Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi All, I've been reading more about the meta keyword tag and why it may not be a good idea to include them on pages and am looking for thoughts/feedback on this idea. If you have employed this tactic, can you give me some insight into any results you saw.  If you decided to not employ this tactic, why did you choose not to? I wan to understand all sides of this before employing any changes to my company's websites. Thank you for your help!

Hi All, I work for an small e-commerce company that is looking to expand our customer base to include Canadian customers. At the moment, we do serve some Canadian customers, but haven't made a concerted effort to capture this market and are looking to lay the groundwork for this new venture. With this in mind I have a few questions I am hoping to get some help on. Please see below. 1. From the viewpoint of a potential Canadian customer, how is it best to them know that we sell and ship to Canada? If you have examples of companies that do this well, please share! 2. From an SEO standpoint, how is it best for a US company to target Canadian customers? In the past, our websites have relied heavily on organic search results to drive traffic and we would like to continue this trend as we venture into Canada. If you have any other feedback, tips or suggestions of questions we should be asking ourselves before starting this, please feel free to add them! Thank you for your help!

Hi All, I work for an online appliance retailer and over the past weeks, we've seen a drop in our google SERPs.  This time last year we were ranking in the top 3 for our top converting key terms, but now we are ranking towards the bottom of the first page or even on the top of the second page with the big box stores now dominating for our key terms.  Needless to say traffic for these pages has dropped off considerably. We still have quite a bit of traffic coming in for other key terms, but they don't convert as well. Is anyone else seeing the same thing? If so what are you doing to combat this? Do you have any suggestions? Thank you!

Hello, I work for an online retailer that has the opportunity to add a lot of SKUs to our site in a relatively short amount of time by borrowing content from another site (with their permission).  There are a lot of positives for us to do this, but one big question we have is what the borrowed content will do to our search rankings (we normally write our own original content in house for a couple thousand SKUs). Organic search traffic brings in a significant chunk of our business and we definitely don't want to do something that would jeopardize our rankings. Could we run into issues with duplicate content penalties if we were to use the borrowed product descriptions? Is there a rule of thumb for what proportion of the site should be original content vs. duplicate content without running into issues with our search rankings? Thank you for your help!

As a part of our SEO strategy, we have been focusing on writing several high quality articles with unique content.  In these articles we regularly link to other websites when they are high quality, authoritative sites. Typically, the articles are 500 words or more and have 3-5 outbound links, but in some cases there are as many as 7 or 8 outbound links. Before we get too carried away with outbound links, I wanted to get some opinions on how many outbound links we should be trying to include and more information on how the outbound links work. Do they pass our website's authority on to the other website? Could our current linking strategy cause future SEO problems?  Finally, do you have any suggestions for guidelines we should be using? Thank you for your help!

Over the past year, we have completely optimized one of the sites we manage for Google (removed bad links, reduced keyword count, etc) and we are doing great for Google organic traffic.  However, in the process we have seen a steady decline in Yahoo organic traffic and Bing organic traffic. Enough so that I am looking for suggestions for quick fixes that aren't going to interfere with the Google optimizations that we made. Do you have any suggestions? Thanks for your help!

In an effort to decease our page load time, we are looking at making a change so that all product images on any page past page 1 load with a place holder image.  When the user clicks to the next page, it then loads all of the images for that page. Right now, all of the product divs are loaded into a Javascript array and loaded in chunks to the page display div. Product-heavy pages significantly increase load time as the browser loads all of the images from the product HTML before the Javascript can rewrite the display div with page-specific product HTML. In order to get around this, we are looking at loading the product HTML with a small placeholder image and then substituting the appropriate product image URLs when each page is output to the display div. From a user experience, this change will be seamless and they won't be able to tell the difference, plus they will benefit from a potentially a short wait on loading the images for the page in question.  However, the source of the page will have all of the product images in a given category page all having the same image.  How much of a negative impact will this have on SEO?

To help build up my company's website, we've been making a huge push in social media and to gain followers on our social pages, we've recently been running a couple of contests. So far it's been a great success - more traffic to the social media pages and more traffic to the website.  We are considering making the contests a regular part of our social media & SEO strategy. In the past, our social media strategy has relied completely on "organic" likes (no incentives to follow our company's page) and posted content articles, pictures, etc. In the past month or so, we've began to use giveaway contests as a way to gain followers. Since focusing more on running contests, we've seen a huge increase in actively on our social media pages. We've continued to regularly post content articles, interesting pictures, etc, during the contests, but haven't see the same level of engagement that we do with the contest posts. Right now, it's looking like there is no down-side to running the contests as we're seeing an increase in traffic on the social pages, getting some additional traffic to posts and on our site, but before we start to completely commit to this strategy, I have a couple of questions: Is there a reason we shouldn't continue to run these contest to increase fans and interaction? How likely is it that Google will penalize us in the future for gaining followers through contests (instead of "organic" followers that followed us without an incentive)? There are some fans/followers that are serial contest entrants and are always entering a contest - could having too many of these fans raise a red flag for Google and the other search engines? How often is too often to be running a social media contest? Basically, I want to make sure that we are using social media as a long term SEO tool and are setting ourselves up to be successful in the future and not get penalized for gaining followers the wrong way.  Any tips, strategies or advice is very much appreciated. Thank you!

Hello, The site I work with has a number of unwanted, unrealted and just generally spammy sites linking to our site.  What is the best way to ask them to remove the links (formal notice asking to remove or more of a "hey, can you get remove this for us as a favor" tone)?  Do you have any tips for getting rid of these links? Thank you!

Hello, I work with a conglomerate of 10 or so different websites.  In the past year or so (but especially in the past few weeks) we've seen a drop in traffic to our smaller microsites and have found that it's time consuming to rank well for these sites.  With the recent changes that Google has made, would you recommend consolidating our sites and focusing our attention on one or two main sites? Also, if we were to redirect the microsites back to our main site, could that effect the rankings of our main site?  Would the demoted rankings get passed along? Thank you!

Hello, Years ago, our company started out as a Yahoo store.  We've since moved onto another website with its own shopping cart but since the Yahoo store is almost 10 years old, there's a lot of history there and it still exists with the occasional order. We currently use it for reputation management purposes with links to our real ecommerce site but we're thinking of just redirecting the Yahoo store to our ecommerce site.  Is there any SEO benefit in doing this? We were also kind of penalized by Panda.  Would this help us out at all (the descriptions on both sites could be considered duplicate content).

We use Google Analytics on our ecommerce site and we recently made several changes to an important page.  Due to logistical reasons, we couldn't perform a Google web optimizer test but tracked the page's numbers in analytics from before/after the changes were made. After a week, we noticed that the bounce rate on the page went up by about 10% but the dollar index also doubled.  We're trying to figure out how this could happen, since it seems kind of odd. Any feedback would be appreciated.

Greetings everyone I have been tasked to do research on just how important it is to have product reviews syndicated with Google's (star rating found in Google Shopping). I am unable to find any research reports or studies on this nor any quantitative data on it's impact, beneficial or otherwise. If any of you folks have any first hand experiences, perhaps some before and after figures, that would be great. Thanks