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Hey John, no, you answered correctly, and I agree with you. However, I only agree with that scenario when, like you said, it involves geographically based service industries such as a hair dresser, plummer, etc.

In our case, it involves a product that is not geographically restricted. Our page is the only page of the Google top 10 that has unique content describing that product. And we are the only page that has more than one or two root domains linking directly to that product page.

And in the case of the results when I changed to Chicago, the website that did come up #1 was based in California.

Basically, I'm just not understanding how it works, or what the best strategy to employ would be for an eCommerce web site.

Hey, I was just noticing that we achieve #2 ranking on Google for one of our customers for one of their primary keyword phrases. But then I noticed the traffic analytics were not matching what we should expect from that keyword phrase.

Then I noticed, in using "Chrome's Incognito Window", that our location was automatically selected for our main geographical city area.

I then went and changed that location from Denver, to San Diego & Also Chicago, just to see what would happen, and I noticed we instantly dropped from #2 to #7 when changing our location.

I don't know what my question is, but I guess I feel like that is preventing us from achieving the results we need to sell ecommerce products. Is there any info on this or suggestions anyone has on how to tackle this issue?

It feels like Google is pulling the rug out from underneath our feet and trying to spread rankings more to localized areas, rather than offering someone the opportunity to capitalize on good rankings for a national audience. I understand why they would do it, and I don't say I disagree. But it just seems to affect our work as SEO's doesn't it? Since we can't be as effective for customers that have a global audience instead of strictly a localized one.

I'm curious to see what people have to say about this issue. Thanks!

Hello MozPeeps! I wanted to see if I could get some help on the best method for troubleshooting our abandoned shopping cart funnel. Maybe point me in the best areas to research, or what are the best tools to use, or an improved method for analyzing and interpreting the existing data for more clarity about what is happening.

I have attached the screen shot that shows what's going on. This account is using a Magento shopping cart with a custom built checkout page that is trying to copy Overstock.com's checkout page.

Here are my thoughts:

1. Use Clicktale to monitor the checkout pages in question to try and get a feel for what people are doing or why they are clicking off?

2. Use another tool (not sure which one) that allows us to monitor page load speeds for the checkout process to see if orders are being hung up by slow loading pages.

3. Or, maybe 62% is not an uncommon abandoned cart rate and therefore we should just focus on automating abandoned cart follow up emails for the customers.

Thanks in advance for any help!

funnel-goal-visualization.jpg

Yeah, we have Adobe Premiere CS3. Do you think that would be a better idea? Add a watermark and intro/outro with our website address on it, and then publish it on YouTube, Vimeo, etc in addition to on our blog?

Our would there be more power/benefit to focusing strictly on link generation towards that page?

I wanted to find out if anyone could recommend the best technique for protecting a video on a website. We have been able to secure a private interview with one of the largest manufacturers in this customers industry. Unfortunately the interview was done impromptu with an iphone, but the recording is not too bad. The volume is low, but we will also type out the content of the interview on our blog, right beneath where the video is posted for viewing.

We were hoping to only post this video on our blog, so that people within our industry will link to that page, increasing our link power. But we wanted to make sure that people couldn't steal the video and post it in other places to avoid giving us our link.

What is the best method for accomplishing this?

What video format would be ideal to hopefully accommodate windows, mac, IE, Firefox, Safari, mobile phones, ipads etc.?

Are we on the right track on how to most effectively use this video for our own benefit?

Your link is broken base.

Thanks Daniel. The link/ranking competition for these individual category product pages is very low, so it might be very beneficial to have a handful of links pointing to each product specifically. I know that if you have 2 or more links pointing to the same page, Google only counts the first link. I wasn't sure how Google responded when you had multiple links to multiple pages.

Hey, I have an opportunity to get listed in a themed directory page, that has a high mozRank of 4+ and a high mozTrust of 5+.

Would it be better to just have one link from that page going to one of my internal product category pages, or take advantage of the 'sitelinks' they offer, that allows me to have an additional 5 anchor text links to 5 other pages?

