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Hello,

We are designing a very large site with hundreds of landing pages that will need to get some of the Pagerank and trust our homepage has, so we are trying to make sure our navigation architecure is well set up correctly from the beggining.

I'm curious though if I need to have left side CSS dropdown navigation (I know no javascript) like www.adventurebound.com or if we can just use the top style dropdown like www.adventurefinder.com has?

I know straight HTML links would be best but unfortunately our site will be too large and complex for that.

Thanks in advance!

Thanks, yea I can use canonicals with bigcommerce. I just wasn't sure how much the URL structure really influences the rankings of the page. Like if everything else is perfect, but there is one variable in there that isn't (ie having /categories/ in the URL) how much that would actually effect the results.

We're building out a store in Bigcommerce, who for all intensive purposes is perfect for SEO besides the fact that you can not change the URL's to be custom. My question is, does this kill the SEO value of bigcommerce, despite everything else being great?

So for example the URL's for a category page would be something like this www.mysite.com/categories/keyword and the product URL's are pulled in by product name, so product URL's could be something like www.mysite.com/products/Product-Description-Long-223.html (notice the words will be capitalized and their is no way to remove the trailing .html)

I could go with Interspire (the liscenced version of Bigcommerce) or Magento so I can custom edit this stuff. But then its a lot more work for my employee's on the buildout.

We have a very large ecommerce store with little fresh content being added, accept through a web blog on the sub domain.

We are thinking of moving over our blog that is on another domain entirely and has a lot of active users. But first I want to make sure it will actually help the domains rankjings, and second i'm concerned about the duplicate content on the old forum if we move it to the main domain.

Should we just copy over all the content, 301 the old forum URL's to the new ones?

Thanks much!

We work with ecommerce clients specifically and many of them get duplicated content from their manufacturers. I've heard of people using the turk to outsource product re writing and am wondering if anyone here has had success?

Do you just get all the product descriptions re written and delivered in a CSV for uploading or have any of you developed a more automated approach?

How is the content quality been?

Thanks much!

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

Curious if anyone has had success ranking multiple sites with same whois and server info? We have a client who has purchased multiple businesses over the years in the same industry.

Each site has a solid amount of link popularity already and good respected Brand. But I'm wondering with the whois info being the same and the same servers, if ranking for multiple domains will be worth attempting.

In the past Matt Cutts has said to nofollow links to pages you don't want to rank in the SERPS. Such as a privacy policy, login page, contact us page.  I believe Google likes to see a privacy policy but you don't need the link followed in order to get credit for it.

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.

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.

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.

Can you post some examples of this? You may be able to fix this with canonical tags, see SEOmoz post here

That will give Google one main URL for both pages. Not sure how that works within Drupal interface 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.

Thanks guys, what about that javascript drop down (view all departments). Should I make those noindex-nofollow?

Thanks yes, that is the point of what I'm trying to accomplish. We want to maintain more of the link juice that the home page has. However, not sure which of the elements on our site should be tweeked. We have a javascript drop down, the left side navigation, and all the products and tabs on the center of the home page. I think the javascript drop down is being crawled and counted still but not sure.

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.

Is there keyword cannibalization between the home page and the intended page for that keyword? Meaning are you referencing the same keyword in title tags, content, etc?  Its possible the home page always was on page 10 for that keyword but you're only noticing it now that the other page has dissapeared from the rankings.

What kind of link building did you do?

Our home page (and 1400 of our other pages) have well over 100 links, going beyond the recommend amount.  Our competitors have less on page links (to other pages on their site) and way more link popularity so we are trying to figure out the best solution for this without hurting our sites conversions and usbaility.

What would be the best way to go about this?

A site just put a blog on http://blog.domain.com/

Should there be a separate XML Sitemap for that particular subdomain or should the original XML Sitemap for the main domain be sufficient?

Looking forward to your responses.

Thanks

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.

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.

What are the best windows hosting companies for SEO?

We would prefer to have the following environment:WINDOWS based server, using the IIS7 webserver, running Classic ASP  (not ASP.net!!)

They must allow 301 Redirects (sitewide non-www to www and specific urls)

I usually use linux based hosting so I am a little new to Windows hosting.

Looking for a little help.

Thanks,

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.

Does anyone know of any guest blogging websites that offer a good (white hat) service?

We're looking for websites that website owners may subscribe to that actually are pursuing guest bloggers to post on their site.

We're looking for white-hat only websites.

Thanks,