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Cheers Everett. Thanks for your response. That was my feeling on the tool (you were correct when asking which tool it was, BTW), but always good to get confirmation. Nick.

There are few other reasons why bounce rate from Google Analytics doesn't affect ranking if you think about it not everyone uses GA, so that wouldn't be a fair measure. Another reason is the spam, most of it doesn't even get to your page, so there is no interaction whatsoever leaving fake data, and by now Google is more than aware of it. However, you are right, as you mention the algorithm Google uses is complex and constantly evolving, so there might be another way to measure the time spent on your page after a search, for example, the back button of the browser. So we can split it if the high bounce rate comes from fake traffic/spam in GA, then there is nothing to worry about. If it is from valid traffic, then it shouldn't be taken lightly since Google might be using other ways to measure it rather than GA. Again Google knows the one and only truth, so we can only make educated guesses based on what we see Carlos

Hi Nick, Regarding the path, you will need at least a second variation URL in step 2, but it does not need to be live. At the end of step 4, make sure there are no errors. The most likely error on step 4 is that the code is not on your page. You wouldn't want to click "start test" if the pages weren't live either, obviously. Now to the question of showing the same page throughout the journey. Experiments does not do this by default; it's more of a landing page tool. There is a way to make it happen, and that's to change the navigation on the test version. I've seen companies either clone every page that links to the test with links to version 1 and 2 (yuck) or use a cookie that switches out all links to the original with the test version if a cookie is fired from the test version. The difficulty of doing this will vary based on your developer's skills and the CMS you're using. These work-arounds are not ideal, and they introduce more potential errors - as all complexity does. It really only works for small sites and landing pages with limited paths in and out. If you're looking to keep the experiment consistent and run a lot of tests I would strongly recommend checking out a tool like Optimizely. I've worked with Optimizely in the past, and had nothing but great experiences. Just make sure to test multiple screen sizes before you launch.

Hi Jane, Yeah, a number of our clients are in the leisure and hospitality industries which means many travel bloggers naturally link to them in reviews, lists of places to stay in certain areas etc. Occasionally we need to think up clever ways of encouraging that, but it's a field where those who are pleased with the offering tend to give you, at the least, a mention. This particular client, however, doesn't really fit that bill, but they are in an industry where there's plenty of scope for expert advice, FAQs, guides and so on, so I'm sure we can find good content-led solutions. The content side I'm fine with, but it was more the tech aspect of harnessing cloud-based software. Thanks for your help with this - happy just knowing I'm not missing anything on that front! Kind regards, Nick

Hi Nick, I believe there is no longer a "character count", but more a space or pixel limit - http://www.seomofo.com/experiments/serp/snippet-ascii-art.html This has been played out by a few people's experiments, so looks fairly solid - the limit relates to space, not character count. You could certainly try to create something that looked good both as a regular result and a sitelink.

Hi Mike, Thanks for your response. Definitely some good food for thought here - especially about ensuring the pdfs are optimised. It may be that we can put all the content on the site as HTML, but just not have it as part of the navigation (which we are doing with certain pages, like FAQs. Unfortunately, when they say light on content they mean just that. As we are a design agency, the designers tend to think people are only picture led and the words distract from that. I tend to think that, while people will decide if we are the agency or them based on previous work, they also like to see stats on results, client feedback and so on. So I'll try to persuade them to go the HTML route, but at least you've pointed out some things to bear in mind if going the PDF avenue. Thanks! Nick

Glad I could be of some help

Looks like the above code might be a bit wrong/ out of date. Current format should be:PUT YOUR PRODUCT, BUSINESS OR SERVICE HERE REVIEW SUMMARY HERE. I.E. WHAT YOUR CUSTOMER IS SAYING IN THE REVIEW 4.5 out of 5 based on 17 reviewsI've also replace the H3 tag with standard span tag, as each person might want the info formatted slightly differently. You can, of course, easily change the numerical ratings of the system. E.g. if your average rating is 7 out of 10, then 7 is the average and 10 is the best.

What about searching for articles about care homes on BBC then seeing if any of those have missing links on an article-by-article basis? If you're lucky, they may also have a tag or a section that fits closely enough with your topic that you can find a listing of all of the articles that are withing that tag/category and just review those.

Cheers Ryan, That's kind of what I suspected - most of the best practice things that also affect SEO in some way (alt tags etc) we're already doing, and we were going to put together a press release highlighting the extra accessibility lengths we've gone to that will hopefully get a bit of attention. So as long as I'm not missing anything, that's cool!

Hi Dan, I had been looking into both of these tools, but UBL seemed to have prompted a fair few people to say they'd paid the listing fee but had never seen their citations appear, so I'd put that on the backburner. As for the Express Update USA, we're based in the UK - do you know of an equivalent? Cheers!

Only used once and I abandoned it as it never gave me any actionable data, but youtube has a Tool similar to Adwords tool, only it focuses on Youtube rather than Google. https://ads.youtube.com/keyword_tool

Hi Barry, Thanks for your swift response on this. The pages certainly seem to be getting cached correctly, and when we initially took over the SEO and made wholesale changes to the site, there were huge improvements, so it looks for all the world like the main pages at least are being looked at. But I think you make a good point about getting it solved anyway so we can identify any problems that may be occurring / will occur later.

Hi Nick, Do the clients already have an existing phone number?  Is it well-indexed by Google?  If it is not well-indexed, the client should first establish a permanent phone number and that number should be well-indexed before going ahead with this service. In general, dynamic javascript insertion works fine, as long as the existing phone number remains on the page in HTML somewhere, preferably in close proximity to business name and address (the footer is a good place for this). Make sure they are NOT sending tracking numbers anywhere outside of this client's website. Period.  No matter what they tell you about how their system is implemented.

Another thing that has occurred to me with this - it's not so much whether the links are passing value / negative value, but more that the anchor text is telling the search engines that our site may be a place to buy viagra, vicodin etc - and surely that's never a good thing?

Thanks for the link Keri. Apparently the feature has not been fully implemented as of yet.