Welcome to the Q&A Forum

If you're an ecommerce site owner, will you be changing how you deal with unavailable products as a result of the recent video from Matt Cutts? Will you be moving over to a 404 instead of leaving the pages live still? For us, as more products were becoming unavailable, I had started to worry about the impact of this on the website (bad user experience, Panda issues from bounce rates, etc.). But, having spoken to other website owners, some say it's better to leave the unavailable product pages there as this offers more value (it ranks well so attracts traffic, links to those pages, it allows you to get the product back up quickly if it unexpectedly becomes available, etc.). I guess there's many solutions, for example, using ItemAvailability schema, that might be better than a 404 (custom or not).  But then, if it's showing as unavailable on the SERPS, will anyone bother clicking on it anyway...? Would be interested in your thoughts.

Has anyone used Ninjapinner?  I'm interested in automating my Pinterest efforts a little, and have seen this tool mentioned.  Interested in using it to (carefully) autofollow accounts. TIA!

We sponsor a few blogs in our niche. As part of the sponsorship, they include an advert on the RHS or LHS of the blog page.  Links are dofollow and are sitewide. Should I be concerned?  Should I be asking for a nofollow instead, if possible? I've recently disavowed links and am waiting to see what happens with this - hopefully there's a Penguin update soon - but I wondered if the blog links were part of the problem.

What's the most effective/least risky ways to engage with bloggers these days in order to build links, gain exposure and refer traffic?  I'm in a competitive niche (weddings), and there's no shortage of high quality and unique content being offered to bloggers. Currently, I do a mix of sponsorship, product giveaways, promotions etc.  But, also have some ideas in the pipeline, such as collaborating with other vendors on styled shoots, etc.  The latter is very time-consuming and, again, is something that has been done LOADS.  So, needs to be very unique to stand out. Want to avoid things like guest blogs and riskier tactics. For obvious reasons. Any fairly easy-to-do ideas that I've missed before I explore the more complex ones??

I need to remove/disavow hundreds of domains due to an algorithmic penalty.  Has anyone disavowed first and done the outreach thing second as a tactic? The reason why I was considering this was as follows: Most of the websites are from spammy websites and unlikely to have monitored accounts/available contact details. My business is incredibly seasonal, only being easily profitable for half of the year. The season starts from next month so the window of opportunity to get it done is small. If there's a Penguin update before I get it done, then it could be very bad news. Any thoughts would be much appreciated. (Incidentally, if you are interested in, I also posted here about it: http://moz.com/community/q/honest-thoughts-needed-about-link-building-removal)

I have an ecommerce website (built using Magento), and have just had the functionality extended to allow me to define my own canonical URLs.  Currently the URLs are www. domainname.com/product-name.html but I can now change this to www.domainname. com/product-category/product-name.html.  I was led to believe that this would be good for SEO. However, I have since had conflicting advice - it's been suggested that any links across the website that link to domain/category/sub-category/product will pass weight and authority through to the specified canonical anyway.   Plus longer URLs are generally worse... I'm confused. Is it worth changing them?  If so, would it be a bad thing to change all 700 canonical URLs at once?

I have an ecommerce website that has common text on all the product pages, e.g. delivery and returns information. Is it ok to use non-crawlable JavaScript injected text as a method to make this content invisible to search engines?  Or is this method frowned upon by Google? By way of background info - I'm concerned about duplicate/thin content, so want to tackle this by reducing this 'common text' as well as boosting unique content on these pages. Any advice would be much appreciated.

I need to remove around 800 bad links, probably about 500 domains as a very rough estimate.  These were built by a previous link building company.  Here some example domains: http://globalweddingblog.com
http://theweddinginsider.net
http://www.couturefashionissues.com
http://www.topfashionlabels.com
http://weddingworldnews.com
http://www.savingsdistrict.com
http://bestfemalesblog.com
http://mylatestfashion.com
http://lastfashion.net
http://womansonlineblog.org I have already tried emailing a hundred or so with a manual link request - with zero outcome.  Hardly surprising when you consider the types of sites they are.  I've had a quote for a link removal service, but I'm not sure if it's wise to pay someone to do this work - not sure what resources/tools they would have above and beyond what I can access and there could be increased risk. Any advice?

I need to signficantly boost the content on the category pages on my ecommerce website.  Currently, they're pretty thin, with some only having approx 50 words of unique content.  In the past, I've intentionally kept the content on these pages quite light, to keep the aesthetic a certain way.  It's a fashion-based site, so it's very much about the visual. However, with the introduction of Panda, I need to change this mindset.  But, there must be slightly more creative ways to boost the content to stop the pages looking too text heavy.  I'm not talking hidden text or anything, but ways to break it up in different blocks on the page to make it look natural/relevant, while keeping it looking great. Anyone have any good ideas? Or, any links to ecommerce sites that have employed brilliant methods?

... In particular Facebook likes for social proof and credibility?  (We have 1.7k likes, more than most competitors). Aimed at the higher end of the market, I've tried to keep the aesthetic a bit more pared down.  But, perhaps this needs to be made more prominent?

I have a small online business that has suffered through Google updates over the past year.  Turns out that the links built by a previous SEO were harmful - yes, it's the usual story, I know. I've been in touch with an SEO about link removal/link building and have had a proposal.  It's not cheap and I would need to dig deep, but it'll certainly be worth it if things work out.  If it doesn't, it'll probably become impossible to continue the business. Personally speaking, it's a sorry situation. For link removal, the SEO's proposing to contact the webmasters followed by disavowing, if needed. There's 15k links, but I think a high percentage of these are from industry blogs that I sponsor that have site wide links. Have you heard many success stories about outsourced link removal? For link building, they will be targeting industry websites and blogs.  The thing is, I know most of the industry bloggers anyway, and can probably reach out to them myself, if I can develop the right high quality content that they will want to feature.  Call me a cynic, but I'm not sure how the SEO can do this.  The quality of content on these blogs is extremely high as it's a very creative/visual industry that I'm involved in.  I'm just not sure how much scope there is for a third party (with no knowledge of the industry) to do this effectively.  That said, there's blogs that aren't directly related to my niche, and I suppose there's possible opportunity there.  Maybe??! If the link removal is a good idea, am I better off trying to build links myself and combine that with the link removal service?

Generally speaking, how long does it take for Google to recrawl/reindex an (ecommerce) website? After changing a number of product subcategories from 'noindex' back to 'index', I regenerated the sitemap and have fetched as Google in WMT. This was a couple of weeks ago and no action yet. Second question: Does Google treat these pages as if they're brand new?  I 'noindexed' them back in April, and they were ranking ok then. (I had noindexed them on the back of advice from my SEO, due to concerns about these pages being seen as duplicate content). Help!

My ecommerce website has menus which contain 'featured product sub-categories'.  These are shown alongside the other product sub-category links.  Each 'featured product category' includes a link, an image (with link) and some text. All menu content is visible to search engines. These menus look nice and probably encourage CTR (not tested!) but are they bad for SEO?

I have an ecommerce site built using Magento and urgently need advice on best practice for handling multiple product categories (where products appear in more than one category on the site creating multiple URLs to the same page). In April this year, based on advice from my SEO who felt that duplicate content issues were causing my rankings to be held back, I changed about 25% of the product categories to 'noindex, follow'. This has made organic traffic fall (obviously) as these pages fell out of Google's index.  But, contrary to what I was hoping for, it didn't then improve rankings - not one iota, nothing - which was the ONLY reason why I did this. This has had a real negative impact on sales, so I'm starting to think this was actually an a terrible idea. Should I change them back? And to ask a wider question, what is best practice for this particular scenario?