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Thank you for this good discussion. We have a town website we developed and recently I removed our footer link. Instead, at the bottom of the homepage I put a quick line of text that says Designed By "Company Name". Now only the homepage links to us so it is ok to utilize this highest PR ranking page of their site to boost one of our keywords. We have no official tests but we have made tremendous leaps for that keyword recently. In summary, rather than not being able to use keywords in anchor text and gaining a ton of links all at one time (if its a large site) doesn't it make more sense to make a link in the body at the bottom of the highest PR page of the site or even homepage that says Designed By "Company Name"? Granted placing this on only a handful of pages will reduce your overall brand exposure.

Hi Tim, Yes, any links to those non existent pages will be causing the page not found errors, so remove them from the sitemap. You should see the errors reducing (or disappearing completely) in the next scan report. If you still see errors in the next scan you can use the same process again to find any remaining links (if there are any).

It sounds like you are just moving the content to a new directory and not changing the filename, correct? If so you can handle that with a single line of code in your htaccess file assuming you are on a Linux server and have access to that file. Most content management systems will probably have some sort of plugin/module for that too. Yes, redirect them so the pagerank earned from external links into the old URL will move on to the new URL. It is a simple thing to fix that could have a profound impact on rankings if those old pages had external links. By the way, update all internal links so you are linking to the new URL instead of relying on the redirects to do that for you. This is just best practice and good housekeeping.

Hi Tim, care to share the article?

Hi Tim,CRO is high on the "to do" list for us in 2013 and I recently had to put together a proposal for a budget. Here are some of the sources I used to help put my proposal together:http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/excellent-analytics-tip-7-the-adorable-site-abandonment-rate-metric/http://baymard.com/lists/cart-abandonment-rate http://www.houseofkaizen.com/resources/calculators/bounce-rate-impacthttp://www.uie.com/brainsparks/2011/10/17/the-back-story-for-the-300-million-button/http://www.clickz.com/clickz/column/1691779/benchmarking-average-conversion-ratehttp://index.fireclick.com/fireindex.php?segment=6http://www.internetretailer.com/2011/09/13/conversion-boost-online-retailershttp://www.davechaffey.com/Internet-Marketing/C7-Service-Quality/Conversion-rates-E-commerce/http://www.thinkmetrics.com/benchmarks-for-websites.phphttp://www.marketingexperiments.com/blog/research-topics/ecommerce/e-commerce-landing-page-mistakes.html http://uxdesign.smashingmagazine.com/2011/04/06/fundamental-guidelines-of-e-commerce-checkout-design/http://www.marketingexperiments.com/blog/marketing-insights/average-conversion-rates.htmlhttp://www.clickz.com/clickz/column/1695493/declining-conversion-rateshttp://www.baynote.com/2011/07/forrester%E2%80%99s-top-five-e-commerce-trends-still-hold-true/Some of these might be more helfpul than others. It's a long list. If you've never read "The $300 million button" I'd recommend starting there just because it's very inspiring.Cheers,Dana