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Hi Mozzers, Just wanted to double check that when a website domain changes from .co.uk to .com - do you add .com to the referral exclusion in GA? Do you also keep the .co.uk version in the list too? I have updated the property settings to .com Thanks Anthony

I have some tough decisions to make about a web site I run. The site has seen around for 20 years (September 1995, to be precise, is the date listed against the domain). Over the years, the effort I've expanded on the site has come and gone, but I am about to throw a lot of time and effort back into it. The majority of the content on the site is pretty dated, isn't tremendously useful to the audience (since it's pretty old) and the site design and URL architecture isn't particularly SEO-friendly. In addition, I have a database of thousands vendors (for the specific industry this site serves). I don't know if it's a factor any more but 100% of the links there have been populated by the vendors themselves specifically requesting inclusion (through a form we expose on the site). When the request is approved, the vendor link shows up on the appropriate pages for location (state) and segment of the industry. Though the links are all "opt-in" from vendors (we've never one added or imported any ourselves), I am sure this all looks like a terrible link farm to Google! And some vendors have asked us to remove their link for that reason 🙂 One final (very important) point. We have a relationship with a nationwide brand and have four very specific pages related to that brand on our site. Those pages are essential - they are by far the most visited pages and drive virtually all our revenue. The pages were put together with SEO in mind and the look and feel is very different to the rest of the site. The result is, effectively, a site-within-a-site. I need to carefully protect the performance of these pages. To put some rough numbers on this, the site had 475,000 page views over the last year, with about 320,000 of those being to these four pages (by the way, for the rest of the content "something happened" around May 20th of last year - traffic almost doubled overnight - even though there were no changes to our site). We have a Facebook presence and have put a little effort into that recently (increasing fans from about 10,000 last August to nearly 24,000 today, with a net gain of about 2,500 per month currently). I don't have any sense of whether that is a meaningful resource in the big picture. So, that's the background. I want to totally revamp the broader site - much improved design, intentional SEO decisions, far better, current and active content, active social media presence and so on. I am also moving from one CMS to another (the target CMS / Blog platform being WordPress). Part of me wants to do the following: Come up with a better plan for SEO and basically just throw out the old stuff and start again, with the exception of the four vendor pages I mentioned Implement redirection of the old URLs to new content (301s) Just stop exposing the vendor pages (on the basis that many of the links are old/broken and I'm really not getting any benefit from them) Leave the four important pages exactly as they are (URL and content-wise) I am happy to rebuild the content afresh because I have a new plan around that for which I have some confidence. But I have some important questions. If I go with the approach above, is there any  value from the old content / URLs that is worth retaining? How sure can I be there is no indirect negative effect on the four important pages? I really need to protect those pages Is throwing away the vendor links simply all good - or could there be some hidden negative I need to know about (given many of the links are broken and go to crappy/small web sites, I'm hoping this is just a simple decision to make) And one more uber-question. I want to take a performance baseline so that I can see where I started as I start making changes and measure performance over time. Beyond the obvious metrics like number of visitors, time per page, page views per visit, etc what metrics would be important to collect from the outset? I am just at the start of this project and it is very important to me. Given the longevity of the site, I don't know if there is much worth retaining for that reason, even if the content changes radically. At a high level I'm trying to decide what questions I need to answer before I set off on this path. Any suggestions would be very much appreciated. Thanks.

Hi mozzers, I have a site A:  www.example.com (with its own branded kws) SiteB: subdomain.example.com Site A and B are related and belong to the same company. Site B was released a couple months ago. ISSUE: I have noticed branded kws from Site A showing up on Site B's GA which doesn't make any sense. I try to make searches in the SE with those kws and not a single search showed the Site B(subdomain). What is weird is that 2 months ago had a an issue with bounce rate on site B showing a 0% bounce rate, then I discovered that we had 2 GATC on site, removed the extra code and bounce was back to normal. Since then I have seen a rise of branded kws from Site A to Site B. Can someone help me here figuring out what is wrong? Thanks

Hi guys, I am creating profiles on some of the countries sites in my network, and have managed to establish the filter for tracking certain url patterns, for example: ^/japan-english-       is tracking all my urls in the Japan site that start by  japan-english     great!   however, it is not tracking the japanese instance of the urls. The pattern for the latter is : www.mysite.org/jp/japan-english I could then modify the filter to track the jp subfolder like this: ^/jp/japan-english- but it will then only track the urls on the /jp/ subfolder does anyone know the regex command for tracking the two url patters as follows: /jp/japan-english- & /japan-english- thanks in advance david