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Articles on an ecommerce site can be a great thing.  I have been spending most of my time recently blogging and writing articles for ecommerce.

Those articles can pull traffic, they speak to the expertise of your staff, they show that you care about customers using your products properly, they help customers select your products and if they are superbly written and extremely informative then can help you get links that improve your rankings.

But, if those article suck then they could be damaging to your business.

I would put all of my efforts into a single domain until I am dominant in that niche.

Lots of people think that they will toss up a hotdog stand of a site and use it as a link platform to their original site.

Actually, the smart way is to use a powerful site to power a hotdog stand - but that should not be done until you have dominance in the niche.

From what I can see you have entered the ring with the heavyweights.

This is a techsavvy niche and the people you are challenging work really smart and really hard.  And they have been doing that for a long time.

I pay very little attention to DA, PA, etc.  Instead I look at the content of the site and the buzz about the biz.     To beat them you are going to need a popular site and a praiseworthy business.

Go to each of these sites and get a measure of their social cred....  cartridgesave....  33,000 Google reviews... stinkyink... about 10,000 reviews.  Check twitter and FB for their brands.

(I don't even live in the UK and I have heard of these businesses.)

These are businesses that people are singing about.  People are typin' their domains into Google - asking for them by name - over and over again - every time they need a cartridge.

Lots of people will disagree (especially hard core SEO linkbuilders).

But I think that you will need a lot more than SEO to defeat them.

I don't think that google is going to look at the links of a website and rank them above these guys without a huge human popularity factor.

I would avoid any JoeSchmoe.com's sitebuilder program.  They often become orphans when Joe moves on to other projects.

I would favor something like wordpress that is used by millions of people, installs on your domain and there are many many smart SEOs who can tweak it for top performance.

If you are not into servicing your own databases, templates, etc. there are plenty of people out there who will do that for you on an hourly or contract basis.  The important thing is to get someone who knows what they are doing from an SEO perspective.

OK... it sounds like your site was made with a hosted site-builder.

If that is the case then moving your site will require a lot more planning and care.

If this site has links and rankings then you will need to preserve the URL structure of the site and if that changes use 301 redirects to preserve rankings and linkvalue.

You will also need to preserve your page optimization to be sure that no rankings are lost.

All of this could involve a lot of work.

I would honestly use this as an opportunity to make a huge improvement in your site.

I would either study this very carefully myself and make the move or I would hire a pro to do it for me or to provide close consultation.

If your biz is in Canada and you want to be found by Canadian searchers then  you want the server in Canada.

Changing hosting companies is a very safe thing to do as long as you are going to a quality host and their servers will be in the same country as your current host.

If your site is down a lot it could have a positive effect on your SERPs - so going to a quality host could be a good thing.

Here is what I do.

I make a landing page optimized with keywords that I want to rank for.  Spend time optimizing just like you would for organic rankings.   I don't hesitate to have a couple links out to my homepage and supplemental information pages or even parallel product pages.

Then I open a new campaign and ad group.  Enter some keywords that I want to advertise.  These keyword must tightly match my landing page. I enter some negative keywords that I know will be duds. I compose six to ten different ads that tightly match my landing page and I think will pull clicks for my offer.

I bid high enough to rank #1... settle for #2 if it takes an insane bid for #1.  I hang in there with these high bids to get my CTR healthy.   I watch keywords that bring in traffic and make negatives for any that will bring low quality traffic.  This will improve CTR and conversion rate.   I watch the performance of my different ad copies and drop those that perform poorly... again improving CTR and conversion rate.

I am willing to take a beating on bidding and click costs at the start of a campaign.  I do this to establish a strong negative KW list, drop poor ads and get my CTR and conversion rate up.  This is really important for your quality score.

After you have a nice amount of data you can start making decisions.  Do the math to be sure that you are making money.  You can loose your shirt easily with adwords.

Your goal should be to make maximum amount of profit per day. Not max profit per sale or max number of sales.

If you sell at MSRP you better be bidding for top position and hope that nobody in your niche comparison shops.  If you sell at deep discount max profit per day will probably not occur with you in the #1 position.   Usually a few positions from the top (who you underprice) will be where the sweetspot occurs.  Your results could vary.

