Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi David. Or it can be done more simply (If you have G+ pages for both your self and you business) by just putting these two lines in the head of your page

where publisher is your G+ biz page.

If it is just one thread on a forum that was flooded with bad links, you could delete that thread. Make sure that any traffic to the associated URL's get a true 404 response.

My understanding is that doing so shows that you did not want those incoming links and that you are not gaining any advantage from them. If you do another Reconsideration Request, you should probably tell them that the targeted page was deleted.

Hi Chris,

I have a couple of small ecommerce sites and ran into the same problem with MOZ Recommended list. They are wonderful intelligent folks - but way too pricey for small businesses.

What I did was search the Forum for questions that sounded like they matched the problems I was experiencing. Then started a list of who answered them in a way that sounded intelligent, that I could understand, and that were polite. You can then check the profile of the MOZ members who answer questions in a way you like. Some will run small SEO firms, or work for small firms. Then put together a Request For Quote (RFQ) and send copies to 3 or 4 of your favorites.

It really does not take that long. Just an evening searching and reading the Forum, then an afternoon to write the RFQ.

After that I did have a hard time choosing just one - I wanted to work with them all but the budget did not allow ;-(

Good luck!

Hi Chris,

If your product is in a market that is saturated, high volume, and highly competitive (like iPods or hiking boots) then stick with Egol's advice.

But from your profile it appears you sell specialty table legs, and I think that may be in a different realm of Adwords where the volume and competition are both low. The products my two stores sell are specialty items that are low volume and low competition, so I can share my experience.

The executive summary is "Start generic and start cheap". Doing that will give you an education focused on your niche at a reasonable cost.

My specialty items do not have a high search volume, so starting with broad keywords allowed Adwords to give me data on the full range of keyword searches it was actually displaying for. Depending on the search volume, it can take a week or three for Adwords to create a good list of actual keyword searches. As this list develops, use negative keywords to prune out phrases that are just wrong. Also start to add phrase and exact match for the phrases that appear often.

And I mentioned "start cheap" because Adwords has this weird habit of over-valuing itself. If I start with a bid of $0.15 it will immediately tell me that I need to bid $1.80 to be on the first page. If I ignore that expensive suggestion, I appear anyways. It may take a couple of days, but I will appear on page 1 or 2. Then I can start upping my bid a nickel at a time until I appear in the upper slots.

So budget $100 to do live research on Adwords, and consider it a market research expense. During that time, also go to the library and use their public computer to make a test purchase after clicking one of your ads - to be sure the tracking is correct. Also never delete a campaign, instead pause it so that the old data is always there to refer back to.

So much more could be said, but I need to go eat breakfast. You are welcome to contact me through one of my stores. Just google my name without the "ory". Good luck!

Hi Coral. I sent you a PM (which is accessed by clicking the little human shape next to the question mark and the magnifying glass at the top of these pages)

From the research I did, the "recommended companies" on the Moz list are all fantastic, but are all geared towards working with large business on long monthly contracts.

If you just need some quick help I suggest doing this:

1. do a few searches here for terms related to your issue

2. check the profiles of those responded with intelligent answers - some of them will be with small SEO agencies

3. contact them, explain your problem, and ask for a quote to resolve it

Good luck!

I checked the AquaFarm page in your image.

My understanding is that G+ prefers to use schema data as it's 1st choice for presenting, but it does not look like you have schema data on your page.

Then it goes for Open Graph data (like Facebook uses) and you do have that. But when I looked at the image linked with your   meta property="<a class="attribute-value">og:image</a>"   tag it is only 56x56px - which is maybe too small.

I know that the minimum image size has been changing recently, so I do not know exactly what it is right know, but I have been using 300x300px images successfully.

If you want people to be able choose which image to display with their post, you will need "tag" multiple images.

If you want to do Twitter Cards you will need add those tags also and make a 120x120 image for Twitter.

Basically you end up with two sets of pictures: one "visible" set sized properly for your webpages, and one "hidden" set sized properly for you social media accounts.

Hope this helps...

