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In my experience, A/B testing for content placement yields different results for different products/languages/seasons. So many variables, I'd just use those resources for more valuable content testing.

Are your buyer guides downloadable or HTML? For downloadable guides, I'd have a thin content block above the fold on category pages right above the products. Another effective spot would be a taller block above the fold in the sidebar on the same category pages. If your guides are a really big deal, have a content block on your homepage introducing these new guides and then link internally on where to get/view them.

Whether you're hosting downloadable or HTML guides, I'd still have links to them on your blog. But without more details on your site, I can only offer this general advice but feel free to update us.

Hi Gregster. I feel your pain. Having worked on Magento for the past three years, I've come across a lot of "issues" you'd expect a top-tier e-commerce solution provider to have under control.

I've written about getting canonical URLs in CMS pages here, something that many Magento SEO extensions don't do. I also had a custom SEO extension created and would be happy to share with you. No cost. Just use it.

I don't know if you have multiple languages, but that alone will create an exponential amount of duplicate content from dynamic parameters. Go into your WMT and set those parameters to be ignored. If you aren't sure how to do that, it's well documented here and on Google, Yahoo, and Bing webmaster sites.

I recommend you nofollow the login, search, and cart pages through XML layout. That will cross off another 500 pages or so.

One last mention is that RocketTheme has created a pretty neat extension that will get rid of the p parameter altogether by using JS to switch from grid and list views. Or you could just select in your admin to only allow either grid or list instead of both.

Any more questions just ask.

I watched a few SEOmoz webinars and Rand Fishkin mentions a bit about keyword vectors, which were explained to be a matrix of sorts that groups keywords with related words. The example given was a key word snowboard is associated with mountain, snow, cabin, etc., so I'm sure Facade and Façade are closely associated, but they're apparently treated as different terms when it comes to search results--just try searching for both Facade and Façade separately (and together) and you'll get different results. I'd venture to guess that versions of words like cafe and café, resume and résumé are prioritized by location and local language, but I'll need someone to confirm that.

I write copy in Chinese and English, but since I am not a native Chinese speaker, I creatively include all versions of questionable terms in anchor text and the content body at least once. To find the variation of the term I want to use consistently, I first check the local dictionary, ask my target audience, and then do a search of all variations in different search engines to decide where I want to rank highest. I've been happy with the long term results.

Check out my Moz comments here for this question: http://moz.com/community/q/http-vs-https-which-is-better-for-seo-usability

Hi Paul,

I actually came here looking for the same info. I'm half way into my 30-day trial, and I have to admit I'm pretty impressed. I get prospect e-mails with the company name, location, pageviews, and referrer of the visitor. That would allow me to send marketing materials to that visitor knowing how they got to my site and what they were looking for. Really cool!

There are a lot of other great tools, like scheduling posts on social media sites (think Hootsuite), form builder (think Wufoo), a simple CRM (think Highrise), keyword analytics (geographically limited and not nearly as detailed as SEOmoz), other SEO tools for content and blogging, and the most awesome feature which is e-mail marketing automation (think Salesforce.com workflow for e-mail). This e-mail automation allows you to set up a flow to "nurture" leads into customers, so if a certain link is clicked or customer information is entered on a certain form or landing page, Hubspot knows and starts sending the e-mails you have created on the schedule you set up for that specific call-to-action. Point is to send pertinent information to leads base on their activity on your site. Now, for a niche business like American BBQ catering in Taiwan, this is really cool. It's probably not so useful for standard e-commerce sites or low-cost, high-volume businesses.

On the down side, and I mean really down side, is the native content management system. Sorry Hubspot, is just sucks. Just a little bit more love on that side and there wouldn't be too many services that could compete. And pricing is an issue for us. The version that would allow me to use the Hubspot API on an external site is over $8K a year, which even if my lead conversion increased 32% (the number they boast), then I'm paying over $200 for every new customer. Those numbers aren't very attractive to me, but they might be for you.

Great people there, great support, intuitive system, terrible CMS. But at the end of the day, the system could help you save time by merging lots of systems into one.

B+

Kevin

I always get permission from a client to represent them as a product specialist or marketing consultant, but I usually open the discussion with site owners with: "I'm Kevin from XXX." I also have a shpeel down pretty well, always communicating the same major points of the business to each site owner I approach. I'm not the overzealous type who promises some sort of grand partnership; instead I speak sincerely about my client, the business, and how they can help us. I have about 60-70% success with that.

