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It's a hell of a joining-of-dots, and I hate to utter anything along the lines of "two indexes" or "supplemental index" etc. But the NIH listings behave differently in the SERPs, and I can see how there's greater inherent value in a set of search results that returns verified authority links for medical queries than a set of search results that doesn't.

Might it be significant that the NIH results don't have the +1 button, nor Instant Preview, when they're in the SERPs?

I'm joining some pretty distant dots here, but that might suggest that they're part of a separate search index? I can certainly see how providing one authoritative link for a very precise medical query would enhance search quality.

If it's a good crew and a good culture, $31k isn't all that bad for a recent graduate.

You may find value in getting your details out in front of some other employers to see whether anyone values your skills higher in terms of a dollar value, but company culture, perks and vibe are very important.

Thinking of the next stage of your career, if you do the intern + perm work + 2 years that's going to look very good to a future employer. It shows loyalty and respect and that can often be the deciding factor when choosing between well-qualified candidates.

Good luck!

It's always interesting to see how sitemap.html performs in terms of pageviews. According to Analytics at least, many users find them useful -- and that's enough for me to usually want to recommend including one.

Try it, test it, and if users find it valuable then keep it. Like it or not, I think it's true to say that there's still a small segment of web users who use sitemaps as on of their main methods of navigation so I think on that basis, there's an argument to include them.

Do you actually need to tag all the URLs? Are you able to create an advanced segment based on "if referrer = X OR if referrer = Y" ?

Tricky explaining this I guess, my apologies -- what I'm getting at is whether you can set up a relatively complex Advanced Segment in Analytics to bucket all these referral visits together. That way you can test how that segment performs in context to the rest of the site and other groups of users.

With URL tagging you're effectively giving the visitor an allocation before they hit Analytics. With the Advanced Segment route, you're allocating the visitor afterwards.

If this can work for you, I'd recommend it as as the more suitable route, mainly because it's easier to administer (asking 900 webmasters to change URLs, and to follow them up to make sure they've done it, would be a nightmare. Plus, there's always the chance that a non-tagged URL might slip through the net, and your data integrity becomes compromised.)

I'm personally not convinced that changing URL parameters has any significant effect on link juice or ranking, but I don't think that's the most important issue here -- in my opinion, you'd be much better off using advanced segments to track these visitors, and doing that doesn't require any modification of inbound URLs.

It might be worth spending a little time before the move drawing up a list of the most important sites linking out to the old domain, and contacting them once the new domain goes live to ask them to update their links.

I'm sure that the rebranding will involve some sort of awareness/media campaign so a "link update" message could go out on the back of that.

I would personally be ultra-paranoid about the 301s, but I know Next Digital (awesome work on the MCG site) so I'm sure you guys will have that all taken care of!

+1 for a .com.au domain name. Australians tend to feel more comfortable clicking on a .com.au extension, just as New Zealanders feel more comfortable with the .co.nz (and, no doubt, other countries prefer their "home" TLDs over a global .com)

Registering a .com.au domain name requires an ABN (Australian Business Number, which is a but like a registered company number in the UK.)

Also, hosting in Australia is going to be important. A lot of internet users experience latency issues with overseas sites, so from a user experience point of view it's worth keeping site design efficient and hosting it within AU.

I'm UK-born and living in Australia, and in terms of web design or any technical issues, there's no significant changes I can think of. Bear in mind that the spelling in this country is the same as the UK and not the USA (colour not color, lift not elevator.)

100% agree. It's only an issue if you're failing to provide unique content page-by-page, and right now I don't think there's enough to differentiate.

+1 to the above. It was a good model when it launched, but now just too cluttered to be of any real significance.

I fully sympathise, and I fully identify with your assessment of it as a bastard of a problem!

Just to be square on the baseline stuff, is your Analytics correctly linked to your Adwords account? Incorrect linking can cause all manner of weirdness. It's pretty easy to link accounts these days but it didn't used to be, so if the adwords and/or analytics accounts for this site are more than a couple of years old that could be causing a problem.

Secondly, is Adwords auto-tagging set up correctly? It could be that Adwords isn't passing on the correct URL handling parameters, and so in the absence of appended campaign data Analytics is interpreting it all as a referral from Google, and therefore as organic traffic.

I couldn't get the attachment link to work, but by linking right to http://www.apexsoft.ca/adwords.jpg I can see what you're asking.

This is a feature recently introduced into Adwords that moves the content from the Description Line 1 into the Headline. The guidelines state that if Description Line 1 is a full and complete sentence, Google may create the longer headline.

In your screenshot, you can see that only the highlighted ad has a gramatically correct and full sentence as its Description Line 1, and as a result it's been moved to the headline.

The other two ads are both missing what in my opinion are crucial full stops that severely impact the readability of the ad when displayed in the top-box three-pack -- let alone prohibit the "headline increase" promotion!

