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Hi Mozzers, Just wondering if someone could point me in the direction of some useful industry benchmarks stats. I'm currently looking at a healthy active living website but trying to find out some average benchmark stats (things like av bounce rate, av time on site, pages per visit etc) for this sector so I can compare this with the site analytics. Having had a look around I can't find a great deal out there relating to average benchmark stats for this sector. Your help greatly appreciated. Thanks Simon

We have five sites which are largely unrelated but for cross-promotional purpose our company wishes to cross link between all our sites, possibly in the footer. I have warned about potential consequences of cross-linking in this way and certainly don't want our sites to be viewed as some sort of 'link ring' if they all link to one another. Just wondering if linking between sites you own really is that much of an issue and whether we should  'nofollow' the links in order to prevent being slapped with any sort of penalty for cross-linking.

When using hreflang in order to deliver the relevant version in SERs, should we also make use of a reference to a canonical version to avoid duplication? Currently, we provide different regional versions of our content where the content is largely the same aside from minor changes due to spelling, units of measurement although occasionally larger amends are required. We have implemented hreflang referencing all the alternative country Urls, e.g en-us, en-gb, en-aus etc but also specificied the canonical as the en-gb version since we are a UK based website and the majority of the content originated from the UK version of our site. Recently, our rankings across all countries have been falling markedly and I'm wondering whether the canonical element may be at fault. We have not been engaging in any black hat activities that might have been responsible for any sort of fall. When we implemented the hreflang and canonical in July 2012 our traffic has actually been increasing significantly until literally 21 Nov when the search traffic is plummeting considerably across all countries. It would be useful to know if you need to specify a canonical version when using hreflang or could there be another reason for our ranking falls. Many thanks in advance of your assistance.

If i have a lengthy article which I decide to split into two separate articles E.g part 1 and part 2 but I target the same keyword in both articles, is this bad from an SEO point of view? For example, if I publish an article about 'healthy snacks ideas' and call the first article 'Healthy snack ideas part 1' and the second article 'Healthy snacks ideas part 2' in order to differentiate between them, would these two articles effectively just compete against one another? Is using part 1 and part 2 in article titles bad practice? Essentially what I am wondering is should you never ever have more than one article that is targetting the same keywords or should I just target slightly different keywords for each article even if they are very closely related?

One of our sites utilizes a single .com domain but offers differentiated article page for users depending on their location. For example: example.com/articles/how-to-learn-seo-gb-en for UK example.com/articles/how-to-learn-seo-us-en for US example.com/articles/how-to-learn-seo-au-en for Aus Currently we use example.com/articles/how-to-learn-seo as the relative link on the site and then the user is redirected by 302 to the correct article for them based on their location. I've read countless pages about 302 redirects (and largely why you shouldn't use them because of link juice, indexing etc) but what alternative can we use since we don't want to permanently redirect to one URL but rather redirect to the relevant URL based on the users location. All the stuff I've read talks about redirecting using 301s but this surely only works when you are redirecting from one URL to one permanent new URL as opposed to redirecting to one of many country specific URLs. It's not really a solution for us to set up separate TLDs for each country so what is the best mechanism for redirecting user to the correct article for them and making sure that link juice is shared, pages are indexed etc? I hope I've explained this well enough for any of you to offer advice. Many thanks in advance.

My site contains a number of listings for charities that offer various sporting activities for people to get involved in order to raise money. As part of the listing we provide an outbound link for the user to find out more info about each of the charities and their activities. Currently these listings are blocked in the robots.txt for fear that we may be viewed as a 'link farm or spam site' (as there are hundreds of charities listed on the scrolling page) but these links out are genuine and provide benefits and are a useful resource for the user and not paid links. What I'd like to do is make these listings fully crawlable and indexable to increase our search traffic to these listing, but I'm not sure whether this would have a negative impact on our Pagerank with Google potentially viewing all these outbound links as 'bad' or 'paid links', Would removing the listing pages from our robots.txt and making all the outbound links 'nofollow' be the way forward to allow us to properly index the listings without being penalised as some kind of link farm or spam site? (N.B. I have no interest in passing link juice to the external charity websites)

I have been trying to use Rank Tracker but it still appears to be down. The following message is displayed which dates from 5th September and suggests it would take around a week to get it working. "Due to a server failure, we are experiencing a delay in Rank Tracker results this week. Unfortunately, it may take up to a week to get it working properly again. Thanks for your patience and understanding; our engineers are working around the clock to get this issue fixed. - Updated September 5th." It is now 17th September and I am still unable to use it. Just wondering whether this is the same situation for all or whether SEOMoz have an update on when we can expect this to be up and running. Thanks.