As a note, something that fails more often than not is mentioning the word "link." You want your business shining inside well-written content, not just links. Focus on the business aspect rather than the SEO part. This SEO buzz is really out of control, and I found that more people with popular sites tend to hoard their link juice. It's a risky approach, so I recommend promoting content over link building. It's just what works for me.

Hi tahirekhanvc,

I'm a big fan of Matt Cutts, and you should be, too. Check out what he has to say about duplicate content: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2319706/Googles-Matt-Cutts-A-Little-Duplicate-Content-Wont-Hurt-Your-Rankings

I had a similar issue with a client a year or so ago. As I'm sure you know, secure pages are encrypted and need to be decrypted, which takes more time and requires more resources. And with that, speed may become an issue, and speed is a ranking factor.

A good rule of thumb is to secure pages that communicate private data, i.e. contact pages, carts, etc. If you are offering some sort of security service, or if your business model requires earning a great deal of trust from your visitors, then go secure the site. Now I'm talking about sites like https://squareup.com/ (FYI, I actually do not recommend that service but you can see the home page is secure). And that company actually takes it one step further with an EV SSL, where you can show your company name in the green bar. Go for a purpose, but not SEO in particular.

Matt went over this about the time Facebook switched to https. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4801641 Now it's up to you to make the call, but make it and stick with it. What you don't want to do is go back and forth a couple times trying to rank better thinking that this is a major problem.

I pretty much do the same for clients, but I also correct errors, add more headings where appropriate, add bold text subtitles (basically follow the SEOmoz guide). I also go social. I recommend Hootsuite.com to manage and analyze social media campaigns. It's been noted that Google likes fresh content, so keeping active on Twitter, Facebook, forums, etc. does count. Starting a newsletter helps with inbound traffic, too.

I also take it offline. Getting the word out in mailings, ads, posters, etc. with your website address or a qr code makes things fun and does increase traffic. Hold events, participate in gatherings, join clubs, etc. to get the word out. If you have the budget and it's relevant to your business, building a mobile app for all smartphone platforms will get you an application page and inbound links to your site on very high ranking sites.

Oh there is so much more. I'll post again when I get a second wind.

Compliance with the law here isn't going to have much of an impact at all on your SEO efforts. A disclaimer in the footer would do it, but you mentioned web site, not web page. Based on that, I would just include this information in an About Us page and let that be the end of it. On the other hand, if you think the registration titles are going to be relevant keywords that visitors would use to search and find you, then you might consider posting that disclaimer on each page.

Now if by disclaimer you mean a novel-long blurb of legalese at the footer, then no. Two or three lines should do it, but do make sure that there is enough relevant content on each page to mute that disclaimer. If it accounts for more than 25% of the text on your page, I'd either create more content or move that disclaimer to your About Us page.

Hope that helps.

Interesting that many folks still think hosting videos on YouTube help with ranking. Sure, keep your visitors on your site, but more often than not, visitors prefer to watch a larger video on YouTube. They leave your site, possibly break your analytics funnels, maybe increase bounce rate, and you even have distracting ads on the videos.

I'd try something like Vzaar or host on your own server. Calculate if your bandwidth would cost anything and get all that traffic, especially if the video URL is your own domain. Add that to a video sitemap, mark it up with schema.org, and then you have something that would help you much more than pushing your video out to sites that want to earn money from people watching your branded content.

But if you still wanna do that, of course all the social media sites like Google+, Facebook, etc, then there is this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_hosting_services

My question to you is why shut down the niche site if it's ranking better than the main site? There is surely some risk of taking a short-term hit when merging these two sites, but I'm confident in suggesting that combining the traffic from the two sites will eventually earn similar organic ranking of your niche site pages for the same keywords.

Yes, 301 redirect your pages to the new domain if possible. If you run into technical challenges with this, use MOZ to see which pages rank the highest and prioritize those redirects to the main site domain.

You stated "The niche site has about 70K product pages that have the same content (except for navigation links which are similar, but not dupliated). " I understand this to mean you found 70k products with the same/similar content on both the main site and niche site. If you simply ran a report that told you you had 70k product pages with duplicate content, I'd make sure to check your URL structure for www subdomain, trailing slashes, and the variation of both, i.e., www.domain.com/product, www.domain.com/product/, domain.com/product, domain.com/product/. These are technically all different URLs, so double check that and reply.