Hello speedingorange,

You wrote:  "I have always been under the impression from reading online that an algorithm update would see a site destroyed for most terms and a notification generated in webmaster tools, however the site still seems to still rank for some terms, others however it has fallen off the face of the earth for. "

I think you have it backwards. The Panda update, which is NOT algorithmic, is the one that would that would "see a site destroyed for most terms and a notification generated in webmaster tools".  The Penguin update, which IS algorithmic, is the one that would cause "site still seems to still rank for some terms, others however it has fallen off the face of the earth for".  And a Penguin penalty does not result in a Google Webmaster Tools notification.  (That is my understanding. I'm sure someone will correct me if I am mixed up, And I am OK with being corrected.)

Two of my sites are suffering from what I believe is Penguin damage. For both the damage is a lot of rank lost for only a few keyword phrases. Other phrases continue to rank normally. When I did a bunch of keyword research (using Moz, Ahrefs, and Majestic results blended together) I found that the few keyword phrases that I severely lost rank for had both:

1. a high percentage of Follow links using exactly those phrases as anchor text, and
2. links from sources that didn't really pertain to the anchor text or to our website.

My understanding is that these are the type of things that Penguin will bite you for. So we did remove or change a few of the anchor text links, and did a Google Disavow on most of the remaining links. We did leave a few anchor text links that were from good pertinent sites. This was done in early June, and we still have not seen any results. I have read that we will not see any big results from submitting a Disavow file until Google updates Penguin again. So we are keeping our fingers crossed until then.

Couple of quick things to explore if you are going to try a similar rescue. First, we did not pay any attention to our NoFollow links since they supposedly do not effect rankings. Second, we did create a nice file of follow links from all our link research, and used it as an additional submission with the Link Detox tool (the spreadsheet report from that tool is very valuable when checking for overoptimized anchor text). Third, we disavowed entire domains rather than individual links because we heard that was most effective.

Good luck!

Sorry, no good answer on how to effectively explain that "it takes time" (I run multiple stores myself and am not a big fan of hearing that either)

But I do have a question. Are you using PPC in the meantime to drive some sales? Also you could be doing PPC combined with CRO to get their conversions improved while you all are waiting for time to pass and organic ranking to rise. You can learn a lot from PPC about what people really search for and what message motivates them.

I've used it with no bad effects, and probably good results.

I have (or had) a keyword on one of my sites with very over-optimized anchor text links. That keyword suddenly dropped from page 1 to page 7. Just that one keyword, which points to a algorithmic (Penguin) penalty. So I analyzed my link profile (not any easy job) and did a Disavow listing enough domains containing those anchor text links to re-balance my link profile somewhat. That's all I did. No reconsideration request, no removal of links. After about 6 or 8 weeks, that keyword suddenly popped back from page 7 to page 3. Page 3 still sucks, but at least that makes it easier to do the work to scramble back to page 1.

Was it because of the Disavow? I don't know for sure, but it sure doesn't look like it hurt anything.

This stuff is often a bit vague and voodoo like, which is why it helps to get a site review from a professional. Check your PM's as I sent you a reply to your reply.

How long ago did you do this?

Google is often pretty slow to change things. Sometimes it takes weeks for a simple change like a page title to start appearing in the results...

Hi Little Bigman,

I just finished doing a little research on hiring a group to help with link building. All the quality places wanted about $200 per link. So if you are happy with the links you get for $100 each, it's probably best to stick with them. Can you share the name of your current source?

$10 a link from some mysterious overseas agency sounds way too dangerous. Besides, the SEO value of one great link will probably easily be 10x that of some crappy link....

I do not know of a handy button back to Moz Pro. Instead I just keep this link bookmarked: http://pro.moz.com/campaigns

You wrote: "Feeling increasingly frustrated and starting to avoid using Moz."  Yep, me too. There seems to be too many bugs and too much inaccurate data. Sometimes I think I stay subscribed just access to this Forum...

Or you could just use your htaccess file to 301 redirect their broken link to whatever page on your site you want it to go to.

I'll second what Michael said. If you are just interested in searches in or around Melbourne you can limit it to just AU searches. Doing that will keep the cost quite low.

