I agree with Jeff's suggestion. Although, just for fun I plugged both URLs into Open Site Explorer and they are really kind of a statistical dead heat, One has one more link than the other, and the one Jeff prefers has marginally better MozRank and Moz trust, but not by much. The overall Page Authority is identical at 13. They probably both could use some love, but yes, it appears you might at the very least have a keyword cannibalization issue. I understand how this happens because it usually results from an attempt to address navigation and try to assure that visitors are finding items they want via several different paths. Frankly, duplicate content happens a lot on eCommerce sites. People often talk about "duplicate content penalties." There is no such thing. It might just cause Google to rank one page and ignore the other, or rank both pages lower because it can't tell which one is really the important one....but it isn't a penalty, per se. Still, lots of duplicate content can cause other problems (like interfere with how much of your site gets crawled on a regular basis), so it's good to address where possible. Canonical tags should do the trick in this case. Cheers,

Dana

Hi Bob,

I use Screaming Frog for this. If you don't already have it, it's $99 very well spent. Once your site is crawled it's very easy to pull the 404s into an Excel spreadsheet and deal with them from there.

Hope that helps!

Dana

Hi Kevin,

I responded to your more recent question about 301 redirects, but I thought I would share some thoughts here too as well. I hope you find this helpful.

If you will be managing this transition (or to whomever will be held accountable for whether it was successful or not), part of what you need to start doing right now is managing expectations. To embark on this project and having someone (the owner, the CEO, your boss, whomever) hold you to the expectation that you will not lose any rankings or traffic as a result of this transition may be a recipe to get you fired. Part of what you need to do right now is beginning managing those expectations. I am not saying this because I don't think you will do a good job, I am saying this because, speaking from a lot of experience and studying what happens to sites when they migrate, replatform, rebrand, or all of the above, you must be prepared for a period of time when your rankings and traffic drop. They might even drop significantly. You need to have a plan in place for how you are going to deal with the business ramifications of that (decrease in revenue, etc). Are you going to rely on paid search to boost things up for a while? Print advertising? You need to plan for this.

Now, on the rosier side, if you do a really good job, hopefully after you power through the post-replatform dip, things swing up on the other side and become better than they were before. I have also seen this happen. Although I'm not at liberty to say which one, one of the major search engines replatformed and rebranded their News site and experience a significant dip for several months, but then powered through that and increased traffic by 80% after enduring the drop. So, in the end, they were better off.

While there are probably some folks here who may have witnessed a replatform with no impact on traffic and rankings, I myself have never seen this. I think it's important for you to make it clear to stakeholders that there will be a period of decline that could be as short as a few weeks, as long as a year and, yes, perhaps permanent. There are many things to consider other than just the URLs...i.e. does the replatform cause your bounce rate to skyrocket, which possibly could impact your rankings? And about 1,000 other things. How well all of that is managed will significantly impact how successfully you bounce back from the project.

Good luck to you. I feel your pain! But replatforms are inevitable and hopefully for you they will lead your business to much success!

Dana

I agree with both of the excellent comments above, with one exception, I don't think adding more text to your page will help your SEO in this case. More content? Sure. But that doesn't necessarily mean more text. How about an original video? How about a video that's share-worthy? I particularly agree that you need to pursue more social shares on the page you want to rank. In our own testing we have seen significant upward moves on pages/keywords that received 100 or more social shares. Hope that helps! Good luck!

This is a great question, and although the post is from last year, I still think that this interview with Janet Driscoll Miller is the clearest, best explanation of how to implement this that I've heard:

http://www.widerfunnel.com/events/google-and-search-engine-optimization-an-interview-with-janet-driscoll-miller

Here are additional comments from my own Q&A answer on the subject:http://moz.com/community/q/rel-author-tag-attributing-content-to-a-company#reply_121257

Hope those are helpful!

Dana

Your question really has perfect timing. Rand's most recent White Board Friday video/blog post addresses this topic specifically and shows you how to go through the process of creating Topics pages that rank for a set of keywords, rather than just one keyword or keyword phrase in particular.

Building SEO-Focused Pages to Serve Topics & People Rather than Keywords & Rankings

Here's the link: http://moz.com/blog/topics-people-over-keywords-rankings-whiteboard-friday

Hope that helps! I could have paraphrased the whole thing, but you're better off learning straight from the master!

