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The site in question is this http://www.stylemyroom.ie/

looking at the page source I saw this

Never heard of this before, does it actaully work?

From a link building perspective, is a link from a site that's completely flash any good?

Can google crawl flash sites at all, or it a waste of time trying to get a link from a flash site?

You see there is no text "Products 1-40 of 93", just "Displaying 1 to 40 (of 93 products)" so good must be able to understand that, and put it into its own format.

The "Products 1 - 40 of 93" does use up space so the meta description is shorter than normal, but to be honest I'm not too worried about it. I was asked to look into it, just to understand why its there.

We have e-commence site (zen-cart) and we use our category pages (which has  the list of the products) as landing pages.  In the Serp results our link is showing up like this

Our Page Title

www.link.com

Rich snip stuff

Products 1 - 40 of 93 - Meta Description text

I just wanted to know where its getting the "Products 1 - 40 of 93" from, and can it be removed (if we wanted to)?

On the landing page say "Displaying 1 to 40 (of 93 products)", But i looked in to the source and it does not say "Products 1 - 40 of 93" anywhere, so google must be coming up with that text.

I have noticed other zen-cart sites have the same text, and other e-commence sites have something similar like " 20+ Products"

As long as google credits your site as the original author of the content ie google crawls your site before it crawls the site that copied the content.  So yes it will penalize them.

Before you changed the file back did you see the last time it was modified? might give you a clue what happened.  As Alan said check other files have not been changed (malware/hacked)  again checking the modified dates gives you a clue ( files you know have not been touched having a recent modified date, all the files having the same modified date... etc)

So I'm guessing you had a 1-2% bounce rate? If so  that brings up another question.  If the code is in twice therefore bounces can't be record properly, then surely bounce rate would be 0% not 1%-2%.

The only thing I can think off is some users are bouncing before the page is fully loaded (eg header but not the footer).... just a thought

Yes same thing a happen to me with a site, tracking code was in twice, so bounce dropped to 1% 2%.

Back on topic, under 30% would be good/v.good I would say

Why not just check your self, by adding &pws=0 at the end of the search?

[quote]If we get it wrong, is there a penalty? Or this just simply up to us?[/quote]

Simply google will not use the rich snippets, don't think it will get penalised.

You can test here:

http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets

If you works there it should work in the serps.

We finally got our schema done a few weeks ago, and with in a few days google was using them on our more popular pages.  I don't think schema/rich snippets, effects you rankings, just makes your link more attractive/clickable for the user.

Hi, We are an online furniture retailer in Ireland and have been going for about 4 years, there is about 1000 visitors onto the site everyday. We have been thinking of new ways to interact with the customer and build the sites online content and constantly working to improve rankings. Have been toying with the idea of a user/customer forum and was wondering what the general consensus was with that as an idea, I appreciate that there could be negative aspects for the brand and was wondering if anyone had experience of similar and how that was perceived by the user and in what way did people interact with the forum. I assume differently to how they would interact with an "independent" furniture forum. My hope would be that the forum would be used for discussing general home improvements, asking questions relating to the home for community feedback and assistance and other similar home related topics. All thoughts and feed back welcome. Cheers. Eunan.

The problem with that you have to do it page by page..... a bit time consuming if you have 3000+ products

in facebook insights, "like button" and then "popular pages" you can see what pages got liked over a time frame. But I can't get it to show any more than a 3 months time frame.

I'm sure there ,must be a better way....

don't mean to high-jack the question, but is setting up affiliates this way a good seo strategy? does google see this as a cheap way to get backlinks, or does it see it as a legit way as it must be a "good site" if so many people are affiliates of it?   Its and Idea i have to thinking of doing myself.

Btw i agree with Istvan, canonical and webmaster tools "ignore affiliate parameter" would be the way I would (will?) do it

I would add the fire-bug add-on for firefox and www.yottaa.com  to that list

Another way to look at it, people that have installed ad blocker would have never have clicked on an sponsored link anyway.

why put the blog and forum on sub domains?, have them as a sub folders on the main domain.  That way you not losing DA to the subdomain.

Also use the www.opensiteexplorer.org and Link Anchor Text, to see what keywords they are actually targeting

I just use the rack checker in the campaigns (which is updated weekly), personally I think checking daily is a bit pointless (but very tempting)

btw when i say use  "&pws=0"  i meant in you address bar eg:

www.google.co.uk/search?q=rankchecker&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-GB:official&client=firefox-a**&pws=0**

When checking searches yourself on google add to the end of the url  "&pws=0" (without the quotes) to cancel out you "Personal Word Search"

Personally I have found the tracker to be right 90% of the time and according to this article:

http://blog.greenlightsearch.com/greenlights_search_blog/2011/10/how-much-do-google-rankings-fluctuate-in-a-day.html

8% of ranks can fluctuate in a day.

And if anything the rank tracker would be a day behind, (remember it only checks once a week)

answer is in this link

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/2nd-november-index-update-our-broadest-index-yet-and-new-pada-scores-are-live

This has happened with us too a few times, usually we bounce right back if not higher in the listings a week or so later.