If you run it about two weeks, you will also be able to pull up the full report that tells the exact phrases people searched for and the quantity of those searches. Always some interesting surprises in that report...

Hi Wesley,

I am using Constant Contact for rating requests. I have had good luck breaking the customer history up into 1 month chunks, and also including the customer's first names in the file of contact info I upload. That way the past customers get a semi-personalized email that starts like this...

Hello Mike,

Please tell us how happy you are with the tools you purchased back in July 2013.........

My guess is that I will reach some point as I go farther into the past where the number of good reviews I get becomes minimal, and then we will stop at that point.

We do use Shopper Approved to collect and publish the ratings. I know there are divided opinions over if it is better to collect them on your own site or use a service. I like using a service because: 1) it is easy, and 2) I get Stars to show in my PPC ads.

Couple of things...

1. You service is focused on Grand Rapids, but no where on your home page do the words "Grand Rapids" appear. You need to use the phrases and the locations you want to rank for. Get something like "Home Care in Grand Rapids" as an h1 way up near the top of the page. Then sprinkle appropriate words like "Grand Rapids, Michigan" at least 4 times through the rest of the home page.

2. If your site is brand new, it may not rank organically on Google for quite awhile. Last I heard, Google had a 1 year "sandbox" that most new sites were stuck in. The sandbox is there to make sure you are a serious site that is going to stick around. Supposedly it is VERY HARD to rank organically above page three while you are in the sandbox. During that period you can use PPC and social media to drive visitors to your site.

Hi David,

As far as I can tell, a campaign does not have to have GA connected to it. But it behaves differently when it does. Also weird things happen when old Moz Pro campaigns are viewed in the Moz Analytics dashboard. Here's what I am seeing in my MOZ account...

1. Moz Analytics and Moz Pro behave very differently.

2. a week ago I created a quick campaign in Moz Analytics just to test something, I did not associate it with any Google Analytics account. It has data in it now, but not as much as other campaigns that are associated with a GA account.

3. also a week ago I re-activated some old Moz Pro campaigns that do not have GA associated with them. They now appear in the Moz analytics dashboard - but with the spinning icon and the "We are collecting your data now. Check back within 24 hours" mesage.

4. to view those old Moz Pro campaigns in functioning manner, I have to skip the Moz Analytics dashboard and view them through the old Moz Pro dashboard which is here  http://pro.moz.com/campaigns/

Hope this helps you.

Hi Daniel,

I also submitted a Disavow file, then learned new things and updated the file to reflect the new knowledge.

You can only have ONE disavow file. So you simply create a new file (which may or may not contain many domains that were in the original) and then go to Google Webmaster Tools and delete the original file and upload the new one.

This article has good info on how you should create your Disavow file: http://moz.com/blog/google-disavow-tool

Especially this part from the article:

Google rejects many disavow files because of bad formatting, but webmasters usually never know. Guidelines state the file type should be .txt only and “must be encoded UTF-8 or 7-bit ASCII.”

Good luck!

When I first went to your site I thought it was about Langley, VA (where the CIA is)

You should add "BC" and "Canada" to your title, description, and page text. Maybe Google is just confused about what city your site is about?

Also your first h1 tag is really messed up. It's a handful of links, images, and text. I think it should just be the important text. After that you have more h1 tags, and for some reason they are capitalized as H1. You should only have one h1 that is just text.

You also have a whole bunch of H2's (capitalized) that are just vague section names. One or two h2's that directly relate to your site's purpose would be much better.

All your html code should really be lower case letters (I think).

Have you done all the "local SEO" stuff to tell Google that your site is only about Langley BC?

Logging out, clearing my cache, and logging back in seems to have fixed it.

Hi DHStom,

I took just a quick peek and saw these things:

Language and Location tags both say:  content="<a class="attribute-value">en_US</a>"  but probably should be UK not US.

Pages are a little thin on content. And are those product descriptions copied from another site? Try rewriting the descriptions in you own unique style (to avoid dupe content issues) and maybe add a bit more of your own text about why it's a good choice or some unique uses for the items.