You are very welcome Rick. Thanks for providing more details. Has your site experienced any other changes since the beginning of the year? I can see by looking at it in the free tools at http://ahrefs.com that you started the year with a lot of inbound links and many of those have been cleared out (most likely from Google algo) over the course of this year. Did you replatform the site, change URLs and/or change the architecture of the site since the beginning of the year?

Are you monitoring your Google Webmaster Tools account? There may be some clues there regarding potential site errors (503, 403 and 404 status codes) and duplicate content that could be getting in your own way.

Let me know. A thorough site audit would most likely get you some answers and give you some directions on where to focus your efforts to regain traffic.

Dana

You are correct. There are no disadvantages, only positives. Go for it.

Hi Rick,

Have you identified which channels specifically are losing traffic, or is it everything equally across the board? The answer to that question would be crucial to evaluating things further. Can you let us know more details? The numbers don't have to be real, but perhaps percentages like direct traffic is down by 30% and referral traffic is down 20%, etc. Let me know and we can investigate deeper. Cheers,

Dana

Thanks Alex. Wil Reynolds actually gave me a copy of Influence at MozCon this past summer and I found it completely fascinating. I read it twice. I think that one's a definite keeper. Don't Make me Think is a very amusing, smart, astute, relevant, fast and easy read, which makes it a good choice for busy people who still want to learn something. You've got me curious about Out of the Ordinary so I'm going to hop over to Amazon and check it out. I'll let you know how it all shakes out!

Yesterday in Seth's blog he gave a wonderful suggestion for making 2014 a remarkable year. He suggested that you pick 3 people who have influence over your life/work and select three books to buy and give to these them to have them read, and then, discuss with you. Here's how he describes it:

"Identify three books that challenge your status quo, business books that outline a new attitude/approach or strategy, or perhaps fiction or non-fiction that challenges you. Books you've read that you need them to read.

Buy the three books for each of the three people, and ask them each to read all three over the holiday break." - http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2013/12/pick-three.html

Don't worry about whether or not I've read the books you are suggesting. If I choose one, I'll read it first before asking someone else to read it.

Here are some of my ideas:

The End of Business as Usual - Brian Solis [currently reading]

Don't Make Me Think - Steve Krug

The New Rules of Marketing and PR - David Meerman Scott

Positioning - The Battle for Your Mind - Ries and Trout

Influence - Robert Cialdini

Engage - Brian Solis

The Dip - Seth Godin

Keep It Simple - Siegel & Etzkorn

Buy - Ology - Lindstrom

The Long Tail -  Chris Anderson

FYI - The three people I've identified to share books with are my CEO (to whom I directly report), our Marketing Director (who is a peer, but who controls most of the marketing budget), and the Vice President of Retail Sales (He is also one of 5 co-owners of the business and a major stakeholder).

The books you suggest can be the same for all three or different for all three. I think the major challenges we are facing in 2014 is agility, branding and redefining or abandoning old business practices that are costly, time wasters, inefficient, or all of the above.

Thanks everyone!

Hi EGOL,

Wow, thank you so very much. This is one of the best answers I've ever received, probably the best, here in Q & A. Your thoughtful comments and suggestions are so appreciated. Honestly, you gave me a check list of things that have potential to be pure gold for us if we act on them.

Yes, you are correct, this is the site that had many issues with content being under tabs. It's also got a tremendous amount of duplicate and thin content issues, in addition to orphaned pages. Progress has been coming along, slowly and surely, but having your comments, and having them be so specific, pointed and concise are something I can take to my team and say "Here's an awesome check list of  things that we can actually address right now, without re-platforming the site [you know, there are always people who think that the root of all a site's problems is the platform that it's on...pure mythology]."

I hope many others find your check list useful. Combined with Annie's audit spreadsheet in Google docs, I feel like I have the tools I need to go to battle and help this site fulfill its potential. Nearly every point you mentioned struck a chord. Better yet, now that I know my way around the "guts" of this homegrown CMS, I feel like I can actually make the necessary changes.

Egol, I really can't thank you enough.

I totally agree Keri. Every word Egol wrote , to me, is worth its weight in gold. I think this may be the best response I have ever received here in Q & A.

I am using Annie Cushing's most excellent site audit checklist from Google Docs. My question concerns Index Bloat because it is mentioned in her "Index" tab.

We have 6,595 indexed pages and only 4,226 of those pages have received 1 or more visits since January 1 2013.

