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Cyrus' webinar yesterday got me thinking about the use of bullet points and Google's increasing affection for context and semantics. Because of their brevity, I can see bullet points parsing up context/semantics etc. Some of our competitors (apparently trying to appeal to Google) are writing 2-4 sentences about the product in the desciption section followed by bullet points repeating the same information.  They'll also put a few sentences of description at the top of the page above the price and then repeat it below in the description (this is relatively common). I put text in the description section and like bullet points as a shopper because I can quickly and easily see important information - therefore I use them heavily in product descriptions. Is Google smart enough process bullet points and mash together context or would Google prefer content in well written sentences? Should I be frying bigger fish?

Is Penguin focused primarily on backlinks or does it also assess internal linking/anchor text? We've lost about 3,000 visitors a month since the rolling updates were implemented. I'm always careful not to over-react to algo updates but enough time has passed that I think the dust has settled. I try to stay white in all I do but I think if I've over-done anything its the internal linking related products/categories with exact match. My backlink profile also has an over-abundance of affiliate links but that's kind of out of my hands isn't it?

In local SEO practices, is it best to geotag all images or only specific ones? For example, if we have images of our retail store on our G+ page (or on our About Us page) it seems like common sense to geotag those images. However, if you're a local photographer do you want to geotag all of your images or only images shot in locations where you'd like to rank?

I've set up a filter to remove bot traffic from Analytics. I relied on regular expressions posted in an article that eliminates what appears to be most of them. However, there are other bots I would like to filter but I'm having a hard time determining the regular expressions for them. How do I determine what the regular expression is for additional bots so I can apply them to the filter? I read an Analytics "how to" but its over my head and I'm hoping for some "dumbed down" guidance. 🙂

I'm not a business lawyer but has Moz been in the marketplace long enough to take issue with this? Volusion's new mid-to-enterprise level eCommerce platform is http://www.mozu.com/

Big city A is the target optimization for services. Suburb city B is the location of the business. Will the NAP of the business in the footer negatively impact on-page optimization for Big city A?

Just got my newlsetter from LinkedIn with a link to an interesting article about the part of a webpage that gets the most viewership. Are there any page tools out there that will tell me the pixel measurements on a page as shown in the article?

We've got a few backlinks from Keyword Spy and Keyword Spy Pro. I'm pretty sure of the answer but I'll ask it anyway. Is there any way to determine who's doing the snooping? Are there any signals to look for while clicking back through the link "crumbs" that might tell me something of interest or value?

I posted a link to Rand's recent Moz Blog in another forum. One of the users posted a link to this article as a counter point. Thoughts? [title edited by staff for clarity]

While researching conversion rate optimization services, I checked out Conversion Rate Experts because Moz used them a while ago and the experience was profiled recently in a Moz top 10 (if I recall correctly). I double checked the fees for service in case there was a typo.  Their site says they don't just service the big boys but small and mid-sized companies. We're a mid-sized outfit (at least I thought) and this is way out of our budget.  Can small or mid-sized companies swing this? Their site says $250,000-1 million in online sales are eligible. Anyone know what a reasonable monetary definition of today's small to mid-sized online companies? "Most companies engage us for either : (i) Managed-service conversion rate optimization, (ii) Full-service conversion rate optimization, (iii) Full-service with walk thru conversion rate optimization or (iv) Full-service plus implementation conversion rate optimization. We work on minimum 6-month engagements, starting from $26,000/month. We give all our clients a 3-month money-back guarantee."

Who do you recommend for Conversion Rate Optimization services?

How does Google process a product page with description tabs?  For example, lets say the product page has a tab for Overview, Specifications, What's In the Box and so on. Wouldn't that content be better served in one main product description tab with the tab names used as (htags) or highlighted paragraph separators? Or, does all that content get crawled as a single page regardless of the tabs?

