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Yeah, the update did seem "Panda-like" but I've been such a "content-nut" here lately I can't believe I missed something so big as to crush us like it has.  Obviously I must have missed something.  I appreciate the offer, I sent you a quick email with my URL.  Any insight you can give would be greatly appreciated.

After the Google "Mystery Update" in early Feb (Algoroo marks the flux as Feb 5th) one of my B2C e-commerce sites has gotten absolutely hammered.  We had some trouble last May but cleaned a whole host of on-site/site quality issues over the summer and as of early Sept we began to regain rankings/traffic quite nicely...until Feb when we've almost given it all back.

I was doing a little hunting around on SearchMetrics.com and saw lots of big ecommerce sites took a hit as well (eBay, Kohls, Target, etc…).  I had read someplace (I think it was the SearchMetrics blog) that the Feb 5^th update had to do with sites ranking due to misspellings.  We do have several domains variations of company name redirecting to our site, I was wondering if that could have hurt.  I dropped the redirects as a test since they do not drive traffic.

I was wondering if anyone else has seen similar issues and/or could shed some light on the situation.  It is very disheartening to see all that hard work simply "go away" so quickly.

I need some SEO advice on an odd scenario:

We are launching a new product line (party supplies) on it's own domain (PartySuperCenter.com).  Due to some internal/technical reasons we will not be able to launch the site until the summer.  We already have the product in our warehouse so the owners want to created a section on our current site (CostumeSuperCenter.com) for the new products.  Once the new site is up the product will be removed from our current site and moved to the new site.

I am concerned about the effect this will have on our SEO - having thousands of product pages appear and then disappear after a few months.  I was thinking about blocking the pages using the "noindex" tag.  Is this how you would handle it?

Thanks in advance for your help!

We are setting up a brand new internal affiliate program for our site.  When creating the affiliate URLs I learned that we can use hash tags (#) instead of question marks (?).  I remember Rand did a White Board Friday years ago (http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-using-the-hash) saying that this was a better way to build affiliate URLs because it basically acts as a stop and/or canonical for the URL.  We already have canonical tags but I was thinking of using this in hopes of getting a little extra juice from the affiliate links.

Questions:

1. Does Google still treat hash tags the same as they did 3-4 years ago?
2. Does anyone see using hash tags as worse than something else, like a question mark?

Thanks!

My company is purchasing another company's website.  We are moving their entire site onto our CMS and the IT guys are working hard to replicate the URL structure.  Several of the category pages are changing slightly and I am not sure if it matters:

Old URL - http://www.DOMAIN.com/products/adults

New URL - http://www.DOMAIN.com/products/adults**/**

Notice the trailing slash?  Will Google treat the new page as the same as the old one or as completely different (i.e. new) page?

P.S. - Yes, I can setup 301s but since these pages hold decent rankings I'd really like to keep it exactly the same.

I am having the EXACT same issue with several of the sites I manage.  One thing I found is that the "Social Signals" (i.e. Tweets, Likes, +1) for our competitors are almost twice ours.  You many want to compare social signals.

Our site uses the "+" and is has never hurt our rankings - we've held many #1 positions in Google.  If I had to start the site all over again I'd use the dash instead but if you have pages that have been around for a while I wouldn't worry about it.

No.  Funny, that was the first thing I thought after checking Title/METAs.  I'm wondering if this is getting pulled from some directory/index like ODP (no we're not in ODP).

When I type in a competitor name (in this case "buycostumes") Google shows several related websites in it's "Pages Similar to..." section at the bottom of the page:

My question, can anyone tell me where the text comes from that Google uses as the link.  Our competitors have nice branded links and our is just a keyword.  I can find nothing on-page that Google is using so it must be coming from someplace off-page, but where?

Thanks!

I run into this all the time with my site's keywords.

If you go to Google and type in the various order of the keywords you will indeed get different results pages. If you go into Google Adwords Keyword Tool you will most likely see the exact same search numbers.

What does this mean? Google obviously recognizes that these are in essence the same keyword and report back search behavior appropriately. This of course takes us back the SERPs which will be different (although often very similar - and the 1 ranking will often be the same) which is clearly more explicit in displaying rankings.

One side note, I have noticed that plural and singular terms are often very different in search volume and SERPs - for example Blue Wide Widget vs Blue Wide Widgets. Here is a case were the intent would be the same (I would guess) but the user behavior must be so different that Google treats them completely separately.

My recommendation: You should be building a breadth of anchor text anyway so link using them all with a predisposition to point using the term that Google suggest defaults to. Hope the helps!

I am having the EXACT same issue with several of the sites I manage.  One thing I found is that the "Social Signals" (i.e. Tweets, Likes, +1) for our competitors are almost twice ours.  You many want to compare social signals.