Good luck!

Greg

When the plural is made by just adding an S, then Google seems not to differentiate the singular or plural. You can verify it by opening two windows and searching for the term both with and without the S and seeing if the results are ranked differently.

But if the plural is a whole different word, like Goose and Geese or Mouse and Mice, then you will definitely have to makes a decision on which to use.

Hi again Coral. There is a communication gap happening hear around a few certain words. Just fixing that will help you a lot in moving forward. Here it is...

Panda is not the same as Penguin......Panda is not the same as Penguin.....

Panda is a manual action, where you get de-indexed, get a notice, and have to do the whole terrible link removal and re-consideration request nightmare. You do not have this problem. So forget all about massive link removals and re-consideration requests.

From what you describe, you have a Penguin problem. That's just Google's programming noticing some weirdness in your link profile and either not counting the funky links or giving you a slap, a penalty, relating to those funky links (as in too high a % of a certain anchor text = a slap for your ranking for that anchor text keyword).

There are no re-consideration requests accepted for a Penguin penalty. All you can do is fix the links. And there are just a few ways to do that. Here are the ones I know of:

1. if the page the funky backlinks all point to is a sub-page, and there are few good links pointing to it, you can just abandon that original page (make it a 404) and create a new page to replace it. This rarely works because usually the funky links are pointing to the homepage and you can't abandon that.

2. get the links removed. If they come from a site you have some control or influence over, this is nice. But usually they are junk automated sites and there is almost zero chance of having the links removed

3. Disavow the domains that the funky links are coming from. Disavowing domains is usually better that individual URLs. Especially to get rid of sitewide links. You can use it to thin out your number of links using the exact anchor text you are getting slapped for. And to get rid of links from nasty toxic malware and porn sites.

Google gave us the Disavow option for this purpose. It can be used wrong, but most tools can. A good SEO group can check out your history and link profile and tell where the problem lies. I would suggest that it is not critical that the SEO company be UK based, but it is critical that they be good and that they are willing to work with small businesses affordably. It does matter that they speak english, so UK, Canada, US, New Zealand, or Australia are all fine.

To make it nice for the visitor, I suggest that at the bottom of the Archives section of the page linked above that you put an additional blue box (like you have for 2013) that just says Older. Below that put a link that says something like 2011 and 2012 issues and have it go to a new page with individual links to all the archived issues. That may also prevent Google from eventually considering them orphan pages.

Hi Ron.  If the keywords and phrases for your niche are REALLY LOW volume (like some of mine are), then I suggest using Google Adwords by running a few short PPC campaigns.

A two week run with your keywords set as a Broad match will gather enough data to activate an interesting Adwords report. This report is found on the "Keywords" screen of an individual campaign. Click the "Details" button then select "Search Terms / All" on the dropdown. This will list exactly what phrase people typed in the search box, how many times it was searched (Impressions), how many Clicks those phrases got, etc.

Just peeked at one of my campaigns and for the last 30 days it only had 2400 impressions. That's pretty low volume and those small volumes do not show up well in any free tool that I know of. Though they used to in the old Adwords Keyword Tool. I miss it...

Hi Peter. Maybe I'm reading your description wrong, but it sounds like a pretty standard ecommerce arrangement.

Is the following true?

Search Volume (ranked highest to lowest):

1. Generic Products (mountainbike, commuter bike, racing bike, etc)
2. Product Brands (Schwinn mountainbike, Trek mountainbike, Hurley mountainbike, etc)
3. Brand Models (Scwhinn 851, Schwinn 3400, Schwinn 4xtc, etc)

Page linking plan in question:  ( >>> means links going to a collection of pages)

Generic Product page >>> Product Brand pages

Product Brand page >>> Brand Model pages

Although this is a pretty typical ecommerce arrangement, I personally think it is not the best plan for sites only selling a few products. When there are only a few products I think it is better to go straight from the Home page to the specific product pages.

I'm not an SEO pro, just a guy with a couple of ecommerce stores trying to keep up with the changes. But getting to pages 2 or 3 does mean you are doing the basics right. The way I understand is that it takes an additional "order of magnitude" of effort and luck to jump up each page level.

