up http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2007/07/robots-exclusion-protocol-now-with-even.html and http://sebastians-pamphlets.com/handling-googles-neat-x-robots-tag-sending-rep-header-tags-with-php/

Would it be possible to only post the content on the blog and then add a few paragraphs on the main site which then links to the blog for the full article? I think that would be ideal.

Otherwise, you could try using the cross domain canonical tag in order to get the blog ranking for the content. The issue is that Google considers the canonical tag to be a hint rather than an absolute directive, so it might not necessarily work. http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/12/handling-legitimate-cross-domain.html

If you can put the blog in a subdirectory such as www.mysite.com/blog, then that would be ideal because the link juice will be preserved on your site. If you put the blog in a subdomain like blog.mysite.com, then the search engines consider them to be two separate sites and thus the link juice is split between the two sites.

Hi Jenna,

It's not so much the fact you have 404 pages that is the problem for SEO, but rather the fact your site is creating a problem for the search engines to crawl the site correctly and efficiently since they are getting caught in an endless loop. This can be a problem because the crawlers may get caught in the endless loop and just give up on your site and leave, which means the search engines may not be able to access the rest of the pages on your site and may have a negative impact on your rankings as a whole. One of the most important parts of SEO is to make your website as "friendly" to the search engines as possible so if they caught in endless loops then that is definitely not ideal. Hope that helps!

Patrick

It looks like the crawler is being caught in an endless loop, most likely a result of using relative URLs somewhere on your site. Yes, this is a problem for the site as a whole so I highly recommend implementing absolute URLs throughout the entire site.

Edit - I just looked at your site and this is exactly what it is. The links in your navigation are relative, such as "<a <="" span="">href="</a>../development/default.aspx"" so just change it to absolute URLs such as http://www.yoursite.com/development/default.aspx and it should fix the problem.