Is this an acceptable ratio? If not, why not and what would be an acceptable ratio? I understand the basic concept that "dissipation of link juice and constrained crawl budget can have a significant impact on SEO traffic." [Thanks to Reid Bandremer http://www.lunametrics.com/blog/2013/04/08/fifteen-minute-seo-health-check/#sr=g&m=o&cp=or&ct=-tmc&st=(opu%20qspwjefe)&ts=1385081787]

If we make this an action item I'd like to have some idea how to prioritize it compared to other things that must be done. Thanks all!

I think this is an excellent question. It's something that was in place where I am the in-house SEO when I came on board. After two years of kicking and screaming, I finally got buy off on doing away with the template. Here's why I didn't like it:

1. It caused a lot of duplicate content problems. We have products that might be alike in every way with the exception of a microphone frequency band. Often, this information wasn't included in the product name/title, and consequently, when it was used to populate the meta description "template" we ended up with tons of duplicates.
2. Problems with length. We had templated copy that worked just find for about 75% of our brands and products, but some of our brand names and products names were much longer, resulting in the templated descriptions being too long and getting truncated, totally defeating their own purpose.
3. Poor user experience. Many of our competitors use templated meta descriptions, specifically Sweetwater, Musician's Friend and Guitar Center. Nearly all of their descriptions are 100% identical with the exception of products swapped in and out. From a searcher's standpoint, this kind of sucks because it doesn't tell me anything interesting about the product.
4. Lost marketing opportunity - Are you really going to use the same marketing message for every single product on your site? That's a huge opportunity lost I think.

Okay, maybe if we were a huge brand like Sweetwater, it just wouldn't matter and we could get away with this because brand recognition would be strong enough to outweigh the fact that there was nothing of unique interest in the description...But, we aren't Sweetwater, so making every marketing opportunity count to us is crucial. We have about 3,000 SKUs, and a tiny marketing department. Somehow we're managing to crank out those unique descriptions just fine. 3,000 really isn't that many. If it does get to be too much, scaling this with freelancers would be extremely easy and cheap to do provided you lay down clear parameters for exactly what you want.

My advice? Take the time to add unique descriptions...oh, and forget about populating the meta keywords. You don't need to do that any more.

Hope that's helpful!

Dana

I agree with Peter. This is an interesting question and one that many brands face. It reminds me a little of a similar question that was asked recently here in Q&A regarding ampersands in brand names.

Here's my advice. Part of writing your business plan should include determining certain "branding" rules and guidelines. These should include official logos, colors, fonts, style sheets, etc. Make all of that play into your branding. Then, stick to it like glue unless there's some earth-shattering, mind-warping reason to rock boat and change it.

Like Peter, our brand name is two words "CCI Solutions." Our brand name is further complicated by the fact that there are probably a dozen or so other "CCI Solutions" in the world, spanning industries from HR, to healthcare to online learning. We've suffered difficulty giving our brand an "identity" because of our own inconsistencies and ambivalence towards what we call ourselves and how we present ourselves. If your presentation is inconsistent, your potential loyal fans are going to be confused and confusion is something you never want when carving out a place for yourself.

Choose one or the other using careful consideration and common sense, and then relentlessly stick to it and drive it home.

Yes, yes and yes. Target everything, target as tightly as possible. You'll save yourself money. All that being said, I haven't found targeting in Google's display network to be as robust as I'd like it to be. Have you looked into StumbleUpon Paid Advertising and Facebook Ads. Personally, I'd give those a go first. StumbleUpon in particular is extremely affordable.

Another option for display ads in Google that might be less expensive and offer more of the targeting you are looking for would be via YouTube video display advertising. I've heard that there's a lot of inventory (maybe because advertisers haven't quite caught on to using it yet?) and as a result the CPAs are lower than via regular display network advertising.

Just some things to think about!

Hi Pete,

I don't think you are going to find a cut-and-dried answer to which size of display ad performs the best. It entirely depends on the quality of the ad, the placement of the ad and the publication in which the ad appears. The results are going to vary vastly depending on these and other parameters. My best advice is to spend a good amount of time planning out, story-boarding and then testing ads. Make sure that when you are testing you are getting enough impressions to provide meaningful results. Remember this when designing your ads: You have a better chance of reaching the summit of Everest than clicking on a banner ad....so gosh darn it, make it compelling.

I have seen some very successful results using combinations of display ads for re-targeting campaigns that yielded crazy good (25%) conversion rates though, so there's definitely a payoff if you know what you're doing.

