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For a site your size, I think the left side nav is fine (for SEO purposes). From a usability perspective sometimes its nice to have a mouse over link in the main nav to give visitors easy access to category and sub category pages but that's just my opinion.

By the way, love bigcommerce! We work on ecommerce sites 24/7 and that is by far my favorite for small to mid size sites.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2401732,00.asp

According to this, Google is bringing the hammer down soon on another 10-20% of the search results.  While we don't advocate keyword stuffing, exchanging links, or anything too risky I am still concerned.

Do we know if the example "perfectly optimized page"; http://www.seomoz.org/blog/perfecting-keyword-targeting-on-page-optimization  is now going to be penalty bait? Is this over stuffing?

Also, how might this effect ecommerce sites in particular?

It depends. If you are linking to a trusted, relevant source that provides helpful information to your site visitors and they link back to you somewhere else on their site (not on the same page) there can be some value. However, you have to be really careful here. If they have done spamming or get penalized, you also get penalized for linking to them.

I believe time is usually better spent on other forms of link building. If your competitors do it, then its probably a good sign that they don't know what they're doing.

The only benefit in having these on one domain is sharing the link popularity from the one domain verses having to focus on link building and branding for both. I suspect the french version needs much less link popularity then the .com. If both sites already have good link building and ranking i would see no reason to merge them.

Yes, if Google see's both it isn't good. Neither are search engine friendly URL structures either. I would at least set up a canonical tag pointing one to the other, or ideally modify the site so only one URL exists and 301 redirect the others.

There are a couple ways to go about this.

1. It would be better if the new domain doesn't have a dash (-) in the name. Dashes are considered best practice after the .com. For example: www.brandname.com/dashes-go-here-instead

Then you could just 301 redirect the old domain to the new one so you get credit for most of the links you had on there.

2. The deeper you get down in the site your URLS are going to get longer anyway. Example www.mystore.com/company/product/long-part-number

Changing your URL just to save characters isn't worth it. You would only wind up getting rid of a short amount of characters anyway (unless you plan on buying www.ab.com).

So only change the URL if it would be better for your brand in the long run.

There's no way to automate good quality content. I suggest using elance or some other freelancer site, or even the mechanical turk and having a team of people help you write custom product descriptions.

Deleting the new account wont affect anything. You used a separate email and login yes?  Then the other will be fine.

SEOmoz provides CSV downloads for lots of the reports. You'd have to delete some SEOMoz verbiage and add your logo. I've had to subscribe to Raventools for better private labeling reporting though. I wish I didn't need raventools and could just use SEOmoz though.

I'm not sure I understand your question. You want to get rid of old links? Generally you want to keep them by using a 301 redirect from old pages and have them point to your new pages.

Submitting to Google is of no value. To help Google recognize your new site you just want to get your site some external links on high authority and relevant sites.

You could do a press release for example or find a blogger in your industry that you might be able to write for.

I'm not sure I understand why these redirects are in place? What languages do you want to show? English & Dutch? If so you should have either a .com or .co.uk with english and use the .nl TLD for the dutch version of the site.

The set up you have now is most probably hurting you're rankings.

I actually had the same issue with a travel site of mine and opted for option #1. Once I establish enough link popularity and and I am firmly in place with rankings I will adjust to the non perfect answers.

I guess it depends on how quickly you want to rank and if your domain already has enough trust to rank without them, if so I'd go for the more user friendly option.

No, there are no real specific web or tech issues between Australia and the UK, besides that you will want a Australian top level domain.

From an SEO point of view I would suggest hosting in Australia, using an Australian top level domain, and make sure you get links from other Australian sites.

Best thing you can do is check fiverr and maybe digital point and be VERY VERY selective in who you hire. Test them on a site you don't care too much about and be detailed in the tasks you give them. Stay away from mass submission type stuff; directories, articles, etc.

I'd look for someone who can truly do niche linking or competitor offset links for you (in house). Maybe someone on craigslist you can train.

FYI guys we removed about 100 of the internal links and rankings jumped 3 big positions overnight. They had not moved in over 2 months. Coincidence? I think not.

Hey guys,

I've come to the conclusion the sheer amount of crap links a site of ours has is un repairable. We own a .net version with the same brand name so I'm planning to move our ecommerce store over with all its content.

I can move the site in one swoop but I believe Google will see it as duplicate content if we don't allow the old site to de index first. I would simply take it down for a month but we still get some orders now and then.

Anyone have any ideas? I was thinking of leaving an image up on each page that is no index no follow linked to the new site that explains the site is being moved, etc.

I would agree but I'd add a limit to how many satellite sites you create. Google is a registrar and they could possibly find out about these sites. So don't use this as your main link strategy by any means. We usually create 4-5 satellite sites (wordpress blogs) and do what the above poster suggested.

Pagerank is tracked on a 1-10 system, 10 being the best. However, Pagerank is not the end all of how well a site is trusted or how quality their link popularity is.  I have seen sites with pagerank 1 beat sites with pagerank 5.

You should use the SEOmoz tool bar, which shows Mozrank, Moztrust, and PageAuthority.  Some info on that here; http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/mozrank

Our youtube page was PR7 and passing on quite a bit of Pagerank to our site. I didn't think it turning nofollow would effect us much, but we've experienced a sitewide rankings drop on a newer ecommerce store.

Anyone familiar with the youtube trick know of another good site for building Pagerank?