So if jumping from page 4 to page 3 requires an effort level 6, then jumping from page 3 to page 2 will take and effort of 60, and jumping from page 2 to page 1 will take an effort of 600.

How long has it taken for your site to get to the page 2/3 zone?

I have a suggestion, but please do your own research to verify this...

My understanding is that you can set up a block of text on your site that is not visible until a visitor does something like clicks a tab or does a mouseover, and if you use the CSS command display:none; to make it invisible, that text will not be read by the major search  engines. That text can get displayed when the visitor clicks the tab or does a mouseover by having the CSS command switch to display:block; (or some other version of display). I think this is because a spider can't activate the tab or mouseover function.

I've read this a few places and avoid doing display:none; on valuable content for this reason (better safe than sorry). But I have not read about someone using it to purposely hide content to prevent duplication issues or dilution of keyword density.

It could verified with a pretty easy test. Just add some gibberish content to an existing page,  but hide it using display:none;  Then use GWT to ask for a recrawl, wait a few days, and do a search for the gibberish content. If it doesn't show up in the results, that is a good sign it worked. Let us know if you test it....

Thanks David. That does explain the issue better.

However, the occasional really long lag time for OSE to re-crawled pages that have been 301 redirected is still a problem for those of use who subscribe to Moz and are trying to use it to monitor and improve our SEO. But I think there is an easy solution...

Give Moz subscribers a new tool like GWT's "Fetch as Google" - but call it "Fetch as Moz" and have it trigger BOTH the Moz spider and the OSE spider to go re-crawl that page. This would let us quickly and positively know that our data for 301'd pages has been transferred to the new page.

Can this be done?

Hi Bruce,

I have two small ecommerce sites, so your question is very interesting.

I haven't heard before the phrases you used: "short head and chunky middle keywords". I guess keywords are described differently in NZ

We started out adding content by adding "article" or "guide" or "how to" pages to the site. These pages do not contain any Buy buttons, but do contain image and text links to our store pages. You can see an example here: http://www.bestdryingrack.com/How_to_dry_flowers.html

These article pages (on both sites) tend to be some of our most active landing pages, though they don't feed people into the store pages at a high rate. But even at a low rate, they are a super cheap way of letting potential customers know about our stores.

But we have since switched to adding content in a blog format. The blog is of course hosted on the site in a /blog/ folder so it helps are total link count. We made this switch because it made it much simpler to write about a broader range of topics. Before we spent weeks planning and writing a 3 page "guide" and connecting it into the site. Now we can do a single page blog post in a day anytime we come across something interesting or amusing. And it doesn't even have to closely relate to the products on the ecommerce site. Here is an example: http://www.easydigging.com/blog/apple-peeler.html

We have not been running the blog long enough to know at what rate the pages will feed people into the store, but I assume it will be similar to the article pages.My hope is that we can post weekly and therefore create more blog pages than we ever used to create article pages. Doing so would feed more people into the store and also keep increasing our link count.

Sam wrote: "Each site is unique in their own way and are already ranking well on their own."

Another possibility is to leave the sites where they are (since they already rank well) but let them all share one single Shopping Cart / Checkout system. I know of a few e-commerce system that allow this. UltraCart and AmeriCommerce are two. You can put the "Buy Now" and "View Cart" buttons on any site and some social media sites (you don't even have to own the sites, which opens interesting possibilities for guest blogging with a shopping capability)

Then you could just re-style the three sites appearance so that they blend well together yet stay distinct. Like three old neighboring houses that were all built in the same era. And freely offer navigation between all three so it pretty much acts like one big website. Maybe put a logo in the header of page saying something like "Part of the Gizmo Group of fine stores". Many people would barely notice that they are moving from one domain to another.

The upside would be safety. If one of the three sites gets a penalty, the other two can continue to pull in customers while you repair the penalized site.

Just tossing around ideas. I've considered doing this with some unused domains we own. Hope it helps you...

Hi Mark,

I asked a similar question here and on a few other SEO forums a few weeks ago. Here is what I learned...

