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If I have an eCommerce website containing 10,000 product pages and then I add 10,000 new product pages using a bulk upload (with limited/basic but unique content), does this pose any SEO risk? I am obviously aware of the risks of adding a large number of low quality content to the website, which is not the case here, however what I am trying to ascertain is whether simply doubling the number of pages in itself causes any risk to our SEO efforts? Does it flag to the Search Engines that something "spammy" is happening (even if its not)

Hi guys Quick question about 301 redirection between domains. I currently manage a website, lets call it website A. Website A sells a particular product range, however the decision has been made by the powers that be to pull the plug on the business and sell the products previously sold via Website A via another website within the parent companies control.....lets call it Website B. I need to make it clear to customers of Website A that the company no longer operates but want to pass the SEO equity that has been built up over time to the relevant pages on Website B. My plan was to 1. 301 Redirect all key landing pages on Website A to the most relevant pages on Website B 2. Initially keep the website A homepage live but change the message to say "Website A no longer operates, but Website B can help etc. etc."  Remove all sub links from navigation. 3. Monitor referral and direct traffic levels and consider 301 redirecting website A homepage to Website B homepage in the long term. My questions: Does this sound like the best approach? If not, what alternatives are there? Will Website A look like a link farm for Website B? I dont want this obviously!

I am considering moving 1 of our sites to a Magento e-commerce platform. If I went down this route we would be keen to find someone who we can hire in-house. However I have never hired a web developer before. What should a developer with experience of launching and building Magento-based e-commerce websites have on their CV? What should I be looking for in terms of knowledge? Any help or advice welcome!

Hi guys I set up a website about 8 months back with the intention to bring in visitors who were after DIY advice & product reviews. To start it was bringing in decent levels of traffic. However since the Google Algorthym updates around October-time the levels of traffic have noticeably nose dived. if you're on your lunch break and have 5 mins to hand I'd really appreciate any advise you guys have on how to rescue this trend. Here's the website in question: www.diyu.co.uk Any constructive feedback welcome 🙂 Thanks in advance

Hi guys Just keen to gauge your opinion on a quandary that has been bugging me for a while now. I work on an ecommerce website that sells around 20,000 products. A lot of the product SKUs are exactly the same in terms of how they work and what they offer the customer. Often it is 1 variable that changes. For example, the product may be available in 200 different sizes and 2 colours (therefore 400 SKUs available to purchase). Theese SKUs have been uploaded to the website as individual entires so that the customer can purchase them, with the only difference between the listings likely to be key signifiers such as colour, size, price, part number etc. Moz has flagged these pages up as duplicate content. Now I have worked on websites long enough now to know that duplicate content is never good from an SEO perspective, but I am struggling to work out an effective way in which I can display such a large number of almost identical products without falling foul of the duplicate content issue. If you wouldnt mind sharing any ideas or approaches that have been taken by you guys that would be great!

Hi guys I'm looking for any recommendations for local SEO tools in the UK? I keep stumbling across a variety of different tools but they all seem to cater for the US market only. Any tools or tips would be greatly received!

Just a quickie.... I know that this was possible in the previous incarnation of Google Analytics, but I cant fathom how to do to it now on the most recent version. How can I see when the mos popular visitor times were on my website? I.e. a graph that shows a 24 hour clock over any given time frame

I have created a sitemap file as per Google Web Master Tools instructions. I have it saved as a .txt file. Am I right in thinking that this needs to be uploaded as a .xml file? If so, how do I convert this to a XML? I have tried but it seems to corrupt - there must be a simple way to do this?!

