Can you share some details why you want to "move" the store locator to a subdomain? That makes me think it is already operational in a subfolder at the moment. In general, I would recommend not moving content unless there is a very good reason for it.

Hi Jenni1,

You are right to be concerned. Do not use the canonical tag like you have described above.

I would recommend putting that content on it's own unique page. Then, pull in the content to your product pages via a an ajax request to pull that content into the tabbed area. This would make the content visible for the user but not a part of the page html for the search engines.

I would advise against it.

I would stick them all in subfolders of the www version of the site. www.web.com/texas

If the domain is has an extremely high authority (80+), I would consider it due to potential to dominate the SERPs by getting the www.web version and state.web version both to rank high.

A few questions need to be answered. Primarily:

1. Are these coming back in stock?
2. Were these popular products?

If these products are coming back in stock, this is a big problem and you need to have your team work to find a solution to have these pages maintain a 200. You could be losing your spot in the rankings every time you run out of inventory, missing out on a lot of traffic and cross-selling opportunities.

If the products are gone and not coming back, this isn't a big problem, as it is something every e-comm deals with. Having a plan to handle this is important though.

Some basic options include:

• Keep out of stock product pages active on web, serving up a 200. Be sure the content is updated clearly to show that the item is Out of Stock and it also serves up a bunch of additional, closely related alternative
• Let the removed products 404. Redirect these URLs to the parent subcategory level. This is possible for sites with a moderate amount of SKUs and low turnover.
• Let the removed products 404. Hand pick the popular products to set-up 301 redirects for to subcategory or similar product. Maintain by watching 404s in Google Webmaster Tools, looking for 404 pages in OSE/ahrefs, etc.

I don't think there will be an ASAP solution to this. I think you simply need to continue to build a brand (authoritative website, social profiles, strong online presence) and increase the search volume for your brand. As more people begin to search for Zotey and click the "Search instead for zotey" it will go away.

As others have mentioned, simply commenting on a blog post does not directly help SEO and if done for the sole purpose of dropping a link it is basically worthless spam.

Leaving a thoughtful, intelligent comment that furthers the conversation started in a post can be a great way to build a connection with the author. If you do this regularly on a site, your chances of securing a future link to your content can be significantly increased.

I would Recommend implementing NoIndex, Follow on your Paginated/Archive pages of your blog.

YourSite.com/blog/page=2 isn't a valuable landing page for Google. You don't need to let them index it.

Typically, if you want to use the Canonical Tag for pagination, you would have it point to a View All style page, such as friendly-url.html&view=all.

If you have too many products/pages in the pagination series, you might want to consider removing the canonical tag and implementing rel=prev/next. You can get more info here: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html

Those discrepancies would not concern me, but there are some differences between all the things you list:

Total indexed: 2,360 Search Console - this is likely a reasonably accurate list of the number of pages you have indexed in Google. You could use a tool like URL Profiler to check index status of specific URLs.

About 2,920 results Google search "site:example.com" - site: search is less accurate and will likely return a different number each time you do it, even if it's just moments apart.

Sitemap: 1,229 URLs: these are URLs you added to a sitemap because they are priority pages you want to make sure Google has indexed and hopefully ranked. You control this number.

Screaming Frog Spider: 1,352 URLs - Screaming Frog is going to start on your homepage and crawl the site attempting to discover as many URLs as possible. If you are not linking to a page, SF won't be able to crawl it. Google on the other hand may have old pages, old URL structures or pages that were linked from an external website in their index and they won't forget them.

A really important question is: how many pages do you have that you want to be indexed? Is Google's index bloated with pages that you want to keep out? Figure these things out, and then try to adjust your sitemaps, noindex, robots.txt as needed.

Derek- This isn't the easy answer, but what you need to do in this instance is test. Run a simple A/B test.

Nathan- There is no right answer for this. All I can do is repeat the usual advice. It's quality, not quantity. Vary your anchor text.

Attempt to build some links that also benefit users. Instead of commenting, contact the niche blogs and ask if you can write a guest post. This will result in a followed link that adds value to the web instead of a nofollowed link buried in the comment section. Also, this will result in your product/brand being the focus of the site's readers.

Best of luck.

The canonical tag is unnecessary if you don't have problems with URL variations (tracking parameters, session ids, etc). Don't just think about external links though, if your own CMS or internal linking structure links to the same pages in different ways, the canonical tag can be a patch while you work on a development fix.

All that being said, I'm a fan of having it on every page.

You will be just fine if you remove your feed.

With the death of Google Reader and the lack of Feedburner support, I wouldn't be surprised if Google got rid of Feedburner down the road.

Focus more on your users and this: "or at some point, you just don't care about keywords and write whatever relevant to your site"

You will begin to get traffic for keywords that are important to your users and company that keyword tools had little to no volume listed for.