I think that if you use something like a htaccess redirect  you won't get any analytics data as the page never gets a chance to load.

But is the whole point of the example.com/tv url is to see how successful the tv campaign was, why do you want it indexed? Just create a custom page in the same theme as the add then link to the section you want them to go.

Hes got 77 Linking Root Domains mostly seems to be coming from his linking network or article sites, while I have only 31.  Also he is only ahead of us in one variant of the keyword (the biggest traffic wise).  It seems that he pretty much focusing on just that keyword 58/77 of the links, while I only have 16/31 using the same keyword.

But you think that because the junk links he has, hes not that far ahead of me  ie I don't need to get 30+  good anchor text links to reclaim the top spot?

his site is a niche furniture site and the links on the bottom of his homepage are:

weight training for women - silk sheets - ladies perfume - quilts for sale - fireplace screen - bed quilts - chess sets - buy dvd

But there are not reciprocal, those sites link to a completely different set of sites, which then some of them link back to him, quite complex.  Then on every page of his he has a completely different set of links (and the same with the sites he links too).  Other than that he got a load olds of articles posts (some years old).

I have had a good look at all of his links and really he only has a few what you could call relevant links at a stretch, but not as many as us.

But back on topic, you don't think the no follow links from Dailymotion are any good? (they have high PA, 50s

We have been ranking No.1 for a nice term for over a year, but in the last few months a competitor has taken 1 and 2 (we are 3rd now).  It seems hes using a linking web i.e each of his pages has about 20 text links at the bottom of his page to irrelevant sites which in turn do the same thing giving them a nice PA thats about 5-4 more than mine now.

But the interesting thing is that his top 3 links are from videos he has put up on to Dailymotion which has linked back to himself with (no follow links).

We use youtube for our embedded videos, but are we missing a trick? should we be using daily motion too?

on a side note it looks like he has made some articles from junk submit article sites, that link to his site, his facebook fan page and the dailymotion video.

Same thing has happened to me a few times, the next update then put us back  down to where we were seeing it.  But a few weeks later (still working on the linking building) we actually did move up.  So I think google does fluctuate its results, but It means your getting close.

Having said that I had the rank checker come up with some questionable reports for the odd keyword, but 99% it seems to be right.

I would also add that the Google Keyword Tool can be way off the mark at times, giving you much higher numbers that the exact word gets, so giving good keyword terms low figures.  That has been my experience when doing research with for keywords in niche (google.ie), but I have heard other say the same.

Still its good way to get a few ideas for keywords and there numbers.

Also I agree exact is way more usefully (broad can be useful at times)

We can't access you personal campaigns.

No need to "fix " Canonicals, they are a good thing.  Basicly if you have dupe pages the dupe pages all link back to the original article so google knows which article is the original.

Basicly the blue parts of the report are notes,  yellow is warning (may or may not be a bad thing),  Red is critical (bad)

I used AceSEF for a few joomla sites I have built, does the job but can't really comment how good it is compared to the others.  The free version puts backlinks/ads on your page, but since it GPL you can go in and remove the links from the code.... if you know where to look

edit: the real problem is finding if its compatible with the other extensions you are using, or if the seo mod you use has an add on for that extensions, and how much that cost.

We rank well across many online furniture keywords within google.ie here in Ireland, this is our core business and it is successful. Now we want to branch out into the related field of "kitchens". So the question is do we setup a new domain (a sister site) or keep it on the same domain with a new sub category. So the main categories off the home page would be:

• Sofas

• Bedroom Furniture

• Dining Furniture

• Kitchens

I know all the benefits of keeping to the one domain (the domain has age, and already has DA of 30 with many landing pages with PA from 30 to 49), so for the short term SEO angle keep it on the same domain. But from a Branding perspective this is not a great approach. Is it better to have a dedicated domain/site for kitchens (and the bonus of having a keyword match in the domain)? We are always thinking longer term so we see this as a 3 year plan outwards rather than a get rich quick.

There is an additional overhead of course with managment of the domain, templates SSL, PCI etc etc and we are conscious that a new domain is not a easy route to success.

Looking at the top 10 for the main keywords within the "kitchen" keyword cloud most if not all are dedicated kitchen sites, or kitchens are the main business so their homepage is there kitchens landing page. The competition in the google.ie space have 20-30 DA and PAs roughly 30 being the highest DA, we are thinking that this has not a huge challenge to overcome?

Thanks for any help, assistance or comments really appreciated. Ware regards, Eunan @ Love Furniture

I asked a similar question a while ago

http://www.seomoz.org/q/monitor-site-loading-speeds

yottaa.com met my needs  (but was not the only option)

Going back to the original question, based on this webinar

http://www.seomoz.org/webinars/future-of-link-building

FB share are more "powerful" than likes, but is it better to target "likes" as we could get more of them.

Has anyone any experience doing something like this?

rq4hm.jpg

Reading though the guidelines it doesn't actually say you can't use shares, just not "likes, checking in or connecting to an app".