I've attached an example.

sitelinks.jpg

I would first ask if the links you have obtained have been indexed yet by Google. Being on TechCrunch, I assume they have already been indexed. I have read here at SEOMoz that Google takes into account how long a link has been around. But that could be controversial, especially when Google is taking into account breaking news ranking algorithms such as what is hot on Facebook, Twitter, etc.

Another thought is whether or not your site has been continuously getting "a bunch of links" and that is your sites typical MO, but if not, Google might not like the big rush of links and have raised some flags about the sudden boost. To answer your question, no, I don't have an answer. But those are some things to think about while you troubleshoot the situation.

I would optimize your product pages for Google, and you don't have to be worried about what Google is posting based off of your feeds.

I am not 100% sure on this, but I believe Google will sometimes pull the lowest priced and/or the most frequently updated product feeds. Otherwise they tend to group the product from 8-20 stores or whatever. Your product descriptions get updated when they get changed within your feed. It is best to have your feed get automatically pulled by Google every day, then Google will give you a boost in rankings because your information is among the freshest and most accurate.

These are just opinions based on experience however, I have no data to back it up really. Check out this qa post here: http://www.seomoz.org/q/does-anyone-have-any-tips-for-optimizing-your-google-product-feeds

Thanks Paul, good stuff!

I personally believe that it takes a lot of work to keep up with regular blog posts. Especially if you have a lot of product pages you want to build links too. In addition, you will need to build links to your blog, in order for the links from your blog to be worth while.

I still believe having a blog for your website is a good idea. I would follow the advice of EGOL posted here: http://www.seomoz.org/q/blog-content-practices-for-e-commerce-sites

And I would give consideration to another great post that simplifies some good link building methods here: http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/10-ways-to-link-build-for-free

It does help, thank you Rand. I wonder if you participate enough to qualify for the free membership because of your contributions. Wouldn't that be great if you didn't have to pay for pro? lol jk

Would it be considered buying links if you asked your Facebook fan base to share a specific product page, and by doing so they will be entered to win a drawing? How would Google look at this? And could we expect a significant increase in rankings as a result? Or would it just be a temporary "what's trending?" boost you think?

Hey everyone, I am wondering if there is a way to confirm or reinforce what am i seeing on a webpage using the Moz Toolbar? When I go to this website here: abilogic.com they have a high page/domain trust rank. However, when I filter down to the niche category I would be interested in submitting too abilogic.com/dir/Home/Gardens/ - Then everything, including PageRank, drops to zero.

The question I have, is I am not sure if this is really just a poorly constructed and untrustworthy page as identified in the Moz Toolbar. Or is it possible that these page categories have recently been redeveloped or something like that, and that's why the deeper pages are not showing any benefits?

Thanks for any help or tips!

I am currently debating the cost vs value of one of our business.com links. It's $300 per year, and our page we are on has a mozRank of 2.37 and mozTrust of 5.36 for the category we are in. However, every link on that page, except for 3 (including ours) is no followed. Essentially we only have to share the link juice with 2 other companies. I'm just not sure that it's still worth the $300 though with such a low mozRank. Anyone else have any thoughts on that?

Thanks for all the help everyone! It appears that those supposed 'phantom clicks' are a result of our product listings being added to the campaigns, and those don't get tracked as individual keyword clicks. Here is the exact response I got back from Google for future reference:

"Having reviewed your account, we can see that you have successfully setup
product listing ads for your campaigns. So, the missing clicks are from
the product listing ads. Please note that the keywords do not record any
clicks for product listing ads.

Instead, to view the statistics of the product listing ads, please select
desired campaign and click on 'Auto Targets' tab found beside Ad
Extensions in the central menu bar. This will give you performance
statistics for your product ads."

Yeah, it could be. Thanks for the response. We are now up to 32 phantom clicks for a total cost of $26

This test campaign is for all states outside of the one we reside in, so we have not attached this specific campaign to our places account.

Thanks Mark, good thoughts. However, I haven't made any changes to the keywords, match types or the ads of this campaign. I did edit the campaign settings late last night, which if tracked by East coast time, it may have been search results from Google's search network maybe, but I still think the keywords would have been identified regarding which ones brought in the clicks.