How do I exclude what I presume to be bots from Analytics data? For example, Microsoft Corp is showing 632 visits during the last month. Pages per visit: 1. Visit duration: 0:00. New Visits: 100%.  Bounce rate: 100%. I'd block the IP address with a filter but how do I determine the proper IP address to block?

Why do about half of the business directories on getlisted.org want a personal profile when creating/claiming a business listing? Why would a medium to large business need personal profile content on the listing?

Anyone know of good photography sites set up on Wordpress with an eCommerce plugin used for selling photos or services? Just looking for ideas. I've found good referrals in the Moz archives for Wordpress eCommerce plugins. Now I'm looking for WP photography sites employing eCommerce. Thanks for sharing.

Hi Mozzers, I can't rank (the page is nowhere on the Google grid that I can find) and I've not been able to move the needle at all on it. The page is http://www.lumber2.com/Western-Saddle-Pads-s/98.htm for keyword "western saddle pads." I'm inclined to think I'm cannabalizing the category with the products so I removed the word saddle from the majority of the product names on page. However, saddle pad or saddle pads is in the meta title for most if not all of the products. Do you think I'm cannabalizing with the product titles or is there something else going on? Thanks for any help.

Should price be included in rich snippets? Is there any research supporting inclusion or exclusion of prices in snippets?

Hello, I'm seeing the following Analytics data for some of my keywords: Multiple Visits Pages/Visit: 1 Avg Visit Duration: 00:00 % New Visits: 100% Bounce Rate: 100% The data is the same on all "affected keywords". What is going on and how do I fix it? Thanks for the help!

A. Is there a correlation between domain authority and crawl penetration? B. Is there a correlation between domain authority and juice distribution?

We subscribe to a product feed and have been very pleased with the results. However, one of the unanticipated results is a trending increase in our site bounce rate. Should we be concerned about this 3-10% increase in bounce rate trend. It may go higher. Of all the factors that can contribute to bounce rate, one of the factors is that we have a lot of products on the site that cannot be shipped out of state or shipped at all. These products can only be delivered in-state or picked up at our store. The Analytics data suggests that feed products typically have a higher bounce rate, lower ctr, lower time on page, lower time on site etc. than products found by other means. However, the product feed generates sales. Should I take these products off the feed that have a high bounce rate and are not "shipable"? Although they may land on feed product, they may click through to a shipable product. Our feed provider says of the bounce rate is typically not something a lot of other merchants worry about. I'm not certain, but I'm inclined to disagree. What are your thoughts and experiences with this? Thanks for the help.

We've got about 1,700 products and 6,600 pages on our site. I recently finished up adding similar product links and popular category links to our product and category pages in an effort to juice up the pages that sell and make us money. I also added a category html sitemap in the footer. A couple of the targeted category rankings are moving down. Am I possible accruing a penalty for overusing anchor text? Is this internal linking strategy poor form? Thanks.

I believe we may be seeing the initial stages of a penalty for over-using internal anchor text on our ecommerce site. Per Rand and other training, we added related product links and popular category links to our product and category pages. At the time, we did not have an html sitemap in the footer. We're a small to medium sized site with 1,700+ products. We have since added an html sitemap of our categories to our footer. Now we have category links in the sitemap and category pages and product pages with targeted anchor text. I'm beginning to see downward movement on some of those targeted categories. If I have an html sitemap in the footer (category index) should I get rid of the popular category links throughout the rest of the site? Also, with more frequency, I'm seeing a "product index" and "category index" in footers. Is this a best practice? Thanks.

Is there any way to quantify how an eCommerce site affects its respective brick and mortar store? I can show the owner of a brick and mortar store how much sales we did last week, month and year. However, I can't show him what it did for his brick and mortar store. What do I do? I want to claim credit for as much gravy as I can! 🙂 Thanks.

