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I find WordPress' blogging functionality a lot easier to use and a lot more customizable. Not only that, if your blog is currently a significant driver of organic rankings/traffic for your site, I would recommend against moving your blog if you have the option to keep it where it is, especially if moving it would mean an overhaul in URLs/URL structure.

Hi Eric,

A few things to reassure you off the bat:

1. For what it's worth, there is a huge, HUGE amount of crawler spam happening in the web today. Every site I work on is being hit hard with false referrals and direct visits. I know Google Analytics is working on a solution to better filter these visits out. So I wouldn't be too concerned that it is something a competitor is doing to your site, specifically - it's more likely that it's been caught up in the general wave of spam crawlers.
2. It's important to note that when we talk about Google looking at bounce rate and dwell time as part of ranking your site, those numbers are specifically from clicks through from search - that's data that Google can get without using your private web analytics data as a ranking factor, which they've said repeatedly that they don't and won't do. So a bunch of direct visits with high bounce rates will NOT affect your rankings.

So, it's not dangerous, just annoying. On to how to get that data out of your reports:

• Make sure you're not filtering out spam referrers at a View level - this can cause those visits to incorrectly appear as direct traffic.
• You could set up an Advanced Segment in Google Analytics to filter out direct visits with visit times of, say, under 5 seconds. Some real traffic may get caught in that, but it will get the noise levels down.
• The best way to filter out spam bot traffic, in my opinion, is to set up hostname filtering. Here's a post on Megalytic on how to do that: https://megalytic.com/blog/how-to-filter-out-fake-referrals-and-other-google-analytics-spam. Make sure you've also got an "Unfiltered Data" View so you'll still have historic raw data if you need it.

Hope that helps! Good luck.

A longer page title is certainly ok - although, as the other answers noted, yours is pretty unreadable by humans.  Too many keywords in a title tag can make your page look "over-optimized" and have a negative effect - not to mention that users are less likely to click on an unattractive tag.  I would advise targeting a maximum of 2 keywords in a title tag.

WIth Google's recent updates it's becoming more important to have a tag that's not TOO long, though.  Title tags longer than about 68 characters (including spaces) may be automatically shortened by Google - or Google may choose to use different text from the page altogether in place of the title tag.  This can make for some pretty weird results since Google's auto-inserted text isn't always as nice of a user experience as your hand-crafted tag.  So make sure your tags are shorter than 68 characters so as not to get truncated.

What analytics tool are you using? I know that both Google Analytics and SiteCatalyst have functions where you can make a note of changes - make sure you've recorded the date of the change so you can compare back and forth and as time goes on, remember exactly when the switch happened.

I would also run some comparison reports for equal amounts of time before and after the switch - things like your most popular pages by organic traffic, home page visits, etc. That will show you right away if an important page has stopped doing well.

In the Moz tool, tracking rankings before and after is definitely a good thing to do. You should also dig in and see which pages are ranking for your target terms before and after the switch to make sure it's still the page you want ranking for the keyword you want.

Lastly, don't forget that your site switch didn't occur in a vacuum. Take into account factors such as seasonality that could also be impacting your traffic post-switch.

If Moz and Webmaster Tools are showing the 403 error, it means that they are able to crawl to the URLs that are returning the 403 - so somewhere on your site or on the web, pages that are accessible by bots and crawlers are linking to these pages that don't exist yet. Having a bunch of errors on your site can impact Google's ability to crawl it well, which can impact your rankings, so it's best to get those cleaned up. In Webmaster Tools you should be able to click on the pages and see which pages are linking to them, so you can remove those links; you can do the same using a tool like Screaming Frog if you'd prefer. Good luck!

DA doesn't usually transfer very well across subdomains - so it's likely the DA from www.example.com is already not affecting subdomain.example.com.

It's certainly possible to keep the subdomain alive, but I'd be a little concerned about what it would do for your brand. If you're sending the message that example.com is now newexample.com, but then keeping things running at example.com, it could create a lot of consumer confusion. From a DA stance you should be OK, though, especially if you take some extra time to promote the subdomain and the new site after launch.

You may still not see pages from the new domain and the old subdomain ranking in the same SERPs, though - Google is often pretty good at figuring out when multiple sites are owned by the same people.