PPC (Bing Ads and Google Adwords) is very easy to fix. Just go into the settings for your campaigns and only target the countries you want your ads to show in. Later if you find that your results are poor in certain cities or states or provinces, you can even exclude them. Targeting your ads this way works very well and is very easy to do.

Limiting Organic results is not worth the effort. Though you can add a huge list of excluded IP's to your htaccess, you then slow down your site because of the computing effort needed to check each new visitor. What is worth the effort, is to go into Google Webmaster Tools and declare your targeted country or region. What I was told by a number of different responders was that doing so means that Google will not count poor site performance outside your targeted country against you.

For example, my US targeted site has a generic Bounce Rate of 60%. When I dig deeper I find that traffic from countries like Phillipines and India have a bounce rate pushing 80%, but that traffic from the US has a bounce rate of only about 45%. Since I have declared the US as my targeted country, Google is supposedly not counting poor performance from other countries against my site. I have set up "Segments" in my Google Analytics to only show US visitors, and that really helps get a realistic uncontaminated overview of how my true customers are interacting with the site.

Hi Ian Watson. We have 2 questions (hopefully you are still monitoring this thread)

1. In the case of an old-page.html that is 301 redirected to current-page.html, will Link Explorer automatically assign inbound links going to old-page.html to the current-page.html ?

2. What is the purpose of showing "Internal, followed links" and "Internal, nofollowed links" on the COMPARE LINK PROFILES PAGE?  What good does it do to know or compare those counts?

Thank you!

I too think that C is best, but instead of listing the inventory in ALL the stores perhaps you can have them select their local store and then just show the inventory level at that ONE store for the rest of their visit to your store (or until they select a new local store)

Showing the inventory at all stores may be a bit distracting on the page (bad for CRO) and may lead to lots of customer phone calls asking if you can have something from store A sent over to store B for them (which could be a pain in the butt)

Unless I missed it, the current site doesn't have Buy buttons or a Shopping Cart. So it's more of a portfolio site than an ecommerce site.

If you're not planning to add Buy buttons and a Cart, you could use almost any CMS. With the small number of pages there, you could even use hand-coded pages (I do that for my sites which have around 80 pages)

If you want a fast and inexpensive solution, there are probably a lot of themes for Wordpress and other CMS that are much nicer portfolio designs than the current site.

Since most customers will be typing on a phone, I suggest not using the "a".

But if a really cool phone number is part of the marketing plan, maybe you could use it as part of the URL. Something like Taxi1515.co.uk or BirminghamTaxi1515.co.uk  -  doing something like that would let you get a good URL for just the minimal cost of a registration...

Hi Gary. I use CopyScape at copyscape.com

The free version only reads from a webpage, so you would need to create a temporary page, publish all or parts of the article you are curious about, check it, then delete the temporary page.

I think that on ecommerce sites it is good to display the social media icons only on certain pages.

Basically on the pages people are likely to share: Home, Product pages, on-site Blog pages.

You can probably leave them off things like the Category pages, Contact, Guarantee, and other instructional pages.

When you say "clean up" do you mean removing the links or disavowing them?

You will never be able to get them all removed, so in the end you will need to a Disavow anyways. If your time frame is short, you may want to make Priority One be doing a Disavow for each of the 50+ sites you are working with. Then you can proceed with attempting to get the links removed. I have not heard that there is any downside to having a link removed that already appears on your disavow file...

As for the order of the Priorities, you may want to shuffle them a bit depending on the different situations on the different websites. I suggest you read this Moz Blog article called It's Penguin-Hunting Season: How to Be the Predator and Not the Prey

...and then test a few of your sub-pages that used to rank well at the program used in this article which is called the Penguin Analysis Tool.  I say sub-page because it needs a single keyword phrase you want rank that particular page for so it do the anchor text analysis. And that works better on focused sub-pages than on general homepages. $10 per website will let you fully evaluate two typical pages on each and see which facet of the link profile is most valuable to attack first.