Just be prepared for low click-through-rates and lower ROI during the beginning few months while you are testing. This phase alone is more than a lot of smaller businesses can stomach. Hang in there and good luck!

Dana

Whimsical Answer: If Search Engine's penalized for this then Christina Aguilera's videos from the first two seasons of The Voice would be de-indexed for the phrase "I mean...you know" [To her credit she must have spent some time watching those playbacks because she's much better this season]

Plain old ordinary answer: To my knowledge, search engines (Google included) do not impose a "keyword stuffing penalty" per se. However, it's entirely possible that the content could be devalued based on quality. Any one of a number of things can indicate to a search engine that visitors found the content uninteresting or useless or even redundant. If social signals are poor, bounce rate is high, time spent on the page is poor, and the depth to which visitors went (i.e. how far down the page did they scroll) is poor, the SERPs are most likely going to reflect that. If the content isn't substantially unique, doesn't add anything new or interesting to already existing content on the WEB and it's uber spammy, Google may just decide not to index it at all. I suppose you could call that a penalty, however, I highly doubt that it would be removed from the index if it received any social signals indicating that someone found it to be of value....even if it just irritated the heck out of them.

My educated guess is that the worse that would happen is that it might not rank very well for the overly repeated term.

Hope that's helfpul!

Very interesting Vadim! Thank you.

We are considering upgrading our Web eCommerce platform. Our current provider has just implemented Magnolia CMS into their Web store package. Do any of you have experience with this CMS and can you share your experiences and thoughts on whether or not it has any implications for SEO? Thanks!

I've seen this problem rear its ugly head in a number of instances that cause various, interesting problems. For example, there are two major Audio Video brands: Allen & Heath and K & M Stands that both feature ampersands in their branding. The problem we've had with it is from a database perspective. Ampersands just cause all kinds of problems. Still, these brands have been around a long time.

Think "M&Ms" - no one really searches "M and M" [unless it's "Eminem" ]  - So, I think it's a matter of choosing one for branding purposes and sticking to it. In your case, with a law firm, searchers are really searching proper names (I'm thinking). So if I were to search for a string of last names, I might be more likely to use "and" instead of "&" - Until the "&" becomes part of the branding, I think Google is probably going to defer to the "and" version. Even if the law firm was huge, I'm not sure it would ever reach that level of brand recognition. Some successful brands with ampersands [Just for fun!]:

H&M, A&W Rootbeer, A&P Grocers, Proctor & Gamble, B&H Photo, Bang & Olufson, AT&T, Ben&Jerry's, Arm&Hammer, Boys&Girls Clubs of America, A&M Records, Bed, Bath & Beyond, Johnson & Johnson, H&R Block, Ernst&Young, Fod&Wine, Black&Decker

(Thanks to Sporcle, but they left M&Ms off their list! How can that be?) Thanks for the fun question

As a SEO who also manages Adwords campaigns in-house, I totally disagree with the idea that Adwords campaigns are "very easy to set up and administer yourself." Sure, anybody with a Google log-in and a credit card can set up an Adwords campaign...and go broke really quickly. It takes months if not years of research to successfully administer Adwords campaigns. I'd hate for any newbie to read this post and think "Right, then I'll just go set up some Adwords campaigns and be done with it."

As someone who does both paid and organic search optimization I also completely disagree with the argument that there is no value in pure organic traffic. Really? Do you want your business to be relying for the majority of its business traffic and revenue by renting traffic from Google? What happens when that goes South?

75% of our online revenue comes from organic/direct traffic and sources outside of Google. We do have Adwords campaigns...very tightly targeted, highly optimized and purposeful Adwords campaigns....not campaigns that are just pissing in the wind hoping to grab traffic.

I understand the provocative intention of the question, but I don't think it acknowledges the true depth of what it is to create and successfully promote a business online. I do agree with your hat tip to Wordstream though, love them!

Dana

Yes Ryan, I am also unable to access my campaigns. I saw a message in Q & A from earlier that Moz was having issues with their servers, but Keri from support left a message saying things were back online. My account still can't access campaigns, like yours, so there must still be some problems.

Great question Ricky. I deal with this all the time. It really depends on the publication. The first thing I would do is browse around a bunch of their other articles and see if you can find an example of where they linked to a source or a source's company website. Get in contact with the writer/editor and find out if they have a policy against linking or if perhaps it was just an oversight. The print world still doesn't necessarily think "on line," so sometimes they just need to be reminded that a link can be really helpful to their readers who want to find out more about the people, places and things mentioned in the article.