Take Brad Geddes adwords seminar and read his book if you are spending serious money on PPC.  This is not a fluffy course.  You will do lots of math and think really hard.  If you go there thinking that you will listen, sip coffee and fart then stay home.   You also better be a guru with excel because anybody who is not doing lots of heavy math is probably loosing his shirt.  Just sayin' that adwords is not easy way to make money for the average person.  You gotta be smart and think hard and have a little bravery with your money.

My bet is that you have a low CTR.....

If you are bidding puny amounts your rankings will be low and that will make your CTR really low.  If that is the case then open the throttle on the bidding.

Also, have you implemented negative keywords?  Reserving your ad for display for only the most relevant queries will increase your CTR.

Finally, do you have an ad that really pulls in the clicks?  If your ad is a sleeper and everyone around you is getting the clicks and you are not then that will drop your CTR and result in low QS.

Mine is updated every few days.  Like once a week.

When you look at the other pages in the top 10, can you honestly justify why your page deserves to rank there? Once you get your content to this level, link building becomes a whole lot easier because you have created a linkable asset.

I agree with this 100%... and when I have that type of content that compares very favorably to the best on the web, I spend zero time building links and 100% of my time making more content.  My pages get off to a very slow start compared to those that get linkbuilding, however, all of my time is spent creating highly linkable assets that over time will defeat lower grade content unless it has  a big investment in offpage SEO.

From my experience, the best way to get links with an exact match domain is to create some of the best content on the web for that topic.  When people see that an an exact match domain they tend to link to it more readily than similar content on JoesWidgetShop.com.

I build content instead of links so I can't answer your question.  As a result, most of the anchor text pointing to my site is stuff like....

exactmatch.com      here        this site      etc.

Ice cream is a broad and deep topic and you could write a lot of blog posts without running out of unique material.  Every blog post that you write should be about a topic that is different from anything else that is already on your site and be interesting, informative and perhaps humorous as well.

If your site (and pages) are powerful enough google will display two, three or more of your pages in the top ten.

I spend a lot of time writing content that most people would consider to be cannibalizing - and it brings in a lot of longtail traffic and takes traffic away from my competitors.  I do it intentionally.  There's no sin about it.

Most of my domains are exact match and penguin didn't bother them.  I my opinion, penguin was more about anchor text and low-quality linkbuilding jobs.

In my opinion exact match domains lost a little value about February 2011... but otherwise they are good domains and worth paying extra to get them.  They convert better for me than other domains and when I own a nice domain it gives me energy to work on the site - and that is the secret of those domains for me.

I tried to post a question which was at least 15 words long and received an error saying the question was less than 5 characters

Blips happen.  Just try again.  This question worked fine. 

The real cost can be in developing the content to be displayed.  You could spend several days researching and designing - and that's before you hire or spend time on the design.

The best stuff usually requires some digging.

I hope not.  If you try it let us know how it works.  I think that they should give a bonus for anything that is "kickass". 

I see that you do have fantastic content for each pose.  That's great.

I would place an image for every pose on this page.  Include a short description of that pose... and a link where visitor can get the full article.

When a visitor lands on this page they will be impressed with all of the poses and that you have additional information for each one.

I NEVER hesitate to show the visitor images of EVERYTHING that I have and then link to a more detailed page.  I am not going to say the keywords that I have pages like this ranking for (with zero linkbuilding done by me) but you would probably be surprised at their difficulty.  Huge image galleries linking to more detailed content are killler killer killer.

**I get the recent change where adding a nofollow to one link wont increase the juice passed to other links. **

When nofollow was introduced it was possible to "sculpt" pagerank by nofollowing links - and that directed their pagerank elsewhere.

Then Google decided that the pagerank on a nofollowed link would evaporate and they didn't tell anyone about it.... until Matt Cutts admitted one day that the pagerank on nofollow links evaporated.

How do they do it today and how they will do it tomorrow is anybody's guess.

So, I would invest my time and strategy on making a great website.

The bizarre thing is despite the recover in rankings our unique traffic has taken a fairly large whack in numbers. Seasonality? Weather? ( it's been nice in the UK for a change)

What rankings are you looking at?  There are image rankings, blog rankings, news rankings.  I'd bet on images.

For long tail queries I don't worry about junk sites beating me.  Because I know that I will get them over time.

