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I'm in a very similar position at my company. Duplicate content is going to hurt your SERP rankings, period. You need to write your own product descriptions. Even a really short original description is better than something copied directly from the manufacturer.

Long story short, two weeks of analytics data are stored on a different profile from the rest of the year's data. Is there a way to export all data from a date range, and then import it to another account?

Thanks for your help.

Adwords works on a bidding system, where AdWords users bid on specific keywords and the highest bidder gets the best placement. Costs differ on a keyword-by-keyword basis, and go up and down based on the market. Google itself doesn't charge any fees on top of the per-click payments.

I don't think this is possible. Any "authority" metric is just going to be a best guess based on number of external links, etc., and will differ between tools anyway. Google's algorithm is constantly changing as well, so a site with high authority a year ago could have very low authority now even if nothing on the site has changed.

I recently started a blog for my client. So far the response has been decent but, as should probably be expected, most of the commenters want to put a link to their own site in the comment. Do I have anything to gain by allowing these comments to stay on the page?

We changed hosting companies two weeks ago, and we had a number of configuration issues that caused the site to go on and offline over that weekend. We fixed the problem but our traffic took a noticeable hit. I am assuming this is because our rankings dropped due to the site being down. Now that we're stable again, how long will it take for the traffic to return? is there anything I can do to speed up the process?

I would recommend against developing a sister site, since you will most likely have lots of duplicate content across both sites and the two sites will compete with each other for SERP rankings. Best practice is to use 301 redirects to send traffic from .co.uk to .com or vice versa

You can use Alexa to get some rough traffic stats, but to get any real analytics you would need to install tracking code on the site.

In keyword research for an ecommerce site, I've found that widget, singular gets a lot more searches than widgets, plural AND is much less competitive. Is it better for SEO purposes to have the URLs (and matching title tags) in the catalog as /brass-widget.html, /steel-widget.html, etc., or /brass-widgets.html, etc.?

I'm worried that a) searches for widgets will pass by the singular urls but not vice versa, and b) the singular form will strike visitors as bad grammar. Any advice?

You can link all your subdomains by modifying your tracking code. Google's tutorial: http://services.google.com/analytics/breeze/en/domains_subdomains/index.html

I lean towards the second response, especially if you have separate profiles for each site. Of course, having two very similar sites could cause you problems with duplicate content and by competing for the same keywords. For those reasons, I wouldn't recommend having two sites that sell the same things, but just having the same GA account won't make a difference.

It's not on SEOmoz, but I use Google's Keyword tool - https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal - and Google Insights to see which keywords get the most monthly searches. If your field isn't super competitive, go after the highest traffic keywords first. If there's a lot of competetion you may want to start with the more specialized, less competitive keywords first.

The problem is that, because we are a specialized store, the product names are very similar. Basically "No. 5 Blue Widget", "No. 5A Blue Widget," "No. 18 Red Widget," etc. I can't optimize all 2000 pages for "widget," but "5" isn't much of a keyword either.

The big difference between these two videos that I can see is that the 2nd video has a lot more views but a lot fewer likes, comments, and favorites per viewer. Video 2 has nearly 5 times the views of video 1 but around the same number of likes comments and favorites; this shows youtube that viewers like video 1, on average, 5 times as much as video 2, and youtube ranks them accordingly.

I'm not sure what you can do at this point to push this video to number one. The best way to outrank your competition is to make better videos that people like more. I'm sorry if it sounds oversimplified, but that's the way it is.

It's widely accepted that in title tags, the first word ranks the highest, and each word after that contributes less than the one before. So a page with the title "Philadelphia Parks" will rank higher than "Parks in Philadelphia" for Philadelphia, but the second page will rank higher for Parks.

With this in mind, which keywords should I put first in the title tags of my product pages? Brand name? Product SKU? Is it better to prioritze general words with higher search volume (more impressions) or more specific terms with lower search volume (stronger long tail)? Any guidance would be appreciated.