Almost every time I've ever gone back to a publication and asked for a link in context, they've been more than happy to comply. I did have one hold out, that flat out said "no." The person saying no was not a writer, or an editor, but the VP of sales. I chalked it up to her just not wanting to be bothered with it, so I got on LinkedIn, found out who the online editor was, sent them a connection request (they also turned out to be the SEO). I asked them to include a link in that very same article, and Voila! We got the link.

My advice is just to be very gracious and appreciative in your tone. The fact that you have a positive mention at all is awesome. I usually say something like " We have been big fans of your publication for years [only say that if it's true!] and it was so nice of you to mention us in this recent article. We thought it might be helpful to your readers if you included a hyperlink from our name to our site, Would you be kind enough to add that? We'd love to reference your write up in our blog."....or any variation. The more genuine you are, the better off you'll be. If you can, pick up the phone and call them. They have a way harder time saying no via phone.

Hope that helps!

Dana

In the second view, If you click one more time on "Create New Segment" you are taken to a screen that contains the Advanced segments.

NzRSnzv.png

I believe if you go into "Acquisition" and select "Overview" then click the circles next to "All Visits" the screen will flip to a view where you can view and select your advanced segments.  I'm including some screenshots.

Is this what you were searching for? LOL, I found it by accident quite honestly. Not sure if this is what you are needing or not.

84PPj42.png 7OCrfbX.png

Yes, in my opinion you should change it back to the "www." version and set that as your preferred version in Google Webmaster Tools. Also, make sure you have your developer 301-redirect the non-www version to your "www." version. This will unify your domain authority, which it appears has been fragmented by the two co-existing.  You want to give preference to the one with the strongest authority. In this case it sounds like the "www." version is the way to go.

Something else to keep in mind is to have consistency in the way you are linking. If "www." is your preferred, then make sure that you are using that version when requesting backlinks, leaving comments on a blog or even creating print pieces (i.e. business cards). It will encourage other people linking to you to use the preferred version.

Hope that helps!

Dana

I agree with Gregory that this is a very typical ecommerce scenario. It's also very common to see the search volume greater for the generic terms and then less and less as things become more specific (down to specific models of bikes, for example).  I disagree with Chris' suggestion regarding the use of the "nofollow" attribute, here's a Matt Cutts video explaining why: http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/022462.html  -  Matt Cutts reiterates, point blank, "I would not 'nofollow' internal links." [Period]

I would take a long hard look at the brand and product pages and try to figure out how to make them more compelling. Do you have customer reviews? Are they being cultivated (i.e. collected, posted, requested...regularly)? Are your product pages getting social shares? If not, spend some time cultivating that. Without seeing one of the pages, my best guess is that there are 5-10 things that you could do right away to make those pages stickier and more compelling. Do that. Don't waste your time trying to sculpt PageRank.

Just my 2 cents! Hope it's a little helpful.

Dana

Hi Jason,

Having been in your situation before I can emphatically confirm that not doing any 301 redirects is a recipe for a disastrous relaunch. To answer your last question first, yes, it is absolutely something worth delaying the launch and yes, get in contact with the developer. He/She will be your best ally in trying to convince stakeholders that the 301s are crucial to the success of relaunching. While the developer most likely already understands why 301s are so important, putting all of that technical-SEO-babble into laymen's terms is harder.

Use pictures.

Make a screenshot of a 404 error page. Then, show with pictures, how much traffic the top 10 pages on the current site are getting and how many people link to them...again...use pictures, draw them if you have to.

Then, make a Screencast showing what's going to happen to any visitor who tries to visit the site via a bookmarked URL (choose a really ugly scary looking 404 page...for effect).

Then, manage expectations (just in case they don't listen to you an proceed without the 301 redirects)...Use more pictures...Show what you anticipate will happen to traffic when they go this route. Make it clear that they may never recover. Relaunching alone, even with 301 redirects in place, can leave a website gasping for air. Tell them to expect less traffic, even with the 301s, and that without them it will be even worse.

Look for some real world examples....I'm sure there are dozens of folks here who have lived through the pain of a relaunch and have stories to tell.

Good luck. May the force be with you!

Dana

Thanks all! Yes, I was familiar with the "Text-only" version and the Fetch as Googlebot, so I wasn't overly concerned. It just seemed odd that this particular spider couldn't get to the content. I think it is a very unsophisticated spider!

