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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: Does Google still treat hash tags the same as they did 3-4 years ago? 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.

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?

My IT department is getting ready to setup the rel canonical tag, finally.  I took a look at the code on our test server and see that they are using a single quote in the tag syntax (see code block below).  Should I be concerned?  Will Google read those lines the same? <link rel='canonical' href='[http://www.wholesalecostumeclub.com/easter-costumes/bunny-suits](view-source:http://www.wholesalecostumeclub.com/easter-costumes/bunny-suits)' />VS. **versus** <link rel="canonical" href="[http://www.wholesalecostumeclub.com/easter-costumes/bunny-suits](view-source:http://www.wholesalecostumeclub.com/easter-costumes/bunny-suits)" />

Has anyone re-run the correlation data for webpages' LDA Score since Google's Farmer/Panda update?  I still have my writers use the LDA Tool and I am curious to know if there was a significant change in correlation now that "quality content" is touted as a more important ranking factor by Google.