There is also a good "Copywriting" group on Google+ (called a community there). It gives you a chance to see how different copywriters communicate interpersonally (with eachother and outsiders who ask questions)

There are probably many ways to code and display the buttons.

If they show up nicely, and function properly, that is probably more important than having the W3 Validator see them as error free. From what I hear, few sites pass the validator test 100%...

Hi Christopher,

I'm not going to touch question #1 - that's a big can of worms that everybody has different opinions on. The big factor seems to be "Did you get a manual penalty?" If yes, there is a fairly standard set of steps to follow that wraps up with a Disavow. If no, you may or may not get any good out of doing a Disavow.

But question # 2 is easier. I used the Link Detox tool at linkdetox.com to check my backlinks and really liked the way it clarified and classified each link. There is a trial package hidden way down at the bottom of this page: http://www.linkdetox.com/plans-pricing/   that lets you buy two opportunities to run your site through the program for 100euros ($130). That's what I used.

You could also first check out the Penguin Analysis tool at penguinanalysis.com and invest $10 to run a few of your primary pages through it to see how likely it is that you have a algorithmic penalty from Google. If you don't, then chasing after a Disavow project may not be worthwhile. There was a Moz blog about it here: http://moz.com/blog/its-penguin-hunting-season-how-to-be-the-predator-not-the-prey

Good luck!

Hi Fedrico. I agree with you when the need is for ongoing SEO work. But the original poster said:

_..._hire an SEO specialist technician to take a look at a few things under the hood that I can't seem to figure out...

Which I understand to mean he has a couple of puzzling technical issues he needs help with. Those can sometimes be straightened out quickly.

I have two e-commerce stores (one using Yahoo Merchant Solutions and one using UltraCart) but neither of them are set up in the generic Categories/SubCategories/ItemPages format. So take what I say just as different opinion...

First the techy answer: What I have read is that it would be good practice to either:

1. pick your best selling "Armani Jeans Polo Shirt" color and set the rel=canonical tag on all the other color pages to point that one best selling color

or

2. use the  "Armani Jeans Polo Shirt" subcategory page (the one all the colors variations are linked from) and set the rel=canonical tag on all the other color pages to point that starting subcategory page

Now the different opinion:

You wrote "We do not do it with colours (the dropdown) because the cateloge of clothing can become quite thin when viewing. That and becuase the majority if not all major retailers do not do it this way."

I think the reverse is true... Having separate pages for each color dilutes your SEO effort by making most of your pages "thin" with no really unique content. Your blue page will not be any different from your green page (except for different pictures and the words blue and green interchanged). Also if you are a newcomer to selling these clothing items, perhaps you should do it differently than "all major retailers do"? You can't really compete with them on their own terms - they are too big and too well established. So perhaps using a different store format will help, and putting all the color and size options on a single strong unique page may be the way to do that. It may open some unique marketing or presentation possibilities.

Good luck!

Too bad that "Boost" didn't work for you. It is an interesting concept...

I wonder how they "force Google to crawl your bad links"?  Does Google provide some sort of form that URL's can be submitted to for spidering? Or is there some other way to quickly bring individual URL's to their attention?

I asked this also a couple month ago and got a good answer here:

http://moz.com/community/q/when-googling-site-mydomain-com-what-does-listing-order-tell-us

If it is a landing page ONLY for PPC, and regular organic searchers should not be going there, then you could just noindex that page. I think that will make it's bounce and other stats not count towards the rest of the site...

Hi Colin,

For sure Disavow the bad domains that are linking to you (whole domains, not just pages). If you are comfortable working with your htaccess file you can follow the guidelines in this article to get those bad domains to automatically prune links to your site (assuming they are automated sites) by 404'ing incoming visits from those bad domains. This tricks the site's bots into assuming your site is gone and so they delete the links to your site. Works for some spa,,y sites, but not all.   http://www.boxaid.com/word/simple-alternative-google-disavow-tool/

The sad truth though is that for awhile the bad links were probably boosting your ranking, and there removal (by Disavow, by Google's algorythm, and maybe by 404ing domains) will cause your rank to fall. You will have to build good links to replace the seething mass of bad ones...