But the more I think about it, i'm sure I have seen big companies using likes to enter contest etc

The aim of this contest is not too get more likes for our facebook page but to get actual share/likes for our site (or pages on our site), which is is becoming more important  googles eyes (or so i have read)

I didn't know it was against facebooks rules since like based contests are so common on facebook, but good to know.

Don't know much about contest app's will look into it.

Thanks

Taking some advice/ideas from this seomoz blog post

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/99-ways-to-build-links-by-giving-stuff-away-and-improve-your-brand-too-14029

I decided to launch a facebook competition were you like/share the product you want to win.

The question is should I be looking for share or likes?  From what I have read Share are more valuable than likes, but Likes would be easier to get I think (ie we could get a lot more of them).  Here is an example of one of our product pages:

http://www.lovefurniture.ie/sofas-furniture/corner-sofas-l-shaped-sofas/rihanna-corner-suite-with-sofabed

We already have a like, tweet +1 buttons, but not a facebook share, should it be there?

Any feedback or advice would be appreciated

We all know that site loading speed is important for google ( and getting more important), and currently we are considering moving to a dedicated server.  But I would like to measure pur current loading times and compare them to our competitors.  I know that webmaster tools shows you your loading times, but its seems a bit random with its results, and I know analytics also now records speed, but the sample sizes seems to be too low.

When I googled website load times, I got a load of different free tools but they seem to give conflicting results  e.g one said that our avg kb load time was 0.02sec and our competitor was 0.01, but a different site says our sites loads in 1.7 secs and our competitor loads in 11sec (our home pages have similar total file size for our homepage. )

Also what would be useful would be a way to monitor of website loading speed to see when it slows down, so we can figure out why.

Does anyone know of any good reliable  programs or sites that does this?

You have to submit to googles Merchant Center a txt file with all your products. It has to be formatted in a certain way, but zen-cart (which is a spin-off of osCommerce) has a module for it that exports you product in the correct format for google:

http://www.zen-cart.com/index.php?main_page=product_contrib_info&products_id=473

you need to install wordpress on to you domain like any other CMS.  Wordpress offer blogs on their own domain, but its much better to have it hosted locally as EGOL has said.

what if you can't place noindex into the html head (limitation of the cms) would a exclude in the robots be enough on its own? (or at least better than nofollow links to the page)

"They changed this (I think in 2009) to : If you had 10 links on a page and 5 were nofollowed each link would still only pass on 1 PR point. The remaining 5 points essentially disappear into thin air."

R u 100% sure about this? any sources to back this up?

Thanks

I'm definitely ranked no:1 as I use IBP for checking ranks and then I have checked from different computers (different providers, not logged in)

So Google Keyword tool is not any good, then the question is what is a good way to find good related keywords that I'm not currently targeting?

e.g. we sell "High Sleepers" on the site, but according to the Google Keyword tool, people search "loft beds" far more (which is the same thing).  Now I don't know if this is true

So a keyword we are targeting  "painted bedroom furniture"  google keyword tool says gets 480 exact local searches (and 880 broad),  and in the same local google we have ranked 1st for months (and currently we are 2nd and 3rd too), but looking at the google analytics that landing page has only gotten 78 unique page views from searches and only 21 from "painted bedroom furniture" . (the 2nd link gets 12 page views and the 3rd gets none, from that keyword)

Now for me that does not make sense!

For other keyword which we rank No.1 the keyword data and analytics generally match/make sense.   Is there something I'm missing?

If you google phases with N.I. in them google shows results with Northern Ireland in the serps (bolded and all), maybe google doing something similar here?

I meant to say that there is of course the added benefit of good products descriptions for the customers.

Thanks for the reply and the real life example

We are an online furniture store with about 1300 products on the site, and we mostly use the catalogue descriptions for the product.

Recently I have been reading about One Way Furniture:

http://ecommerceprnews.com/e-commerce_articles/2011/03/one-way-furniture-shifts-toward-quality-content-after-google-panda-update-201928.htm

They are a big american online furniture which seemed to have lost about a 3rd of there traffic due to being punished in the panda update.  Now it seems they are blaming the fact they use they use catalogue descriptions for the product (like us), and now they are going to rewrite all their product descriptions.

We are a small company and rewriting 1300 products (meaningfully) is no small task.  Looking at our own traffic we have taken a small slump since feb after about 18 months of general increased month on month traffic ( bar seasonal dips and boost), but we didn't have a "fall of the cliff" like One Way Furniture.  But have been expanding into other areas (and there for new keywords), so we had expected to be increasing our traffic.

So the question is, how important is unique content for all our products? is it worth all the time and money to fix all the pages?  Our plan is to make sure our category pages (and there for landing pages) have unique content, would that be enough on its own, or are the product pages damaging the site over all?

We have a similar problem, we have a javascript dropdown nav at the top which brings the user to every product category on the site (+100), but we also also have the main categories listed in the left column.   So we have used "no follow" for the javascript dropdown nav, and also other pages like shopping cart etc, so leaving the spider to use the main categories listed in the left column to crawl the site .  But not sure how effective or useful that would be