Hi Don,

I don't know what to say.... I can't stop giggling. There is NO WAY you get a better CTR with ads appearing at the bottom of the page. Like you I also have plenty of data to back that up.

This issue continues to occur for one of my clients.

Perhaps consider testing on smartphones only - I'd imagine more people would see the whole first page of results on a smartphone than they would on a desktop. I'd also recommend getting your SEO up to scratch so you are placing top of page for organic listings and Google Places.

Will let you know if I find anything new......but am still scratching my head as well.

Davinia

Have a read of this page http://www.seomoz.org/blog/retargeting-basics-what-it-is-how-to-use-it half way down it has a paragraph on remarketing and how it is Google's 'word'.

If you are looking into retargeting I highly recommend investigating multiple stage remarketing (link above).

The blog you listed, well yes, I think you are right to search for other sources of reference

I use broad to get a feel for the type of keywords out there but when it comes to actually selecting keyword targets I use 'phrase' for keyword phrases and 'exact' for singular keywords.

I also cross reference my keyword choices with another keyword research tool (depending on which country changes the tool I use). This might be a useful thing for you to do given that you target the whole world. I'm in New Zealand and at times find the Google Keyword Tool doesn't give specific enough information for monthly search volumes.

Completely agree with Eric. You need to get creative in how you approach your content. This website will help you locate blogs you can post on http://myblogguest.com/

Hi Stephen,

Have tested using the Adwords 'ad preview and diagnosis' tool as well as logged in and out, removing cache and on different computers - no change, always at the bottom.

Looks like people in New Zealand also want to conserve weed - of the illegal variety. However when 'searching in NZ only' we are only concerned with how to destroy the everyday weeds from our gardens.

Good questions. For me DA is when I'm evaluation a website as a whole (either my client or doing competitor analysis), I also use it as a benchmark. If I'm doing link building I'll be looking at the PA of the page I want a link on.

Hi Chelsey,

I don't have much knowledge with Google Shopping sorry but I thought I'd just suggest when you come to the time of creating unique product descriptions, headings and title tags this can be automated. When I have websites like this I create rules and formulas and pass to the developers to implement.

Example: Title tag: [product name - or pull from

header] [product code] - [category] - [branding]

Meta description: use the first 165 characters from the product description
Body copy: Swap out the [product code], [product color etc], [category name] but use a similar description as the base. It would be great if we could write individual descriptions for product pages but if you have a site with thousands and thousands of pages this isn't a reality.

header: Will need to be added by hand via a CMS but you can make these unique by adding the product code (or colour or size etc) at the end.

Also another thought, why don't you only add noindex to the product pages only on go live so at least your homepage and other content pages have some time to get indexed before the product pages are ready? Alternatively you could use a robots.txt file to block the folder directories of product pages while still allowing search engines to index those important high level pages (instead of noindex).

I think it's great you are taking the time to provide unique product descriptions!

Good luck,
Davinia

Hi Keri,

Status of ads is 'eligible' with quality scores of 10/10 for brand terms (trademarked) and related brand terms (not trademarked).

Any idea how the twitter person established "stuck in eligible status purgatory"?

Thanks,Davinia

Dana provided the answer above. Good luck.

The URLs don't have to be keyword heavy, they should be semantically in line with the content of the page and also be relevant, not only will this help as a ranking factor but it also allows for better authored search engine result page snippets (i.e. the keyword's will display in the URL on the SERP snippet), which in turn should help with click through rates.

A search engine isn't going to know that "medicalcallcenter" is "medical call center" so the URL doesn't include the keyword. Therefore adding the keywords to the file paths will get the keyword into the URL.

Agreed, building links to the homepage (and other important pages) would be a good idea.

You should also set up Google Webmaster Tools for your old and new domains and then tell Google about your change of address. Log-in then go to Configuration>Change of Address

And here is some other information from Google that is useful to follow https://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=83105

I go to Google Image search (http://images.google.com/) and then do a site search and then look through each image, e.g. do this in the search field
site:www.yourwebsite.com

If the website has thousands of images indexed and it's not possible to look through all entries then do the site search and then add a word from the file name e.g. like this
site:www.yourwebsite.com pillow

Alternatively, post the image URL and I or someone else here can check for you!

Hey Keith,

I did the same search and the keyword in the URL was not bold. Agreed don't use hyphens in the root domain (I do believe they help in folder paths), but anyway I feel that you and I could go on forever having a fun debate but I think we have made our points and from this Wendy will be able to make an informed decision, or at least our information has helped her to look in certain areas so she can do additional research.

Best regards,
Davinia

It's really important that you add a permanent 301 redirect from http://www.cascadevillagehotel.com/index.htm pointing to http://www.cascadevillagehotel.com (as mentioned by Marisa). Otherwise SEO goodness can be split between the two domains making it harder for you to get the sites ranking.

At the moment the homepage is accessible via 4 URL versions:

http://www.cascadevillagehotel.com/
http://www.cascadevillagehotel.com/index.htm
http://cascadevillagehotel.com/
http://cascadevillagehotel.com/index.htm

ALSO, when you send the request you should also be requesting that a 301 redirect is also placed on the non-www URL version pointing to its respective www URL version - you'd want to have this done for every page e.g. http://cascadevillagehotel.com/hotel should redirect to http://www.cascadevillagehotel.com/hotel

Note - I often have the same discussion with web developers, from their point of view it is the same page and I understand that but you just need to state that Google treats it as multiple versions (do some research are canonicalization).

Hi Nick,

They are using schema markup on their reviews (AggregateRating <a class="attribute-value">- http://schema.org/AggregateRating</a>

This is why the ratings occur in SERPs.

Have a read of this page
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=99170 and then research on from there.

Good luck and private message me if you want to discuss more.
Davinia

Hi Hal,

I like your site! On a quick review here are a couple of things you should consider doing:

1. Your

   and

   headers don't contain your target keyword and they really should.

2. You don't use alt tag for images and you could. Just add 2-3 keyword targeted words to each.

3. Your logo uses the brand name as the alt tag, you should add the keyword in here as well.

4. Build quality links to your website from relevant websites.

Davinia

I haven't come across this issue before so can't comment on which alternative but I'd be looking for Google's best practice and select one from there (from Google dev website or perhaps Matt Cutts has covered this in a video).

It seems interesting that your dev team could use an alternative like ~ or + but not (-) a hyphen. Maybe push back for the use of a hyphen!

I haven't used them but any company listed on that page has made high-quality, public contribution to the community (i.e. you have to be good at what you do, giving and I'd imagine ethical to be listed on that page), so they should be good.

As well as adding the 301 redirect to the /index.html page you should also ensure that non www versions of your URLs are 301 redirected to your www versions. So at the moment there are 4 versions of your homepage, these are:

www.spooksevents.co.uk
www.spooksevents.co.uk/index.html spooksevents.co.uk spooksevents.co.uk/index.html