I see what you describe on four types of sites:

1. new sites

2. sites that need better on-page optimization

3. older sites that have not gained a lot of popularity

4. sites that are being held back by some problem

I don't think that there is a sandbox.  A new site can be launched  and not have  any problems that people call a "sandbox".

I think that the problem is.... other websites scrape new content from you and post it on their site... then you  get filtered.  I think that has been happening for years but since nobody believes that is true they call it a "sandbox".

I know that this comment is going to get me a lot of thumbs down.   

Went to your page.  Where are the poses??

I like the other guy's site because the pictures are right there.  That's what I expected to find.

If I owned your site that page would have big photos for every pose right there and visible... generous descriptions will accompany each one.  I would not expect people to click to them.  People who arrive on a page like this want to see something.  Give it to them is what I would do.

If you do that I bet your traffic will climb from long tail keywords and better ranking for your main term.

I would also cut back on spending the top 500 pixels of the page on design elements that are repeated across the site.

That's just opinion... but where I would bet my money.

(I have a page on a subject where I have lots of images - about the size of yours - each with a few sentence description.  That page has about 60 images and 3000 words.  It pulls in more traffic than an five pages on my site combined and is slowly climbing the SERPs for difficult terms.  I do no linkbuilding.   Pages with lots of images, big images and substantive text pull in links with no work from me.)

I combined items like this on a single page with options.

Thanks for this information.

I have seen "leave a review about your transaction at......." on some of documents that I have received.

Better check the terms of use anytime a person wants to do this.

Ask customers to do it.  Print on receipts, mailings, email footer, etc.

When I do a query like that I get "most relevant pages" returned.

You should be able to use analytics to determine the referers or search terms that are responsible for this new traffic.   Once you have that you might be able to get an idea of how to monetize that traffic with relevant offers or merchandise or pay per impression ads or google adsense.  If the amount of traffic is really high maybe consider selling your site to this competitor or maybe you should keep your mouth shut.

A good description of how to solve your www vs non-www problem can be found here.

My .htaccess code looks like this...

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

===============================================

Redirecting an old page to a new page is described here.

My .htaccess code looks like this.....

redirect 301 /old/old.htm http://www.you.com/new.htm

The 301 redirect will be very valuable.

You also have some canonical problems......

Both of these URLs display.

http://www.endeavourcottage.co.uk/Whitby-lifeboats.html

http://endeavourcottage.co.uk/Whitby-lifeboats.html

Do you know if your server can use .htaccess files?

In my opinion, it is very important to delete anything that might be a duplicate.

Also, if the old URLs have any external links their value can be transferred to your new page - making your site compete better almost immediately.

Question: How long ago did you do this?  Was your site established and pulling traffic when the change was done?

Question:  If you grab a unique sentence from one of those pages and search for it do you see two copies on google? or bing?

If this was my site I would  do 301 redirects of the old URLs to the new URLs and delete the old pages.

If I owned google and a site was appearing in the #2 position and not getting clicked then that says something.  The title could be totally irrelevant, the site could be so trashy that everybody knows about it, may other things.

If nobody is clicking then it is wasting space in the SERPs.

I would build one site and make it really good.  Use it to dominate one location and shoot for the second with a couple of pages.

Only go for two sites if the single site attack fails.

The content must have been what made this blog successful.  That is what attracted the links... so if the content leaves the links will probably evaporate too.

I bought a website that had some great content that was not owned by the person who I bought the site from.  I allowed the site to go unchanged until I had enough same-topic  content to repopulate those pages (on the same URL) with articles that were just as good or better.

So, if I was buying this site I would do an inventory of inbound links and get to work on content that will fit those URLs.   I would try to delay taking possession until I had the new content ready - if possible.  If not, I would get short articles up ASAP and improve then quickly.

Thanks.

I see how my sentence allowed longtail to be merged with PPC.  I actually wanted that to mean going after long tail with SEO efforts.

This is a good strategy, but to recommend looking for a new job in a less developed industry is almost like saying just give up and try something easy.

Some people can interpret it that way.

I think that it is a mistake for an SEO to accept jobs that are above his ability level or jobs where the resources that the company plans to put into an effort are not adequate to become competitive.

A lot of SEOs are selling the $500/month package to business owners who really should be spending the $5000/month needed to compete in their industry.