Thanks

Use a tool like open site explorer to check their backlinks. They probably have a handful of well-aged links from high authority domains that are buffering them against spotty reviews. The fact that they've ranked first for so long probably helps them stay high more than anything.

If you've resubmitted the site map, then you just have to wait for google to get around to crawling your site again. It could take a few days.

Go to google and type in site:www.in2town.co.uk

you'll see that google in fact has been crawling your site, because if it wasn't nothing would show up. I would suggest double checking your webmaster tools account and sitemap to make sure everything's set up properly.

You should check your meta description tags because all your top results say "Joomla! - the dynamic portal engine and content management system."

I've read that a flat URL structure is best -

"MountainBiking.com/Mountain Biking Adventures In Whistler" instead of "MountainBiking.com/Mountain Biking Adventures/Mountain Biking Adventures In Whistler".

This format is easier for bots to crawl. Since only around 130 characters of the URL show in SERPs anyway, searchers won't see the whole URL if it's too long. You also avoid the appearance of "keyword stuffing"  by using a flat URL structure.

I'm getting a ton of duplicate content errors because almost all of my pages feature a "print this page" link that adds the parameter "printable=Y" to the URL and displays a plain text version of the same page. Is there any way to exclude these pages from the crawl results?

OK. Just to be clear, you are wondering which type of outgoing link makes a site more valuable as an external link source for your own site, right?

Again, I would look at metrics like authority before number of internal and external links, as those have a much greater influence on the amount of link juice you'll get. But as far as just internal versus external there isn't much difference. Too many of either one will look bad to search engines, and a high ratio of links to non-link text is bad as well.

Outgoing/Incoming and Internal/External are two different link classifications.

Outgoing = links from your site to another site
Incoming = links from another site to your site

Internal = links from one page on your site to another page on your site
External = links from another site to your site

So incoming and external are basically the same, and are very important factor in search rankings. Don't get me wrong, outgoing links are good too (they connect your site to the site you link to, and the owner of that site may choose to reciprocate), but because you have to "earn" incoming/external links they are worth more to search engines.

I would look at the Authority and mozRank of a site you want a link from first, because those scores are an aggregate of links and other factors that give a more complete picture of how valuable a site is.

I don't know about your first question, but if Google does penalize/blacklist a domain, it will likely be toxic for a long time afterward. In my opinion, there isn't any value to associating yourself with a domain determined to be spam. It seems risky.

It's hard to tell exactly what you mean by dropdown menus ... I am assuming you mean for navigation? It depends on if the dropdowns are formatted so that a spider can read them. You can right click on the page from a browser and then view the source code. You should see URLs for all the pages you link to. If so, you've got no problems! If not, then you should use a different method to navigate.

I should have used the word purchase instead of conversion in my answer. I'm not sure Google gives any weight at all to conversions, since conversions are defined by site owners and not Google.

To answer your question, Christopher, if you use GA for ecommerce tracking it automatically tracks purchases, as well as custom conversion goals that you define. If you don't use GA on your site I don't know how they would know if a visitor converted or not, probably through pages per visit or other behavior that shows engagement with the site.

Other than on-site optimization, the main factors google uses for shopping results are things like bounce rate, conversion rate, time on page, etc. So basically if visitors are responding well to your products and making purchases, your shopping SERP will go up.

They are not nofollowed. The sidebar is automatically generated by the shopping cart so I'm not sure if I can nofollow them.

You'll be fine as long as your 301s redirect to the actual content and not to other 301s.

So 301 > homepage; 301 > homepage; 301 > homepage won't hurt you at all, but 301 > 301 > 301 > homepage will get you in trouble.

I run an ecommerce site with close to 2000 products. Nearly every page in the catalog has a too many on-page links error because of the navigation sidebar, which has several flyout layers of nested links. What can/should I do about this? Will it affect my rankings at all?

Thanks