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I'd ask the BBC contacts if you can have your twitter username displayed alongside your name to start with - the BBC seem happy to do this for a lot of guests and their own presenters - I understand that any advertising is likely to prevent you making it to air (i.e. obvious promotion) but simply displaying a username in an effort to continue the discussion might be accepted by them.
Thanks again Mat,
Another thing I should have mentioned (we have lots of project on the go right now!) is that we are redesigning the shop and at the point we are changing our URL structure we are also launching an updated version of the shop software (latest version of Magento - to help with internal admin issues) along with a new theme for the shop itself. Our shop has around 25,000 customers and we are using Magento's features to reduce our product page count from 35,000 to around 1,000 (thanks to Bundle and Configurable products) to reduce the number of similar pages per fitment etc.
The new shop theme (which will also incorporate our new home page) will feature content from the blog and forum - but is based around the shop.
I like some of your ideas in terms of linking to shop categories at the end of blog posts for related products.
We have a system in place (although currently disabled) that displays adverts on the forum from the shop based on keywords picked up in threads - the system is currently being refined at the moment.
Thanks for your reply Mat, I guess I should have been a bit more specific with the project!
The goal is to get more of our site visitors to view the shop, and increase awareness of the products we supply. Currently the blog makes us no money, and since the majority of visitors (to articles not the homepage) come via other source such as Facebook and other back-links it doesn't seem right to me to have the shop "tucked away out back" when it should be in the shop window. The blog to me is the 3rd most valuable of the 3 sections on our site - with the shop 1st and the forums 2nd, so the plan is to re-arrange things to ensure the most important asset is the one you are presented with on our homepage.
Part of the goal is to ensure that Google crawls more of the shop products and that more of our back-links add to our product/category rankings on our shop since currently lots of our incoming links are just to driftworks.com (i.e. the blog) this value could be put to better use! I think...? 
We run a fairly large online community with a popular blog and Europe's largest online shop for drift-specific motor sport parts and our website has been around since 2004 I believe. Since it was launched, the blog (or previous CMS system) has been at the domain root, the forums have been located at /forum and the shop at /shop (or similar) but we have decided to move things around a bit and would like some comments as to whether we are doing the right thing or if you would make any addition or different changes to us.
Currently the entire website gets around 3m page views per month from 500,000 visitors, but this is split roughly 75% to the forums, 10% to the shop and 15% to the blog (but remember the blog is at the root so anyone who visits our homepage "visits" the blog).
We plan to move the shop to the domain root (since the shop provides the income for the business - surely it should be the 1st thing visitors see?), the blog from root to /blog and the forums will stay where they are at /forum.
We have read Steven Macdonald's post here, and have taken notes to help minimize traffic loss and disruption to our army of users and hopefully avoid too many penalties from Google and plan to:
Should we be taking this opportunity to actually set each of the three sections of the site to it's own sub domain? Our thoughts are that if we are disrupting things, it's surely best to have lots of disruption once rather than a little bit of disruption several times over a 3-6 month period?
OSE shows us to have roughly 1500 inbound links to /shop, 2100 to /forum and 4800 to the root / - if we proceed with our plan and put 301 redirects in place this seems to be the best plan to retain the value of these links but if we were to switch to sub domains would the 301s lose most of the link values due to them being on "different" domains?
Any help, advise or suggestions are very welcome but comments from experience are what we are seeking ideally!
Thanks
Jay
To say "linking just dilutes the authority from the page" is not strictly true.
In this particular instance I do not believe that the menu is too OTT in terms of links but if you have every page linking to every page you just end up creating a mesh of links that search engines can waste crawl time trying to decipher.
Too many links with poor structure can mean that your crawl allocation is wasted which results in less of your pages being indexed properly.
Thanks Nick,
changing the settings for cookies by itself didn't fix this. FYI I had to do everything you suggested and then uninstall the toolbar before reinstalling it. This worked and everything is fine now but where I had tried uninstalling and reinstalling before, without the cookies tweaks it didn't cure the issue.
