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Hey Nathan,

I think your idea is great, though maybe a 302 would be better. If the amount of paginated pages are constantly going up and down those 301s may not be very "permanent".

But I agree that redirecting to the last "real" page in the set is a better solution than the one I recommended if the developer can handle that coding.

Thanks for sharing!

Hello CommercePundit,

I'm going to recommend Justin Taylor's first reply as the best solution here. You want your cake and you want to eat it too, but unfortunately that is against several of Google's Webmaster Guidelines.

Either give each of those sites their own content, which would mean not using the same database, which would mean investing a LOT of money, which is probably not scalable or doable - OR - Give up the idea of having a mirror-site on multiple geotargeted domains and instead 301 redirect those to the primary / canonical domain at www.lilyanncabinets.com . You could also use the cross-domain rel canonical tag as suggested by Justin, but I find that does best on content websites. Due to the nature of an eCommerce site (e.g. secure shopping carts, etc...) I think just redirecting the domains would be best.

You can put up a landing page for each location if you have a good reason to, such as having office or warehouse locations in those areas. But if you have no presence in those areas and are just trying to get traffic because they are big markets I wouldn't do that either. Go for the national market instead. I see on the Orlando site that the contact address is in Toledo, Ohio.

You don't have to take our advice, but you asked for it and despite your other sites getting traffic I think getting rid of, and redirecting, all of those mirror sites is the best long-term option if you want to continue getting business from search engines. Let's assume that you can get local traffic with those other domains and business does really well for a few months or even a year or two. You hire more people and buy a bigger house/warehouse/infrastructure... only to have Google wipe out every one of your sites completely with a single algorithm update. Now you're firing people, selling your house and looking for a job. It's not worth it, IMO.

I usually instruct affiliate managers to write their own company bio and/or product descriptions for affiliates to use. Treat every single piece of content on your site as if it were an asset, because it is.

You can have 2,000 affiliates linking to you (though their links should probably be nofollowed) from within the same company bio or product description as long as that is not ALSO the same company bio or product description you use on your site. If they all want to share content that's their problem. Just don't let them share YOUR content.

The Back Burner,

I think Takeshi gave a great response though I can't officially endorse it because I wouldn't officially endorse the strategy. When someone says "at risk of the Panda penalty" you need to take that very, very seriously. I've worked with comparison shopping engines (CSEs) and even eCommerce sites that have tried similar solutions in the past. What you're talking about here are doorway pages and are clearly against webmaster guidelines from any major search engine.

If you and the person who owns the company understands the risks and have weight the potential benefits than you are obviously free to do as you please. But you may think about your coworkers and the fact that a lot of businesses have gone under completely, and a lot of people have lost their jobs, because the SEO decided to take a risk like this.

OK enough of the disclaimer talk. You asked if anyone has used that particular service. I have not, so I'll butt out now.

We would love to hear about the results a year from now if you think to check back.

If you are removing it from the product title and the product title populates the link text from category pages, related product boxes, and other places you would be drastically altering the internal link anchor text to those pages. Taking it out of the title tag could have a huge impact too.

The real question is: What do people search for?

If your analytics show high search traffic and conversions for "Long Sleeve Cool T-Shirt Name" then you wouldn't want to make the change without putting some more thought into it. For instance, you may be able to salvage some of that internal anchor text by using title attributes on the text links and alt attributes on the linking images from category pages.

If, as you mention above, nobody searches for "Long Sleeve Cool T-Shirt Name" and instead most people search for just "Cool T-Shirt Name" then you probably only have better "Cool T-Shirt Name" rankings to gain by removing the "Long Sleeve" portion from internal anchor text and your product detail page header tags.

Also see this page for more information on using named anchor links (i.e. page.html#image) to avoid the "first link counts" issue. This is what Alan Mosley is recommending. I think it is much safer than using CSS to try and "trick" search engines. You can put the image on product pages in a named anchor like #image.

Resources:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/results-of-google-experimentation-only-the-first-anchor-text-counts

http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/3-ways-to-avoid-the-first-link-counts-rule

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-first-link-counts-rule-and-the-hash-sign

Hello JH,

The "100 links" rule doesn't really apply these days, and I'd personally remove that from the SEOmoz report if it were up to me, but some people still like to see it. I wouldn't worry about it, though you may want to focus on more important and higher ROI issues like getting a couple sentences of useful, static content on category pages.

Hello Menachemp,

Google is really good at detecting affiliate links, especially from any known network. To answer your question in the title, the best SEO value would come from a home-grown affiliate program that doesn't use any of the link footprints or networks that others are using.

In terms of a linkbuilding strategy you'd be paying for links so essentially it could get your entire domain in hot water. Getting random affiliates to remove all of those links after the fact would be a nightmare. So unless you are ok with the very real possibility that you'll have to scrap the domain and start over again somewhere else I'd stay away from it as a linkbuilding strategy.

Some people run those links through another domain first and then 301 them to the destination. That way if Google figures out what you're doing you can just dissconnect the redirects and remove all of those links with the flip of a switch in the middle-domains' htaccess file. Google knows about this tactic as well, and I would be very surprised if they haven't addressed it already, or very soon.

This isn't a whitehat / blackhat or a moral thing for me. It is a matter of risk tolerance. In this case the pay-off would have to be big and fast for me to have enough risk tolerance to chance burning a legitimate business down. People have been trying this tactic for at least five years (that's about the time when I first thought of it myself, though I'm sure others were doing it long before that) so this is nothing new, especially to Google. Keep that in mind when planning it out, and get someone to build it for you from scratch if you're going to do it.

Good luck!

As answered in the other thread...

Here's what came back from Channel Advisor. They know about as much as anyone when it comes to Amazon and Ebay stores so I think this is about as good as we're going to get. I hope it helps!

Hi Everett--So we don't have any definite answer, but the consensus is that the name doesn't matter.  We've put out feelers to eBay and Amazon and will let you know what we find out. **Person A:**My initial gut response is if they change their name on Amazon it should pass through to Google as is, but I don't know where Amazon is getting the name of the seller for their GPS feed.  I'd have to investigate but again my gut says it is part of the name they pull from the listing itself which comes from the name the seller created.I'll see if I can get any more info from Amazon before we reply.  I'd imagine the others operate the same way.Person A, email 2:

Okay, I haven't gotten any answers from Amazon or eBay but I've done some random google searches myself and I cannot find a single ad from one of those sites that references the name of a seller.  The Amazon listing is the information from the product detail page with an amazon.com link, which when you click takes you to the direct page (with many sellers) on the page.  The eBay ones sometimes have listings but I am not finding any names anywhere.  I'm happy to keep investigating but am inclined to say this is a non-issue.

**Person B: **
I don't know the answer.  I would be pretty surprised if (marketplace X individual seller X product listing duration) is more than a small component of the GPS algorithm though I don't know.  The effect would decrease over time also.  It wouldn't factor into my decision for rebranding my site.

Best,Delisa