Just for fun I ran our homepage through this tool:

http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com/search-engine-simulator.shtml

This spider seems to detect little to no content on our homepage. Interior pages seem to be just fine. I think this tool is pretty old. Does anyone here have a take on whether or not it is reliable? Should I just ignore the fact that it can't seem to spider our home page?

Thanks!

Thanks so much to you all. This has gotten us closer to an answer. We are consulting with the folks who developed the Web store to make sure that these solutions won't break other things if implemented, particularly something mentioned to me by our IT Director called "Sim links" - I'll keep you posted!

Thanks much to you both for jumping in. (thumbs up!)

Streamline, I understand your suggestion regarding .htaccess, however, as I mentioned, the content in these directories is being used to populate content on our pages. In your response you mentioned that users/search engines wouldn't be able to access them. When you say "users," are you referring to Web visitors, and not site admins?

We have three Directory Listing pages that are being indexed by Google:

http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/jsp/

http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/jsp/html/

http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/jsp/pdf/

How and why is Googlebot crawling and indexing these pages? Nothing else links to them (although the /jsp.html/ and /jsp/pdf/ both link back to /jsp/). They aren't disallowed in our robots.txt file and I understand that this could be why.

If we add them to our robots.txt file and disallow, will this prevent Googlebot from crawling and indexing those Directory Listing pages without prohibiting them from crawling and indexing the content that resides there which is used to populate pages on our site?

Having these pages indexed in Google is causing a myriad of issues, not the least of which is duplicate content.

For example, this file <tt>CCI-SALES-STAFF.HTML</tt> (which appears on this Directory Listing referenced above - http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/jsp/html/) clicks through to this Web page:

http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/jsp/html/CCI-SALES-STAFF.HTML

This page is indexed in Google and we don't want it to be. But so is the actual page where we intended the content contained in that file to display: http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/meet-our-sales-staff

As you can see, this results in duplicate content problems.

Is there a way to disallow Googlebot from crawling that Directory Listing page, and, provided that we have this URL in our sitemap: http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/meet-our-sales-staff, solve the duplicate content issue as a result?

For example:

Disallow: /StoreFront/jsp/

Disallow: /StoreFront/jsp/html/

Disallow: /StoreFront/jsp/pdf/

Can we do this without risking blocking Googlebot from content we do want crawled and indexed?

Many thanks in advance for any and all help on this one!

Hey Kelly,

Awesome! I am so glad that relieved your worries. You are very welcome

Dana

Hi Kelly,

I am much more familiar with Volusion and 3Dcart, but I imagine that Big Commerce might work in a similar way. Inside the admin panel, when you are building products and categories, it is very easy to assign one product to multiple categories.  As CleverPhd suggests, this is accomplished because the products aren't nested under category directories, they have their own.

Here is an example of one of the 3dcart stores I manage. This product: https://www.celebratecommunion.com/prefilled-communion-cups-with-wafers-box-of-500.html  actually belongs to 3 different categories: "Prefilled Communion Cups" "Communion Supplies" "Home Page Specials"   However, it retains the same URL across all categories. In both 3dcart and Volusion, when you are building a product you can customize the URL and then simply select with drop down boxes which categories you want that product to be applied to. I imagines Big Commerce would be quite similar, but having never used it I can't say for sure. As long as the URL for the product page doesn't change, you could put it in 100's of categories and it would never be considered duplicate content because it only has one unique URL.

I hope that helps a little. Let me know if my answer raises more questions than it answers

Dana

Hi Cesar,

I am in-house in charge of 2 ecommerce sites as well. We just completed a free trial of Wordstream and I was very impressed. We are going to give it a try for 6 months. I found it very easy to jump in and start managing things without spending a lot of time finding my way around the interface. That's my two cents Cheers,

Dana

Hi Cyto,

I think the only way you're going to know the answer for sure to this is to try it. Fortunately, the Data Highlighter allows you to markup one page at a time if you want, so I'd suggest choosing a handful of pages and try it on just those first. Measure the results and proceed based on those results. You've probably already considered this, but just thought I'd give it a mention. Cheers,

Dana

Yes, this stat is for one month, but it's important to know that it's not an "average" of several months. It's for the most recent month. If you want to see trending for previous months you have to export the data into Excel. This can be an important thing to consider if your business experiences a lot of seasonality or if perhaps you are launching a brand new product that may not have any volume right now, but has significant potential for a lot of volume going forward. It's also important to know that it's local search volume based on your Google Adwords account settings (assuming you are using the new Keyword Planner tool). So if you're settings target only the US, then that's all you are going to see.