Thanks for you assistance
I sent the email below to help@seomoz.org on the 12th April and haven't heard anything back so thought I'd fire it up here in case someone has a solution for me...
"For the past month or so I've had an issue in Firefox where my SEOmoz toolbar appears to not sign me in, or allow me to sign in. All metrics are 0 for all websites/pages and if I click the login button, nothing happens at all. If I click the Quick Links button the drop down menu appears but whichever option from the drop down I choose, nothing happens. I'm funning Firefox 11.0 and have attached a screen grab of the bar as it appears no matter where I browse.
Do you have any suggestions how I can get it working again? It works fine in Chrome but I primarily use Firefox..."
Please bare with me, this might turn into a bit of a waffle, but I'll get to my question... I promise!
I've just been looking at our CPC traffic for April and 2 search terms jumped out at me. I recognised them from previous keyword research because they are search terms that I expected to be high traffic (from past experience), but Google Adwords keyword tools showed them to have no potential traffic, and next to no potential traffic (literally 0 local searches and 12 local searches per month).
Last month search term A had 46 visits, with 19:25 average time on site and 8.70% bounce rate and search term B had 10 visits with 14:47 average time on site and 0% bounce rate. For very boring reasons we are not currently able to measure conversions on these terms since (they are related to consumer finance and when a customer applies for finance it is all done on our finance providers website) but despite the low volume, these are pretty good figures for on site behaviour and so it got me thinking...
Is there a more accurate tool to estimate traffic volume that we should be using rather than the Adwords tools?
I appreciate that the estimates are probably made based on historic search behaviour and April's traffic could just be a one off, but these particular terms used to be insanely popular 4-5 years ago when I worked at a competing company.
I'd imagine it is more to do with subscribers, social media posts containing links, referrals and fans who have bookmarked your page etc rather than anything to do with SEO. If your rankings are not improving yet your traffic is, I'd suggest looking at your analytics to see where the traffic is actually coming from - referrals, direct traffic etc.
You could add a google analytics event tracking code to the links in the tag cloud. Then you'll soon see if it's being used.
Our shop site has a 3 tier drop down mega-menu so it's easy to find your way to anything from anywhere. It contains about 150 links and probably 300 words of text.
We also have a more context-driven single layer of sub-category navigation as well as breadcrumbs on our category pages.
You can get to every product and category page without using the drop down mega-menu.
Although the mega-menu is a helpful tool for customers, it means that every single page in our shop has an extra 150 links on it that go to stuff that isn't necessarily related or relevant to the page content. This means that when viewed from the context of a crawler, rather than a nice tree like crawling structure, we've got more of an unstructured mesh where everything is linked to everything else.
I'd like to hide the mega-menu links from being picked up by a crawler, but what's the best way to do this?
I can add a nofollow to all mega-menu links, but are the links still registered as page content even if they're not followed? It's a lot of text if nothing else.
Another possibility we're considering is to set the mega-menu to only populate with links when it's main button is hovered over. So it's not part of the initial page load content at all.
Or we could use a crude yet effective system we have used for some other menus we have of base encoding the content inline so it's not readable by a spider.
What would you do and why?
Thanks,
James
Thanks, that's helpful.
We've got a flat URL structure and we don't have category info in the product urls so we're all good there
I'll aim for somewhere in the middle, where the category page can introduce and explain the range, then there's a product page for each product model, with some drop down choices for fitments. That system was well received in our customer tests and seems to make most sense to me.
Just a minor point, but you might want to check your definition of an SKU btw.. The whole point of a 'stock keeping unit' is that each sku relates to a specific variation of a product, and this can be used for stock control and purchasing.
So in your example of the pants, although I can see that there's a parent product which all the variations belong to and it makes sense for this parent product to have the product page with the 6 choices on, I would expect each of the 6 product options to have their own individual sku in the back end of the store.
regards, James
Have you looked at Google Webmaster Tools?
