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Hi Wesley, according to the article you sent, I do not believe I was hit with the unnatural link penalty because I never saw any notification in webmaster tools. It seems more like a algorithmic update. I'm not sure if you are able to tell anything via open site explorer, or whatever other methods... Your thoughts?

We've been outsourcing our link building to India for the past 3 years and the results were pretty good up until beginning of this year. What they were essentially doing is putting links into directories, a few per month, and posting a few articles per month. Out of our top 10 keywords, 8 got into top 10. Then something happened around Jan 1 last year, our ranking started dropping, falling out of the top 50, before settling around 20-30ish. We disavowed most of the low quality links since then.

Also, very odd, all the top ranking competitors all fell (including me) and were replaced by less "specialized" companies who sold a broad range of products (for example: all parts of the car, rather than someone who just focused on mufflers). Theres also other differences but again I can't put a finger on it.

I'd like to find someone who can do a detailed audit of our site, and our competitors, what happened to cause the drop, and why the new top positions sites are ranked high. And I really don't have time to do an audit myself. Our site is American Hospitality Furniture dot com. Any feed back would be appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Great article and I am very motivated to make a killer blog. From what i've read on SEOmoz it looks like the best place for the blog is on the same domain. Ideally i'd have it at mydomain.com/blog, but due to Volusion constraints I have to put the blog at mydomain.com/v/blog and add a 301 redirect from mydomain.com/blog to mydomain.com/v/blog. Is this a bad thing, or is it just fine since the blog is in the domain?

Thanks

Volusion doesn't allow messing with the main directory so I could only put a page at /v/blog. They do allow you to set up a 301 redirect so I had set up a 301 redirect from www.mydomain.com/blog to www.mydomain.com/v/blog. Is it worth starting a blog like this for SEO?

Thanks

Does anyone know of any google products research tools? I am trying to find what attributes and classifications my competitors are using? Much help appreciated. Thanks!

Hey Lux,

Hope you can provide some advice since you worked at Volusion. We are using Volusion right now, it was fairly easy to set up but we have now grown to the point where we need to customize the shopping cart and add a blog (they only allow subdomains, which google treats as a seperate domain). We also need to integrate 3rd party apps like freight calculators and Powerreviews, but do not have access to the back end coding, neither FTP SQL support...

I'm thinking we may need to start a domain and build from scratch, as we've invested tremendous resources into SEO and do not want a big hit to our rankings. Any recommendations from you on which platform and shopping cart to use?

Some quick notes on our site:

• 1 year old

• 1000 sku but will need to expand to 10,000 in the future

• No IT professional (we will need to hire one in the future)

Based on what I've read so far, the best blog URL for SEO purposes is a subfolder (www.example.com/blog) rather than a subdomain (blog.example.com). I am having a lot of trouble adding a blog to our e-commerce store which is hosted by volusion. I have looked into installing Wordpress into a subdirectory but apparently Volusion does not allow the mysql/myphpadmin/database access needed to successfully do this. I have also looked into trying to publish my blog through ftp using Blogger, but they stopped allowing this a while ago. Does anyone know a way to add a blog to my volusion store's subdirectory?

Thanks

Hi Thanks for the speedy response. We actually use the volusion system, so it would be the volusion shopping cart. Our site is here: http://www.americanhospitalityfurniture.com. I do not think its an open source.

I am managing an ecommerce site with over 1000 SKUs. Does anyone know of any Q&A widgets we can add to our site for individual products where customers ask questions and moderator can answer them? FYI I'm looking for something similar to Golfsmith.com, which has a great tool q&a tool.