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Hey Leigh,

First off, I'd say that your #2 concern would be a great problem to have! I'd rather own 2 of the top listings than just 1!

In scenarios where product-level optimization is not feasible/efficient/etc, I'd try to get as many data points on each product as possible and do 'form optimization'. I see that your initial descriptions are going to be similar. You should enhance them a bit using product attribute info. It takes a bit of programming but worth it in the long run!

Do you have other product attributes which can be worked into each product page template?

Maybe stuff like:

• Size availability (2,3,4,etc.)
• Color/style options (white, gold, pink, etc.)
• Seasonal availability (winter, spring, year-round, etc.)
• Parent category names (wedding ring, anniversary necklace, etc.)
• Material (gold, sterling, etc)
• Fulfillment time [1 week, immediately, etc.)
• Weight

In this case, you can enhance your descriptions with that data. For example, your product page template would look like:

The [Insert Ring Name] is a [Insert material] [Insert parent category name] available in a variety of sizes including [insert size options, comma separated]. The [insert product name] is available [insert availability attribute] and usually ships [insert fulfillment time].

Would yield something like this on a specific product page:

The 14k yellow gold ring is a yellow gold wedding ring available in a variety of sizes including 1,2.3 and 4. The 14k yellow gold is available year round and usually ships in 1-week.

We're still seeing form optimization work pretty well as long as:

• The content is pretty useful and not just a bunch of keywords and attributes stuffed onto each page (aka, provide value, especially to the customer!)
• You have at least a few different data points for each product which can be utilized to hide the appearance of 'form optimization'

O yeah, not sure of your sales volume but push the h*ll out of getting customers to write reviews and make sure the reviews appear in a SE friendly way on the product pages themselves for added uniqueness.

See where I'm going with this? Hope this helps and good luck!

Here's the google help doc on trackpageview: http://www.google.com/support/analytics/bin/answer.py?answer=55529. Or you could use event tracking: http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/tracking/eventTrackerGuide.html.

Hola,

We've moved a number of sites for similar political reasons. It's always frustrating as an SEO!

We almost always have seen some drop-off for obvious reasons. Sometimes that drop-off has been less 5%, other times closer to 30% depending on the precautions that business owners were willing to take. Sounds like you're going to do redirects and do the webmaster tools request. 2 tips:

• Plan to hold on to the .net domain for a long time and keep the redirects in place. Our worst results were situations where for some reason, the business owner would not (refused to/could not/whatever reason) hold on to the old domain name.
• Try to find a feasible/scalble way to get your top-linkers to move to the new domain. In a perfect world, you'd get most your inbound links updated. This can take some time but seems to help minimize the impact and be better in the long-run. This is an absolute waste of times in some cases (way too inefficient) but if you have or can establish solid relationships, get those links updated!

Best of luck. It's not an ideal situation but usually isn't the end of the world if you're in it for the long haul (unless your in a crazy competitive market)!

Tell your boss that the website's flux capacitor will get overloaded without a good meta description.

Hey Gary,

I partially agree with Cafe. However, I wouldn't remove any redirects for URLs which may have backlinks. Maybe it would be a good idea to figure out if any of the redirects which you are removing are from URLs that have earned links? An Open Site Explorer link export would help you figure out if any of those URLs still have value.

Per Google's recommendations, I'd change the links to the new website.

I think it could be argued differently but, if the products are identical, I'd pick one of the categories and try to keep the SE's out of the other. Probably be best to pick the category that will apply to most 'prospects'. Could use canonical, disallow in robots, etc.

You can't apply tiered pricing via your CMS and display wholesale pricebreaks? Then you could just link to the same product page (URL) from each different category.

Wp e-Comm is "okay" out of the box, but is missing stuff. Just make sure you install  the Yoast Wordpress SEO plugin and that will fix the rest and give you specific control over the category/product page titles, meta, etc. It's a great plugin to use in combination with WP eCom.

Cheap wine?

Yahoo can be ssssllllllooooowwwww.

I'd almost certainly first try to use it as a micro-site. Would it be big deal to do a quick overhaul (not sure what your business is)? If you can generate leads from it, why risk a fishy redirect? Either way, could always link from the new domain to your existing and pass some of that link love.

Agree with Brandon too that more info is needed but I can't think of much that would convince me to do otherwise without trying this first.

Good luck

Here's what I'd do.

First, check big stuff like:

• Did your URLs change? Is so, were redirects applied?
• Did your devs accidentally noindex or nofollow entire sections of the site? I've seen this happen a bunch.

If neither of the above, I'd next dig deep with analytics to try to figure out if there is a certain pages, type of pages (product page, articles, blog, etc), etc. that have taken the biggest hit.It may give you more direction. Could also:

• Review Webmaster tools
• Run a site scanner link ScreamingFrog and look for big errors

You could always try blocking new stuff but you never know how long it's gonna take google to come back and honor your changes.

Almost everything these days is DB driven! I see no issues and the same optimization rules apply. Yes, google just sees the final rendered version of the page so aside from potentially slower load times, it all looks the same!

Once it's crawl-able, go to town!

Really depends on the products you're selling. I do like Rob's answer about keeping the page live and offering an alternative or capturing an interest list. You still want the sale or to create the lead so providing some sort of call to action is key if these are significant.

If the product is never coming back, I'd def redirect to a close match or a parent category.