Under 'Site Configuration > URL Parameters' You can tell google there which query strings do what. Which to ignore and which to include.
But it may be worth looking into using rewrites to rewrite the query strings into a regular url that can be easily indexed.
Thanks for the answer
It's left me a little confused though...
Everything I've read recently has suggested that large quantities of scripted/csv imported database product pages will always be ranked as inferior to a small quantity of well written, informative and unique product pages.
Is the thinking that by having loads of pages, you get lots of potential exact matches for long-tailed or long phrase search terms? So you're casting your net far and wide?
Results from recent user testing we've done show us that our customers prefer a solution with less cluttered category pages and more 'intelligent' product pages where choices can be made.
Maybe a better system of subcategories and filters would help people easily sift through a large category though?
Hi, Apologies in advance for the long winded question... we need some guidance with our category/product/options structure in our shop.
We primarily sell car parts and lots of our parts have multiple fitments for what is basically the same part. Some ranges can have 1,000s of products. We can't work out what is an appropriate level of information and granularity for our product structure.We recognise the importance of having fitments and specific terms in the product title and URL, but we also know that having loads of almost identical product pages is a definite negative and fragments our SEO potential. But where's the happy medium?
For example, let's say we have a specific brand of brake pad (we'll call it Brako) with 4 different product-models (Super1, Super2, Super3, Super4), each fits 100 different cars, which are made by 10 different manufacturers. We have a few different ways of presenting/splitting up these 400 simple products: (ignore the URLs here, this is just to illustrate the browsing structure & likely product page titles)
1 category for the Brake Brand with 400 product pages inside, 1 product page for each specific combination of brake product-model and car-fitment. /Brako/Brako-Super1-brakes_BMW-M3.html 1 category, 400 product pages, 0 choices on each product page.
1 category for the Brake Brand with 40 products inside, 1 product for each specific combination of brake product-model and car-manufacturer. Each product page would then let you choose from a dropdown which of the 10 specific cars you had. /Brako/Brako-Super1-brakes_BMW.html 1 category, 40 product pages, 10 choices on each product page.
1 category for the Brake Brand with 4 sub-categories inside for the brake product-models with 100 products inside each, 1 product for each specific combination of car-fitment. /Brako/Brako-Super1-brakes/Brako-Super1-brakes_BMW-M3.html 1 category, 4 sub-categories, 40 product pages, 10 choices on the product page.
1 category for the Brake Brand with 4 sub-categories inside for the brake product-models, with 10 products inside each.1 product for each specific combination of brake product-model and car-manufacturer. Each product page would then let you choose from a dropdown which of the 10 specific cars you had. /Brako/Brako-Super1-brakes/brakebrand-Super1-brakes_BMW.html 1 category, 4 sub-categories, 40 product pages, 10 choices on each product page.
1 category for the Brake Brand with 4 products inside, 1 product for each brake product-model. Each product page would then let you choose from 2 dropdowns, each with 10 options: one for car manufacturer, the next for car model. /Brako/Brako-Super1-brakes.html 1 category, 4 product pages, 100 (10x10) choices on each product page.
1 product page containing options to choose all 400 Brako products using 3 drop down boxes: Car Manufacturer, Car Model and Product-Model /Brako/Brako-brakes.html 1 category, 1 product page, 100 (10x10) choices on each product page.
Or we could mix it up and split the sub-categories by manufacturer:
1 category for the Brake Brand with 10 sub-categories (1 sub-category for each of the car manufacturers with 40 products inside each), 1 product page for each specific variation of car-fitment and product-model. /Brako/Brako-brakes-BMW/Brako-Super1-brakes_BMW-M3.html 1 category, 10 sub-categories, 40 product pages, 0 choices on the product page.