If you really have the same pages, obviously you'll need to fix that if combining the two sites. If you don't combine them, cross-domain canonicalization is an option (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/12/handling-legitimate-cross-domain.html and https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1716747?hl=en).

I'm sure you've found this already but I'll post for reference: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1034324?hl=en

And you can check out some examples here: http://www.cheatography.com/jay-taylor/cheat-sheets/google-analytics-regular-expressions/

So try ^/specifictextstring/(.*)  for your  ^/specifictextstring/anytextstring/anytextstring/

Keywords related to these areas of law are very competitive, and technical SEO advice will only get you so far. Josh has got the right idea of publishing at least three separate pages that specify and detail each area of expertise. I wouldn't go too crazy with internal linking, but a similar format to squarespace dot com for each page will allow you to get quite a bit of important information to your potential clients. You can link each section title to more pages, but remember not to canalize link juice by trying to rank two or more pages for the same key words.

I'm going to go out on a limb here only because I've seen it work really well for another client. You're no doubt going to need to embark on major link building campaigns and advertising to direct as much traffic to your site as possible. Now, a legal advice forum might help you out in this department. Having users generate content and lawyers answer these questions will drive more legitimate traffic to your site. And this content will be rich with key words related to your firm, even some you haven't thought of yourself. Of course, you'll need to consult with someone on the best solution for your company, but the forum should be on your own domain and not hosted somewhere else unless that association will benefit your ranking. Start a blog as well with great content for potential clients.

Also get on HARO as there are always reporters looking for professional legal sources. Linkmosses is a great link building newsletter. Get on directories, social media, all that. I imagine you're busy, so you'd be best to find someone or some company to do this for you.

P.S. Remember that your goal is conversions, turning leads into paying clients. Make sure you web site has some sort of web-to-lead form and call to action.

Hope I helped a little.

The best way to manually test your pages is to view the page source and search for your key words. Google has commented on how it handles synonyms and related terms here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NpnnXt7CHMU, so the take away is to use the key words that get you the best traffic from search results.

About stuffing in general, I'd go over your copy to make sure it reads well. If, by chance, your site is reviewed by a human and it reads in a spammy sort of way, then you might get some bad marks. Feel free to share a link to the page in question to get better feedback.

And an additional two cents (for free of course). Your subject matter is commonly associated with a large volume of spam, so I'd be posting medically qualified articles for relevant treatments and procedures. Well researched material with references and sources will help much more than short excerpts about your services and satisfied clients. Rich, informative content will attract more potential clients, as well as search engines.

Hi Justin. Most search engines take into account your physical location when displaying results. If you are physically in NZ and search for your high ranking keywords, you will more than likely get the NZ site. If you have access to a server in the USA and run the same search, chances are you'll get the .com site. Likewise, if you're in AU then the .au site "should" show higher in the search results. Google has made it very clear here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ce9jv91beQ that just because a site ranks well in one language doesn't mean it'll rank well for a translated site or language-specific subdomain.

Other than that, your biggest issue is that you have very little content for search engines to consider. Google used to recommend about 250 words of relevant content, but these days I'm seeing longer articles rank much better. Your site performance could also be better, so I recommend a read on YSlow scores and how certain front-end optimizations might speed up your site.

But you should have already know what we were going to tell you. Your psychics should have told you! LOL

Cheers!

Haven't read anything or experimented with using canonical link elements to indicate your preferred domain. You should have server redirects in your Apache/Nginx config file for this and also set the preferred domain in GWT to really take care of that issue.

Yes, Google will certainly decide for you if you don't have other indicators on which site you want to rank for select keywords. I suppose you'll need to decide which site to keep, but if you want both then you've got a lot of work ahead of you. Ideally, you should be ranking each product page on each site for unique keywords rather than duplicating efforts and wasting resources on trying to rank the same product page on two different sites for the same keywords. Not sure why anyone would want to do that for any other reason than testing.

Anyway, my strong advice is pick a site and then merge the other site into it. If you're using Magento or WooCommerce or some other mainstream e-com platform, this should be rather easy, if not just time consuming. If they are different platforms, then I recommend Magento or a custom solution for best technical SEO features. If you can share more details about your job, I'd be glad to help.