The clicks are now up to 9 clicks, but still no credited clicks to the keyword phrases. However, I don't know how new this is, but I just noticed that the clicks are now 'accredited by the Media Rating Council', which could mean clicks are coming through, they are just not being considered legitimate and 'chargeable', so maybe that's why they are not being shown or deducted from ad spend. Article is here: https://adwords.google.com/support/aw/bin/answer.py?hl=en&ctx=tltp&answer=153707

Yeah, I read that, didn't agree with it though. That's the danger of depending too much on forum members for answers to your SEO questions. It's like going to Web Pro World or something. You'll get completely opposite answers depending on the day.

I think that duplicating the title tag and the H1 tag seek to maintain continuity and continued thought process in the mind of the consumer. I think subtle differences are ok and they make sense, but I do not think there is any danger in doing so whatsoever.

Ok, I posted two images showing that my Google Adwords search settings are to receive clicks only from google's search engine, as we are doing testing on keyword behavior with a few specific keywords.

The second image will show that we have somehow 7 total search clicks, but not for any of our specific keywords.

I'm confused. . . and hungry. . . I'm 'confungry'. jk any thoughts are welcomed.

search-1.jpg search-2.jpg

If your Internet marketing budget is low, and your keyword niche has weak to moderate competition, you can still top the rankings by following plenty of the advice here at SEOMoz without the need to purchase a Yahoo directory listing for $299 per year in my opinion.

By the way, fantastic information EGOL. You make it very easy to break down what sort of content is best to put on a blog post. Thumbs up for sure!

Reference this SEOMoz post here: Great Content for SEO - Once you find out exactly what content your customers need to have before making a purchase, then you make sure your product pages provide that on your pages. I would suggest providing the same content in possibly a different format for your blog posts, as well as any additional user-valued fluff content, and then provide the blog post with a call to action directing them to the product purchase page.

Thanks a ton EGOL, I have been looking around for more info on this subject for quite a while. What are your thoughts on how to create the links? Is it considered black hat tactics to place invisible links in those pdf's? My thinking here is that I know competitors will start stealing our pdf documents to use for their own websites. I was thinking of placing invisible links on some key phrases that link to product pages, and then when competitors upload our pdf's to their site, we get backlinks from their websites. Does that make sense, and does it seem like a viable strategy or a potentially penalizing one?

Thank you everyone for the help. I feel confident that we can just continue on like we are, and if I notice any issues, then I can try your suggestions of the keyword order and also following the examples of that blog post. Thanks again!

Thanks for the response EGOL. Right now we have 3 different brands of digital ballasts. We have our main digital ballasts category, then we have NextGen, Phantom & Lumatek digital ballasts, and each of those all have the NextGen 400w digital ballast, the Phantom 400W digital ballast, the Lumatek 400w digital ballast, also for 600w and 1000w.

Where I get confused, the example of the on page optimization states that if you are trying to rank for elephants, then you can use "baby elephants" as a different page. Isn't this what I'm essentially doing then? I have digital ballasts, but then they are also broken down into 400w digital ballasts, 600w digital ballasts, NexttGen 400w digital ballasts, Lumatek 1000w digital ballasts, etc.

Right now I have an E-Commerce website that has layered menu properties. I have one page trying to rank for "NextGen Digital Ballast" that is the main category page. However, on that category page I link out to three product pages which would be "NextGen 400W Digital Ballast", "NextGen 600W Digital Ballast" and "NextGen 1000W Digital Ballast". The on page ranking factors tools is saying I may need to consider making adjustments because of the potential self-cannibalization, but I wanted to get some feedback to see what others thought about that. Thanks.

Thank you very much. We'll give that a shot and see how it goes. What started us tinkering with the robots file in the first place is that Bing Shopping told us it couldn't crawl our product images. Plus, our pdf files for product specs and manuals are all listed within the media folder. Do you have a suggestion for this? I would think we would get rid of "Disallow: /media/" and replace it with the following (what do you think?):

Disallow: /media/aitmanufacturers/
Disallow: /media/bigtom_media/
Disallow: /media/css/
Disallow: /media/downloadable/
Disallow: /media/easybanner/
Disallow: /media/geoip/
Disallow: /media/icons/
Disallow: /media/import/
Disallow: /media/js/
Disallow: /media/productsfeed/
Disallow: /media/sales/
Disallow: /media/tmp/
Disallow: /media/UPS/

Hello, I am having difficulty getting my robots.txt file to be configured properly. I am getting error emails from Google products stating they can't view our products because they are being blocked, and this past week, in my SEO dashboard, the URL's receiving search traffic dropped by almost 40%.