1 category for the Brake Brand with 10 sub-categories (1 sub-category for each of the car manufacturers with 10 products inside each), 1 product page for each specific variation of car-fitment. Drop dowjn box on the product page lets you choose product-model (Super1-4) /Brako/Brako-brakes-BMW/Brako-brakes_BMW-M3.html 1 category, 10 sub-categories, 10 product pages, 4 choices on the product page.
1 category for the Brake Brand with 10 sub-categories (1 sub-category for each of the car manufacturers with products inside each), 1 product page for each specific variation of product-model. /Brako/Brako-brakes-BMW/Brako-Super1-brakes_BMW.html 1 category, 10 sub-categories, 4 product pages, 10 choices on the product page.
Obviously, option 1) is going to be the best search match for someone searching for 'BMW M3 Brako Super1 brakes' but that page will have almost identical content to 100 other pages and very similar content to a further 300 pages, which takes it's quality ranking down a lot. At the other end of the scale of complexity is option 5) which concentrates all search potential for the Brako Super1 down to a single page, which can be well written and have great content, but wouldn't have a match in the title, url or product name for anyone searching for 'BMW M3 Brako Super1 brakes'. 'BMW M3' would be mentioned in the page, but only once in a drop-down along with 100 other cars and possibly once in the content if there's something noteworthy about that application. So which option would you go for and why?
Someone else asked a similar question earlier today.
Canonicals are the key if you want to keep the category structure in your product URLs. Surely you'd want the book title and author name in the product name / URL and wouldn't need it from the category URL though?
Either way, we use this extension on our Magento shop which lets us control the Canonical URLs properly as well as generating some good google friendly sitemaps.
http://www.mageworx.com/seo-suite...
Hope this helps,
James
Yeah, canonicals are the key.
We use this extension on our Magento shop which lets us control the Canonical URLs properly as well as generating some good google friendly sitemaps
http://www.mageworx.com/seo-suite-pro-magento-extension.html
Hope this helps,
James
Here's our sitemap:
http://www.driftworks.com/shop/sitemap/dw_sitemap.xml
In google webmaster tools, I can see the sitemap report and it says: Items:Web Submitted:2,798 Indexed:2,910 Items:Images Submitted:3,178 Indexed:0
Do you have any idea why our images are not being indexed according to webmaster tools? I checked a few of the image URLs and they worked nicely. Thanks in advance,
J
Cheers Ben,
I'm not so worried about the mechanics of rewriting the old URLs and keeping them unique as I can have all that covered. fairly easily
I'm more interested in how beneficial the end results may be and whether it's worth a disruption.
cheers,
James
In our Magento store, products are arranged into categories, subcategories and so on. We typically have 3 or 4 layers of category depth.
This makes it nice and easy for customers to find stuff, but it means that the end categories have massive long urls.
I'd like to keep our category tree structure in place from a navigation point of view, but I feel the url structure is pushing some important stuff to the back of the shop as it were. We have something like 200 categories in total.
So, assuming every individual category has an a unique name, I'd like to rewrite the urls so that:
ourshop.com/car-parts/
stays as
ourshop.com/car-parts/
ourshop.com/car-parts/suspension/
becomes
ourshop.com/suspension/
ourshop.com/car-parts/suspension/springs
becomes
ourshop.com/springs/
ourshop.com/car-parts/suspension/springs/thismake-lowering-springs
becomes
ourshop.com/thismake-lowering-springs/
and so on....
I'll need some custom magento URL rewrite work done, but that's another story. The real question is whether you guys feel this is worthwhile?
Are there any other stores with a deep categorised navigation structure, but a flat url structure?
thanks,
James
If you're just after something easy and free to edit the audio, then a program like Audacity will do the job. - http://audacity.sourceforge.net/
If you want to turn it into a simple video cheaply, then Microsoft Movie Maker is free and can do most simple video jobs you might want. Do a google search to find the install if you don't already have it installed
Hope this helps,
James