If I understand correctly, you're ranking well for a page and related keywords but you'll be adding new "news" content related to the title page topic. Sounds good to me. I'd make sure to note my changefreq in the sitemap to hourly or daily. While I'd expect you to continue to rank well for your static content, there are other factors to consider in a "redesigned" page. For example, how your new HTML code is structured; the order of content displayed to search engines (source code); how much of the original content you keep above the fold; relevance of your news to your current keyword(s); the number and quality of links added to this page; change in the amount of traffic to this page; and of course all the other technical and editorial SEO factors. Only thought about this for a few minutes but I'll post back if I think of anything else.

I'm a little confused about the redirect you want to implement. Are you unable to just replace the original page or use the original page URL? Note that permanent redirects tend not to pass 100% of your link juice http://moz.com/learn/seo/redirection. Try to do that, but if you can't then the redirect is likely your best option.

Well after taking a quick peek, it seems you are a directory. You should really read up on how Google treats directories, especially when it comes to SEO. I say this because after 10 random clicks on your site, I never got to a page with any content. All links, so that is very likely hurting you. Something else is the ads on your site above the fold without any content. There was big news about that late last year.

Looks like you could add quite a bit on the structure data side of things, like for people, events, companies, etc. Also, take your text out of your images and publish it in HTML so Google can read it.

Hi Claudio,

I feel your pain. Nearly every time Google updates their algorithm my site takes a hit, but it recovers a week or two later. At some point you're going to have to direct resources to other forms of promotion to Goolge-proof your business. At the end of the day, it's about making money, not getting a number from Google.

I would monitor your WMT account to see if you get any manual actions taken and keep an eye on Moz. I won't make any drastic moves so soon after this hit, but do keep up with the original content and healthy activities.

First thing to do is insert authorship markup and check that google recognizes you as an author of the site you're posting to. There is something to say for original content, and Google knows. If your content goes up first and is indexed first by Google, chance are you're going to rank better than the scrapper sites.

If these sites really bother you, you can submit a Copyright Removal form here https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/dmca-notice, but a legal order to remove the content would be better (acted upon faster). Filing copyright infringement reports for eBay listings was very effective for me, but my experience with Google is limited. Let us know if you do file and how the process goes.

Generally speaking, it's actually pretty good that site are linking to your posts. If you are extremely uncomfortable with any particular site's backlink(s), you can use the GWT Disavow tool https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487/?hl=en&authuser=1

Good luck, and let us know what you do.

Two schools on that one. They may not be hurting your business now, so you can forget about them. That's only until you can't. If they continue rip off your work, they may take from you in the future--ad revenue, traffic stats, e-commerce, news reports, whatever you're doing--that's all money. If I had time to fill out the form, I'd do it.

Hi Dimitrios,

Sorry for the confusion. There is in fact a safe way to go about this. Since your site is currently showing two different pages on the same URL (big no-no according to Matt https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GyWx31GeQWY), you can do any of the three with the following consequences:

Keep the default domain as the English language as it's been indexed by search engines as of now, and then add a /de/ subfolder for your German visitors. You won't lose any rank in the short term since you're not changing anything that search engines already see, your just adding pages. But as your 70% German users trend toward the /de/, these pages should out rank the default domain in time.

On language switch, your visitors are redirected to the homepage from any other page, so your site wouldn't take that big of a hit by keeping the default domain home page and adding two subfolders /en/ and /de/. In this case, the homepage could be either language, but since the English page has been indexed already, this would be the safest way to go for the default domain. If you're goal is to rank the German site higher under the current conditions, don't worry about the hit. Do what's best for your visitors and make German the default language.

And lastly you could cater to your German visitors by making the default domain German and adding an /en/ subfolder for English. Again, here your site has already been indexed in English and only English, so I imagine you'd take a hit in the short term as the search engines reindex, then you'd recover in time assuming your keywords are in German.

One more option I just realized you were considering was redirecting visitors to either a /en/ or /de/ without a default domain home page. Since this is the page showing on SERP results, it would be a bad idea to remove that page.

Just so you're aware, your English site shows in the German results only because it's the only site Google can see. As far as I can tell, there are no URL parameters to indicate to any search engine which version is English and which is German. Once you fix that, you might actually rank higher.