One of my favorite quotes is... "It's not the size of the dog in the fight, its the size of the fight in the dog."

But even with that powerful attitude a smart chihuahua will stay in his weight class.

Wow, you saw PPC and didn't read any further. 

What is the main reason for this usually?

I don't think that there is really a main reason for this....   a couple things play in concert..

As with many sites that produce great content  my bet is that... Lots of people have grabbed your stuff and are using it.  They are using your titles and your brand and your words and your images to enrich a site that is monetized with ads or affiliate programs.   Some of these people are really smart about optimization.  Some of them have created sites that have become moderately powerful.

Perhaps this has not been theft.  Perhaps you gave your content away and now you are paying the price for creating duplicate content that is being used against you by smart people.

And, google says that they are "good at recognizing relevant content to return  to the searcher"... but they have not decided to put the resources into returning the original version - even after we tell them which version it is with rel=author as they requested.  They have simply not decided to put the resources into this- even though I am sure that some of them would like it to work that way.

There you have it.

One that does not offer unlimited bandwidth.... because most that offer this will throttle your site in invisible ways.  They really don't want you to succeed because it will cost them money.

What do you do? What indeed...?

Become an expert at PPC and attack ALL of the long tail keywords.

Make a case to the boss for the resources needed to wage war at the level needed to become competitive.

You can also look for a job doing SEO in an industry that is not as highly developed or as cut-throat.  I know of a lot of industries where I would not want to be an inhouse SEO.

I've always wondered why web design companies are not placing site wide links to their clients in the footers of their own sites. Would that not be helpful to their clients and also be a good thing to do?  Certainly more visitors to a web design site would be interested in clicking those links to see samples of web design than would visitors to a car repair site be interested in going to web design?  

What would you recommend for a guest blogging strategy with the implementation of links?

My recommendation would be to blog on your own site and do it well enough that people who see your posts will email the URL to their friends.

We would be write about 3 paragraphs per post, and include 3 links at most per post (we would use one word anchor text as well).

Based upon that, my personal opinion is that this is an activity being done for rankings manipulation.  So, I would not do it.  Different people may have different opinions.

This is either a great opportunity or great danger.

Think about it.... 200 blogs that link to each other and that are linking out to a ton of other sites.

I am imagining a  lot of crappy articles and copyright infringing images.  If that is true then don't do it.

I think that the biggest risk is doing a heavy attack using keyword anchor text on inbound links.

If you avoid that along with spamming keywords in content and title tags, I think that you will be OK.

If you read the book:  In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives by Steven Levy (recommended reading for any SEO) you will learn how many people get "test SERPs".

Google does a lot of testing and I believe that they have been especially active at testing recently.

Doing a combination is a great idea.....  You know that you sell LOTS of some items.  Those are definitely worth writing about.  The ones that don't sell well don't merit as great of an investment.

At the end of the day, neither is easy...

I agree...  Have you ever visited PotPieGirl.com?   She has a great slogan for you....  "If you are willing to spend  a year doing what other people won't, you can then spend a lifetime doing what other people can't."

Think about that when you are writing your descriptions.

I really like that slogan...  and really enjoy some of her blog posts.

For example, we have 500 award certificates.  All are the same size and have the same description. But one is swimming, one baseball, one reading, etc, etc. Apparently the 1 word difference is not enough to differentiate.

These pages probably get very little google traffic and could cause a rankings reduction for your entire site.  I would be amazed if they are getting any respect from google.

Does anyone have any good tips on how to change the content to avoid this issue and to avoid making up content for 2500 items?

Here are the two obvious choices....

1. severely reduce the number of pages on your site... have one for award certificates and list all of the sports / activities that it can be given for.  Should be a really rich page... but not very optimized

2. start writing a substantive description for each of these products... you should be an expert on trophies and award certificates so there should not be anyone better qualified to do this than you.  All of these people went to great lengths to  earn their certificate... now if you want respect from google you gotta do the same

Panda is a ranking reduction that can effect an entire site.  It is believed to occur when a site has a lot of duplicate content.

So, if you post a lot of duplicate content on your site you should not be surprised to see a ranking reduction occur.  You might avoid the problem if you post the content with noindex.... maybe.

Also, if you  are linking straight to the duplicate on a more powerful site that almost guarantees that your version of the content will be at least filtered.