Is there anyone that can offer assistance on a good template robots.txt file I can use for a Magento eCommerce website?

The one I am currently using was found at this site here: e-commercewebdesign.co.uk/blog/magento-seo/magento-robots-txt-seo.php - However, I am getting problems from Google now because of it.

I searched and found this thread here: http://www.magentocommerce.com/wiki/multi-store_set_up/multiple_website_setup_with_different_document_roots#the_root_folder_robots.txt_file - But I felt like maybe I should get some additional help on properly configuring a robots for a Magento site.

Thanks in advance for any help. Please, let me know if you need more info to provide assistance.

Here is the data on the other listing we did. Top listing for the other search term location. These places results also actually have that "* loc:" listing in it as well as you will see. This second listing received less impressions, but more actions.

I just still can't decipher how a top tier spot for a second location was obtained without any FTP access to the website. Thanks for the help everyone, if anyone has more info after seeing this additional info, feel free to chime in

places-1.jpg places-2.jpg

Hello, we have been working with this customer for a few years, doing their PPC, organic marketing, and we had established one google places listing for them as well. I guess the owner got sold on having someone else work with us to do google places for an additional office location they recently set up, and for whatever reason, they bypassed having us do it. This company never gained FTP access to the website. And despite heavy competition (apparantly), they have that new location listed in the #1 - A spot, without making any changes to the website.

And, to top it off, when you review the Google places performance, there is a weird result I had never before seen labeled as "* loc:". You can see what I'm talking in both screen shots.

Is there any guidance you can offer, first as to what that listing label means, and second, do you have any ideas how to 'reverse engineer' how they were able to get top listing so quickly for our customer like that?

local_results.jpg local_analytics.jpg

Hello Everyone, I thought I would update this question with a few more specifics of what I did based on David's suggestions and also some other key elements to consider that David notified me of through private message. This way, if anyone else stumbles across this post in the future, it might provide a little bit more insight.

What we did is we added the suffix to our feed URL. Instead of submitting the product URL http://www.domain.com/my-product.html, we now have the following for each feed:

Google Products:
http://www.domain.com/my-product.html?utm_source=google&utm_source=products

Bing Shopping
http://www.domain.com/my-product.html?utm_source=bing&utm_source=products

*Important - One of my concerns with adding these custom URL parameters was the duplicate content issue. As I was researching and trying to find out if this would eventually be counter productive to our site's SEO, David was kind enough to follow up with a private message, reminding me to make sure and go to Google Webmaster Tools>Site Configuration>Settings>Parameter Handling - And have Google ignore my new custom parameters so that it doesn't treat them as duplicate content.

I still have a question about this, as I want to make sure I get this right. if anyone can chime in and clear up the remaining question, it would be helpful. Otherwise, when I find my answers, I'll try to post them back here for more precise help on this topic.

1.) I am not a programmer, so this is not common knowledge to me. But would the parameters I list in Google's Webmaster Tool parameter handling be the following? And I should tell Google to ignore them right? Rather than letting Google decide?
          A.) utm_source
          B.) utm_medium

Thanks for the tip David! Hopefully we can figure out how to work something like this in for ourselves as well. I was just hoping there was an obvious way through analytics or something like that to identify them, but I suppose we can attempt to duplicate your suggestion for ourselves. thanks again!

Is there a way to track Google & Bing Shopping referrals independent of standard Google/Bing tracking? It would be nice if we could see the difference between Google PPC, Google Organic & Google Shopping.

I notice in analytics that we get some traffic from  google/ppc, some from google/organic, some from google.com/referral (not sure what this is), and some from googlebase/cse (I know this is Google shopping, but I don't think it's tracking all shopping referral visits as this).