Hi folks I am responsible for an e-commerce website. Our website is doing very well but I believe that our product pages should be ranking more highly than they currently are. When taking over my current role, it became clear that a number of changes would need to be made to try and boost the under performing product pages. Amongst other things I therefore implemented the following: New Product content - we have placed a massive focus on reworking all product content so that it is unique and offers value to the reader. The new content includes videos, images and text that is all keyword rich but (I hope) not seen as overly spammy. Duplicate content - the CMS was creating multiple versions of the same page - I addressed this by implementing 301 redirects and adding canonical links. This ensures there is now only 1 version of the page Parameters - I instructed Google to not index certain URLs containing specific parameters Internal links - I have tried to improve the number of links to the products from relevant key category pages My question is, although some of the changes have only been in place for a month, what else can I do to ensure that the product pages rank as highly as possible. As an e-commerce website with so many products it is very difficult to link to these product pages directly, so any tips or suggestions would be welcome! Here's an example of a product page link : http://www.directheatingsupplies.co.uk/pid_37440/100180/Worcester-Greenstar-29CDi-Classic-Gas-Combi-Boiler-7738100216-29-Cdi.aspx

Hi there - I have just been told that it is a big "no no" to add authorship to a standard page and that it should only be used on blog posts. Is this true? What are the negative effects of using authorship on a page? I added the rel="author" tag to a page that talks about a member of our team and a few weeks ago his picture started showing next to the search results entry on Google - great for click through rate, however is this improper usage? Any help welcome!

I have been approached by a website (domain authority 65, homepage authority 70, linking domains 415) that syndicates other website's content. They are keen to promote one of my existing articles on their website and are in a similar subject niche . My immediate reaction was "No", as I am keen to avoid any negative impact on our SEO-efforts that may be created through having my content duplicated on another website. I am just looking from the feedback from the rest of the community as to what their thoughts are - does the potential benefit of driving visitors from a popular website outweigh the fact that our own article may not rank very well organically as it has been duplicated. I think the fact that we have been approached regarding the syndication suggests that the website in question is not a spammy "scraper" website that activity looks to employ black hat techniques, but I don't want to risk effecting my organic SERP ranking. Thoughts?

I am building a new website and I plan to 301 Redirect my Old Domain (olddomain.com) to a brand new Domain (newdomain.com) in the upcoming months. To do this I was planning to update the htaccess file on both the old and new domains. The htaccess file on the old domain would look to 301 redirect all pages on the old domain to the new domain. The htaccess file on the new domain would detail any specific URL redirects I want to implement (ie. olddomain.com/EXAMPLE/TEST will redirect to newdomain/TEST) - this will ensure link equity is retained and bounce rates are kept at a lower level. Does this sound like the right approach? Also, what do I need to do with the old domain going forward? Do I need to keep this forever in order for the 301 redirect to work or can I eventually just forward the domain to the new one permanently?

I am aware that Google's Penguin 2.0 update is looking to tackle the increasing numbers of links from poor quality websites & blogs. The advice since Penguin 1.0 has been to create a natural backlink profile, ensuring that there is a balance between keywords-rich anchor text and brand terms. I tend to link using Branded anchor text to the homepage of my website and use keyword anchor text sparingly to link to subpages/categories elsewhere on my website. My question is what exactly is too much in terms of anchor text? If for example I have 5 or 6 keyword-rich links inbound to a sub/category page, do I need to also get some brand anchor text into these sub/category pages too?

I manage an E-commerce website and we are looking to make some changes to our product pages to try and optimise them for search purposes and to try and improve the customer buying experience. This is where my head starts to hurt! Now, let's say I am selling a T shirt that comes in 4 sizes and 6 different colours. At the moment my website would have 24 products, each with pretty much the same content (maybe differing references to the colour & size). My idea is to change this and have 1 main product page for the T-shirt, but to have 24 product SKU's/variations that exist to give the exact product details. Some different ways I have been considering to do this: a) have drop-down fields on the product page that ask the customer to select their Tshirt size and colour. The image & price then changes on the page. b) All product 24 product SKUs sre listed under the main product with the 'Add to Cart' open next to each one. Each one would be clickable so a page it its own right. Would I need to set up a canonical links for each SKU that point to the top level product page? I'm obviously looking to minimise duplicate content but Im not exactly sure on how to set this up - its a big decision so I need to be 100% clear before signing off on anything. . Any other tips on how to do this or examples of good e-commerce websites that use product SKus well? Kind regards Tom

