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Thanks for the response.

The rich snippet testing tool has actually been available for a long time, but they've recently made improvements and created a menu category for it (it was previously in the labs/beta section). However, the tool doesn't actually predict the snippets you get in search results, it just verifies the semantic markup and shows an example of what your snippet might look like. At least that's been my experience with it, and I've heard the same from other people around the industry.

Ideally Power Reviews/Bazaar should just update their markup to Schema.org format. Since that's the preferred format agreed upon by the powers that be, I don't understand why they wouldn't, unless their framework is just extremely rigid.

I appreciate your feedback about your client sites running PR. If I understand the (limited) documentation correctly, this shouldn't be a problem unless I was marking up the exact same data with two different formats. Just wanted to see if anyone else had direct experience. So thanks

Does anyone have experience implementing Schema.org markup on e-commerce websites that are already using Power Reviews (now Bazaar)? In Google's documentation they say that it's generally not a good idea to use two types of semantic markup for the same item (reviews in this case), but I wouldn't think that there would be a problem marking up other items on the page with Schema such as price, stock status, etc...

Anyone care to provide some insight?

Also in a related topic, have you all noticed that Google has really dialed back the frequency in which they display rich snippets for product searches? A few weeks ago the site that I'm referring to had hundreds of products that were displaying snippets, now it seems that only about 10% (roughly) of them are still showing.

Thanks everybody.

Interesting. Have you guys seen an increase in disparity between the two methods over the last couple of weeks?

I don't use the 50 and 100 count pages for rank tracking, but I use them for prospecting and analysis. I definitely started noticing the increase in domains with multiple results about two weeks ago, but it's possible I just didn't pay close enough attention before that.

What really sparked this question was the fact that I found a SERP in which the top 12 results were all from a single domain. I thought I was hallucinating.

It looks like the change took place approx. 1-2 weeks ago.

Example: A search for "business credit cards" with search settings at "never show instant results" and "50 results per page", the SERP has a total of 5 different domains in the top 10 (4 domains have multiple results).

With the slider set at "10 results per page", there are 9 different domains with only 1 having multiple results.

I haven't seen any mention of this change, did I just miss it?

Are they becoming that blatant about forcing as many page views as possible for the sake of serving more ads?

I use Link Assistant's Rank Tracker in addition to the SEOmoz rank tracker, and they are usually pretty close. There are definitely some instances where positions may vary, but they both accurately report rising and falling terms.

"...Internal anchor text (linking within your site) is rarely penalized."

I agree that it's rarely penalized, but based on some things I'm seeing, I think a site with exceptionally high percentages of exact match internal anchor text links to category pages can (perhaps unintentionally) be caught in the Penguin net. Not conclusive just yet, but it really looks like this is the case with a site I'm working on.

The term "collateral damage" comes to mind.

I track around 1000 keywords for this site, and my rankings in Bing dropped for about half of them on Wednesday. No major changes have been made to the site, rankings are maintaining or improving in Google for a majority of these same terms. The average drop seems to be around 9-12 places, which to me signals more than just standard fluctuation.

Anyone else seeing anything strange with Bing this week?

Or does anyone have any ideas?

I looked for posts about an algorithm change but haven't found anything.

Thanks.

Thanks for the detailed response and confirmation about the canonical being the best solution. This definitely helps.

Some of the tracking URLs are actually being indexed. It doesn't seem to be negatively affecting anything right now, but I'd prefer to prevent any potential future problems if possible.

Thanks again.

Thanks for the response.

The article doesn't deal with my specific issue exactly, but it does suggest using a rel=canonical in similar cases (affiliate tracking).

Using GWT to block parameters is a useful suggestion too, but isn't "recommended as a first line of defense" according to that article. I'll definitely use it in addition to whatever is best though.

Right now, the canonical tag seems like the best solution. Does anyone have any ideas on implementing these across the site's unique pages dynamically using code? Is this even possible?

Thanks!

My ecommerce company uses Omniture tracking codes for a variety of different tracking parameters, from promotional emails to third party comparison shopping engines. All of these tracking codes create URLs that look like www.domain.com/?s_cid=(tracking parameter), which are identical to the original page and these dynamic tracking pages are being indexed. The cached version is still the original page.

For now, the duplicate versions do not appear to be affecting rankings, but as we ramp up with holiday sales, promotions, adding more CSEs, etc, there will be more and more tracking URLs that could potentially hurt us.

What is the best solution for this problem?

If we use robots.txt to block the ?s_cid versions, it may affect our listings on CSEs, as the bots will try to crawl the link to find product info/pricing but will be denied. Is this correct?

Or, do CSEs generally use other methods for gathering and verifying product information?

So far the most comprehensive solution I can think of would be to add a rel=canonical tag to every unique static URL on our site, which should solve the duplicate content issues, but we have thousands of pages and this would take an eternity (unless someone knows a good way to do this automagically, I’m not a programmer so maybe there’s a way that I don’t know).

Any help/advice/suggestions will be appreciated. If you have any solutions, please explain why your solution would work to help me understand on a deeper level in case something like this comes up again in the future.

Thanks!