Hope I got your question right this time. I'll just add here that I run a multilingual e-commerce site in Taiwan with Chinese and English. I set the default domain to show Chinese and added an /en/ subfolder for English. Over 75% of my Chinese keywords rank #1-3 while only 20% of my English keywords rank #1-10.

Well, I can share an experience with a client of mine who, without my condonation, ran a Groupon campaign hoping to drive more customers to his restaurant but also to drive traffic to his site. He intentionally stuffed links in his Groupon description posted on Groupon. I monitored local search results for two months after he ran this campaign, and while he made out okay on his Groupon, his site traffic didn't move all that much.

I know this is different than a PR service, but I think it'd be safe to assume Google has quite a bit of information on who charges money for "descriptions" and "public relation" postings. If you really want an inbound link from this site, and assuming the domain authority is significantly high, see if there is any other way to get that particular site to post a link to your website. I'm not convinced the cost is worth a few mentions in an article that will become outdated and probably won't generate much traffic to your site.

Now if I've misunderstood your situation, please clarify and maybe I can add something to help you make a better choice on how to spend your hard earned money.

Hi Eric,

I would recommend the Yoast WordPress plugin available at http://yoast.com/wordpress/. This plugin covers pretty much all the SEO issues you'll encounter in WordPress, plus there is a handy tool that will analyze important text fields in your posts to see if your articles are optimized for the keywords you're looking to rank for. This plugin won't put heading tags in the template, but I think it's worth a look.

Another consideration for WordPress is your permalink URL structure. As of WordPress 3.1.2, there is a definite performance issue when starting the permalink structure with either the category, tag, author, or postname fields. You can read more under "Structure Tags" at http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Permalinks. I'm not sure how this affects SEO, so it'd be great to get some feedback on ranking results using different WordPress URL structures.

This is a hard one, I'm sure. In regards to search, I've read that Facebook pays close attention to verbs and that Google takes into account related words close to anchor text and search terms.

Now I have the unique opportunity to work as the internet sales and marketing consultant for a company in serious need of brand reputation repair. The company has experienced a terrible fallout from a recent product recall. Unfortunately in this case, the company site has really strong reach, which means that our blog posts, product descriptions, and twitter comments can be found copied on hundreds of websites hours after they are posted.

The most recent incident has associated our brand name with words like cheaters, scam, phoney, copycat, and other words that will certainly get filtered here. All my attempts to assure unconditional refunds and offer phone support get labeled as a desperate attempt to save the brand. No doubt, the company has issues but will surely overcome them in time.

SEO Question: Should I close the Facebook page and set strong filters on a new page to delete the onslaught of negative comments or should we spend the time to clean up the current page? This is a difficult decision, as I know many companies like Hubspot, Mailchimp, and Rackspace actually look at Facebook pages to qualify business leads (no fans, go home).

Damage control suggestions also welcome, but the crux of this issue here is how our brand name and product names will be associated with cuss words or negative terms and how this will affect our ranking in SERPs.

I'm going to take a stab at this one and try to stay as unbiased as possible. First thing to consider here is if those sites hosting these profile pages have noteworthy domain authority. I'm not sure how many reputable sites really allow link juice to flow in profile pages as you mentioned, but if this is the case, then it's reasonable to assume this link will count as a followed linking root domain. This has, indeed, been noted as one of the most important factors in search ranking, but there are other forces at work that limit the benefit of this kind of inbound linking technique. I wouldn't call this black hat per se, put I wouldn't focus my efforts on chasing this competitor on these sites either.

Watch some webinars here and you'll learn that links that never get clicked aren't contributing a lot to your ranking or the linking site's domain authority. And a sudden massive increase in linking root domains without an increase in traffic raises red flags that someone is trying to manipulate the system, ie. engaging in black hat SEO activities. Also note that Google loves fresh content, so I'd rest easy knowing that these links will go stale at some point in the near future, especially with no good copy to entice visitors to click the link.

So instead of worrying about your competitors who are focused on short term rankings, write some good articles about your products and services and start getting the word out; build trust and extend your brand. There is so much more you can focus on that will get people to visit your site and spend money, which is the whole point of having your Internet business. So I would try not to worry about cheaters. Even if these competitors are ranking higher for the time being, I'm willing to bet they are probably not putting much energy into selling.