I have done some research into the types of sites that my competitors have inbound links from and upon closer inspection it appears that in many cases they would have had to pay for this kind of exposure. I already do a lot of guess blogging (for free) in an attempt to get my content out there, but is it worth paying to add my content (with backlinks) to established sites with good Domain Authority or PageRank? I, as I'm sure do a lot of you, have been inundated throughout my SEO career with offers to pay £X for this and £X for that. What is a good rate to pay? Is it dependent on what you expect to get back or is there an industry norm? Happy for general chatter on this as I want to try it but if I am to get the budget from my manager I need to be certain it will pay dividends and is worthwhile.

I was using Open Site Explorer to look at a competitors back links and they had a lot from Diigo.com...a site I must must confess to have never heard of before. Diigo seem to have a strong Domain Authority but I don't understand how (or if it is wise) to utilise it to boost the organic performance of my website. My competitor seems to be taking advantage of it to good effect, but I cant work out how! In my mind it is a bookmarking & commenting tool that is geared up towards nofollow link sharing...I must be wrong?! http://www.diigo.com What do you guys reckon? Has any one here got any experience in optimisation via Diigo.com?

I've long been considering using Trust Pilot (or another form of customer feedback service) to gather reviews for my websites. At the moment my main website has 0 reviews. Is it worth promoting the Trust Pilot link to my customers after they have converted to encourage them to leave feedback even **if **I do not have a Trust Pilot account?

In Google Web Mastertools you can stipulate which paramters you want the Googlebots to ignore when crawling your site. This is common place on pages that add some form of parameterisaton to the end of the link when a web user filters the information on a page (eg. on a clothes website someone may filter the products so they only see 'blue' jumpers, rather than 'all') This is meant to be beneficial as it means Google trawls through less duplicate content. Having now set this up, what impact will this have on my search results, if any? Don't get me wrong, I'm not expecting to shoot up to no.1, but will it benefit me in any way?

I am responsible for 2 e-commerce websites. SEO Moz and Google Web Master tools both inform me regularly that on both sites there are many instances of duplicate titles, headings, decriptions and page content. Obviously from an SEO point of view I am more than a little concerned about this! Out product pages struggle to perform strongly despite the fact that our website is of a decent quality and we are leaders in our field. Our competitors rank above us when they add a product page, whereas we normal flit in between 8-10 or on the 2nd SERP. I know it is hard without viewing the site, but is duplicate content likely to be a strong, leading factor in this? I think it is, but want to put together a business case to spend the cash to sort it out....just need someone confirmation that this is worth sorting as a priority. Here are 2 examples of what I mean: 1) Category pages www.exampledomain.co.uk/category1.aspx We have filters on our category page (so the customer can sort products based on their price, colour, size etc.). When filters are used a new URL is generared. www.exampledomain.co.uk/category1.aspx?prices=0||10 www.exampledomain.co.uk/category1.aspx?prices=10||20 The content, titles, description is the same although the links are different. Do I need to set up a canonical tag on the page that reads: 2) Product pages Product pages on the websites have different URLs depending on how to arrive on them. You get 1 URL if you navigated to the page via the website navigation, but you get another different URL if you used the website search functionality to find the page. Example: Search link:  www.exampledomain.co.uk/category1/Product1.aspx Navigation link: www.exampledomain.co.uk/12345/category1/Product1.aspx Again, do I need to set up a canonical tag for 1 of these link types so that the link benefit is not shared over 2 pages? Any feedback would be welcome! At the moment the ability to add canonical tags is locked down by our CMS (I know, rubbish!)...so website development would be needed - hence the need for a business case!