I hope that helps a bit. Cheers!

Dana

I haven't noticed this on the sites that I manage. The only time I've had Google construct a title has been when the title we wrote was too long. I have seen many instances where Google is extracting an excerpt from the "description" as market up with Structured Data instead of using the meta description we have written. I find this frustrating because we have recently spent a good amount of time optimizing our meta descriptions and now, the majority of the time, Google seems to be favoring what we've marked up with structured data.

Have you examined your titles to see if perhaps there is a reason that Google is doing this? Could it be an idosyncracy of your CMS perhaps, or if not, could it be that something was programmed internally to insert the brand at the front of the tag programmatically? Just some thoughts!

Dana

Phil Nottingham is the top expert, in my opinion, on this subject. He has written extensively on this topic both here and at Distilled.net. I would very highly recommend searching here for "phil nottingham video SEO" and then repeat the same search in Google. He's brilliant, and believe me has probably already answered every question you could possibly have about where to host your videos, and better yet, why.

The first thing I think Phil would say would be: First determine what purpose you want the videos to serve, then determine the most appropriate place to host them.

He would say a lot more, and much better (particularly with the accent!) than I do. Here's a video from Phil & Will at Distilled (that's fun to say) to get you started:  http://wistia.com/learning/advanced-seo-with-distilled

Enjoy!

Agree and thumbs up to Sara. Also, it's important to understand that, while you can change the setting to show broad match instead (which used to be the default), you are only going to see search results based on your settings in your Google Adwords account. This is potentially a huge difference because, while the tool used to show global & local results in two different columns, what you are now seeing are searches based on your Adwords settings. Which mean, if your campaigns only run in the USA, you will only see USA search volume.

I wrote about the changes in a blog post a few weeks ago located here: http://www.danatanseo.com/2013/07/google-keyword-planner-vs-keyword-tool.html

Larry Kim did a more exhaustive post on the subject here: http://www.wordstream.com/blog/ws/2013/04/25/keyword-planner

Hope that helps explain in more detail the discrepancies you are seeing! Cheers!

Yes, very helpful guys. I appreciate it!

I absolutely wouldn't worry about using the same product descriptions for your PLA's causing duplicate content issues. That being said, optimizing Ad copy is always a good thing. If you tweak your PLA descriptions and they convert better, then, woohoo! Might make for some interesting A/B testing....although, I don't know how you could do it simultaneously in Google without actually creating duplicate product listings with different SKUs. Otherwise you'd have to test them one at a time, which wouldn't probably give you scientific results.

No, I wouldn't worry about duplicate content at all with these. They are paid ads...different animal.

Hope that helps!

Dana

I agree with you Kurt. In our space we see duplicate content everywhere, from manufacturer's sites to vendors to resellers. There is no such thing as a "duplicate content penalty." Google doesn't penalize duplicate content. They may choose to ignore it, which may feel like a penalty, but that's not technically what's going on.

I also agree with EGOL. If getting a lot of product descriptions is a daunting task, hire some writers. You can get it done for way less that you think. Need inspiration? Watch Fabio's video from MozCon 2012 where in 15-minutes he describes how he and his team created thousands of unique product descriptions in a very short amount of time without spending a lot of money: http://moz.com/videos/e-commerse-seo-tips-and-tricks

Cheers!

Dana

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/158587?hl=en#158587

I just double-checked David, and it looks like the allocation may not be different for different sites. According to Google you get 500 fetches and 10 URL + Linked pages submissions every week.

You are welcome David, and no this isn't a lifetime limit at all. I believe it resets at least once every 30 days, maybe more often than that. I manage four different sites, some large, some small and I've never run out of fetches yet.

No, I wouldn't worry about this at all. This is why Google has already allocated a finite number of "Fetches" and URL + Links submissions to your account. These numbers are based on the size of your site. Larger sites are allocated more and  smaller sites less. [Please see my revised statement below regarding Google's "Fetch" limits - it isn't based on site size]  I don't think enough Webmasters take advantage of the Fetch as often as they should.

Hope that helps!

Dana

Many thanks to both Vadim and Igal for such great information and also a really great thread on the subject. I really, really appreciate your answers.!