I use our city/state in the majority of our title tags and consequently we do very well locallly for the majority of terms on our ecommerce site. I'm wondering however, if this "localized" optimization will inadvertently affect our keyword rankings outside of our city/state? If a keyword query does not include our city or state, would Google interpret our titles as less relevent and therefore move other results ahead of ours? The city/state is last in the string on the title: Blue Widgets - Our Company in City, State Thanks for any insight.

Why would you put an H1 tag on a product name? I came across this in another forum and thought I'd float it here.

Suppose I have a long url on an established site and created a shorter version of it so it is easier for people to enter directly and click. I 301 the short version to the long. I don't think there is much concern for people linking to the long version pages, but will there be a tendency for people to link to the short url instead of the long for the domain links? Will I not benefit as much from links to the short vs the long? Thanks.

Does Google interpret Affiliate links as paid links? If so, can Affiliate links harm your rank if they are not properly tagged with a no-follow? Thanks.

Anybody have some good advice as to how to handle customer accounts when merging eCommerce sites? These include email accounts and store accounts. We're trying to limit customer concerns when people discover the sites are merging. Thanks.

I know its effective practice cuz we're getting our arse kicked. I'm curious if its best practice (white, gray or black hat). I'm checking a competitors link profile on its landing page that is hitting the top of page 1 for several keywords. This competitor (national chain) has a strong domain authority (69). The particular landing page I'm checking in OSE has two 301 redirects from its own site among some other directory links to the page. The page shows 15 external links and half of them are very strong including it's own 301's. Aren't they essentially sending their own juice to the landing page to bolster page/domain authority to rank higher in the SERPS for those keywords? Is this a common practice using the 301's to a landing page? Is it white, gray or black hat? They are appearing suddenly appearing on the first page for several category keywords, so we're doing some snooping. Thanks.

We're closing down one of our eCommerce sites. What is the best approach to do this? The site has a modest link profile (a young site). It does have a run of site link to the parent site. It also has a couple hundred email subscribers and established accounts. Is there a gradual way to do this? How do I treat the subscribers and account holders? The impact won't be great, but I want to minimize collateral damage as much as possible. Thanks.

Our ecommerce sites are on CMS platforms. When we generate articles we get the following: www.example.com/Articles.asp?ID=134 in the url. There is no page name (keyword) in the url as opposed to product and category pages which generate them. Does the absence of keywords in the url significantly impact the page rank of an article? If it does, I'm going to submit a feature request. If not, I'm going to leave it alone. Thanks.

When linking internally on an ecommerce site between pages and from a sitemap, is partial or exact match on the anchor text a significant factor? If it matters to Google, which is a better practice to use? I found plenty of info on external links, but precious little on internal links (which suggests it doesn't matter enough to worry about).

I'm working on an html sitemap for our ecommerce site and want to limit the links on each page to less than 100. I've created an article for the initial page, but what is the proper way to go to the next page? Do I create another article page (and so on and so on) until I have the sitemap completed? If so, how do I link from one page to the next? Would my on page text read: "sitemap continued" with anchor text on the link "sitemap page 2.."? It seems like all the sitemaps I've seen just fill one page with links and very little regard for "link saturation" and continuous pages. Thanks!

Greetings, I am new to the community and am checking out Pro. The domain authority for two of our sites www.lumber2.com and www.americasworkclothes.com has dropped 10 points each respectively. I've worked on getting our lumber 2 site on registries from getlisted.org (i think there are 5 or 6 of them). Our page authority has improved significantly along with mosrank and moztrust. However, at the same time our domain authorities just tanked 10 points each. Since each site dropped 10 points, I'm wondering if its the ros links affecting them. Here's the domain data: Lumber 2 site: DA 21: 50,489 links from 12 domains
America's Work Clothes: DA 20: 33,839 links from 5 domains We have left nav run of site links between our two sites and have had them in place for a couple of years with steady domain authority progression. Suddenly DA tanked. Is there a chance there is too much run of site linking? I already removed a few links, so you won't see all of them. Can anyone help? Thank you. Steve