AFAIK there is no way to trigger this per se, it's all at Google's discretion. Rather than changing the text of your ads to include a fullstop you might get a quicker result by creating a new ad that contains the same text and the grammatical fixes.

Hope that helps!

JoelHit, the article you link has precious little if anything to do with what Ethan is asking.

It sounds to me Ethan as though it's more to do with branding and practicaility -- albeit within the confines of the max character length that Twitter allows in a username. So the question reall is, do you want to be pushing the idea of an acronym in order to unite the character accounts -- or will there be enough recognition fed through from the web series itself?

I'd be inclined to suggest everyone sits down and has a good ol' brainstorm about this. For example, might there be a way for the series to feed its audience to one character's Twitter feed, and then via @ replies and mentions within that feed, spin off and "discover" new characters?

What I guess I'm saying is, you've got a great opportunity to explore methods of storytelling as well as marketing. That, to me, is more pertinent than the idea of tagging all characters with an acronym.

If pushed, I'd say that appending "fishbowl" to each character's handle would be a nice and sticky way to tag them, based solely on resonance (a fancy schmancy way of saying, "it sounds funny, so do it")

Bear in mind that the shorter the username the more you can say in a retweetable tweet. So keeping the number of char's in a username as low as possible is an approach that also contains some wisdom.

Sounds like a fun project anyhow! Best of luck with it!

It's always interesting to see how sitemap.html performs in terms of pageviews. According to Analytics at least, many users find them useful -- and that's enough for me to usually want to recommend including one.

Try it, test it, and if users find it valuable then keep it. Like it or not, I think it's true to say that there's still a small segment of web users who use sitemaps as on of their main methods of navigation so I think on that basis, there's an argument to include them.

David has it -- you'll want to do this in Google Analytics to get the best and most actionable data IMO. I always prefer doing this kind of thing in Analytics and not Adwords as you can also track what happens in organic / social / direct traffic, and see how that compares to your PPC clickstream.

So, in Analytics, set up a Goal at the final, confirmed "registration complete" page. You can then set up a funnel for the Goal (with the same steps as you outlined in your post).

(Setting up a funnel isn't mandatory, as you can get the data you want to extract from raw pageviews... landing page > registration page > confirmation page.)

You might also like to try this Excel Goal Funnel Report that pulls conversion data from Analytics and lets you do a lot of analysis, pivoting, and whatever else takes your fancy!

http://www.savio.no/blogg/a/100/free-excel-goal-funnel-report-for-google-analytics#b

It's a hell of a joining-of-dots, and I hate to utter anything along the lines of "two indexes" or "supplemental index" etc. But the NIH listings behave differently in the SERPs, and I can see how there's greater inherent value in a set of search results that returns verified authority links for medical queries than a set of search results that doesn't.

I fully sympathise, and I fully identify with your assessment of it as a bastard of a problem!

Just to be square on the baseline stuff, is your Analytics correctly linked to your Adwords account? Incorrect linking can cause all manner of weirdness. It's pretty easy to link accounts these days but it didn't used to be, so if the adwords and/or analytics accounts for this site are more than a couple of years old that could be causing a problem.

Secondly, is Adwords auto-tagging set up correctly? It could be that Adwords isn't passing on the correct URL handling parameters, and so in the absence of appended campaign data Analytics is interpreting it all as a referral from Google, and therefore as organic traffic.

In theory that's possible, but it's a bit of a stretch to call it a "correlation".

It's like spending $100,000 advertising on the side of every bus in your city. Chances are you'll get coverage and some of that coverage will be a link, but it's not to say that there's any causal relationship between advertising on buses and improving the rank of your website.

Might it be significant that the NIH results don't have the +1 button, nor Instant Preview, when they're in the SERPs?

I'm joining some pretty distant dots here, but that might suggest that they're part of a separate search index? I can certainly see how providing one authoritative link for a very precise medical query would enhance search quality.

+1 for a .com.au domain name. Australians tend to feel more comfortable clicking on a .com.au extension, just as New Zealanders feel more comfortable with the .co.nz (and, no doubt, other countries prefer their "home" TLDs over a global .com)

Registering a .com.au domain name requires an ABN (Australian Business Number, which is a but like a registered company number in the UK.)

Also, hosting in Australia is going to be important. A lot of internet users experience latency issues with overseas sites, so from a user experience point of view it's worth keeping site design efficient and hosting it within AU.

I'm UK-born and living in Australia, and in terms of web design or any technical issues, there's no significant changes I can think of. Bear in mind that the spelling in this country is the same as the UK and not the USA (colour not color, lift not elevator.)

It's not an online tool, but Xenu LinkSleuth does a dead good job of making an XML sitemap.

http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html

No worries with a 5,000 page site, just let it do its thing and index away. Under File there's an option to export to "Google Sitemap File".

I've not used the linkvendor tool that Petra linked; but I've had problems with online tools skipping out on some URLs for whatever reason. Xenu's never let me down.