Glad you asked! A great way to do this is to follow the internet citation standards in your industry (simple search will get  you nice results) and then include structured markup (microdata) http://schema.org/MedicalScholarlyArticle

As for links, search engines look at the hypertext inside the link element (the text in-between the <a>text</a>) and attributes like title, rel, etc. So try something like:

<a <span="">id="source" rel="external" href="http://link/to/your/source" title="title of your source">Your source title or key word</a>

Thanks for the posts everybody. Confirming that I've done everything I have influence over, I guess that settles it. I just tried searching for more on this after reading Matt Cutts, Eric Ward, Joost de Valk, and others SEO pros share different info.

On to other SEO issues. Awesome to be back at SEOmoz guys!

Thanks Tyler. We're committed to Magento. I was inquiring about the SEO effectiveness of the Ultimento template in particular. It's up there at around $600, but if it saves us a complete redesign of an entire Magento theme, then it'll be well worth it. I'd just hate to get involved with this only to find that we still have to work throughout the code changing heading tags, removing extra span tags, inserting XML modifications to add metadata, and all that jazz. If you don't tool with Magento, you probably won't get what I'm jabbin about, but that's ok. Magento is a beast, we're just looking to maximize our SEO dollars in the least amount of time.

Kevin

The only issue I see here is that you said "clients." Are these clients of yours all hosted on the same server with the same IP? Google does take this into account, notably to punish server farms and the like. I'm not exactly sure what levels of cross-linking will count for or against you, but I imagine these sites are relatively small with low domain authority so it shouldn't be an issue.

I might consider posting the doctor's articles on reputable medical sites and then link your clients' sites to articles on these bigger sites with higher domain authority. Try to get your wine articles on other wine related sites as well. You can also try using Zemanta to help with getting more people to link to this content.

And do you have Google+ account with verified authorship? You need to do that and add the sites you've published to, then add your rel="author" to your name.

Use the Google Rich Snippet Testing tool http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets

Your snippets are showing fine, but you should mark up your reviews section. Also best not to mix schemas.

Matt Cutts has posted a few videos about duplicate content and the take away is that it won't hurt you unless it's spammy. A legit e-commerce site shouldn't be negatively impacted by duplicate content issues.

If you're worried about it, why not have only one product page for these products and then just have color chooser that page? This way you'll only have one product page and a lot less duplicate content.

Funny I just looked this up today trying to help someone here. Basically, you're adding a backlink to your site and I can't find any information to get you a solid answer. In general, you need to consider any link's relevance, reputation, and trust. so if a backlink isn't relevant to the site, will it get flagged as an ad? Might webmaster backlinks be considered paid links?

I did find this Matt Cutts video on footer links https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0fgh5RIHdE and it seems Google can weigh footer links and editorial links differently, and I think that's your answer. But I also came across this article http://blog.ahrefs.com/matt-cutts-says-google-cracking-bloggers-bribed-links/ that's says Google is basically cracking down on the kind of links you're describing.

But at the end of the day, are you getting a significant CTR from these links? If that's the case, nofollow those links and perhaps Google might actually counts them more. Who really knows?

It would surely be helpful to post the HTML so we can see what's going on. W3Schools has a great tutorial here http://www.w3schools.com/svg/default.asp. If your title tag is properly embedded with the svg element, everything will be fine. From what you posted here, it seems you're afraid search engines will confuse the svg title with the page title. That won't happen if your HTML is correct. Post it here and I'll take a look.

Looks like you're using mcroformat, opengraph, and microdata. Google promotes Schema.org so you should use that.

Also, get a Google+ account and establish authorship, then include that, too.

The fist thing to look at is to see if the template/plugin/page is published. If so, I'd check if your CloudFlare cache. Read up on how to purge the cache here https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/200169246. This is most likely your problem. If this doesn't help, I'd use dev mode on Cloudflare and start checking caching plugins and memcache.

It's also helpful to rename your new images, i.e., Web-Header-New.jpg to Web-Header-New-2.jpg, so you're not overwriting the previous image that was already cached. You'd have to wait for the cache to expire for a new image to show if the names are the same.

Redirects usually don't pass all link juice to the target URL but may in time. You won't get accurate reports on the www version of your site because it's redirecting to the non-www URL, so use this primary URL when running reports with SEO tools. Regarding the number of links, you may find that people generally link to the www version just by habit, and that's why I personally still use this as my primary for most projects.

Another thing to do is check Google WMT to make sure both www and non-www properties are listed. You'll then be able to select the preferred domain in site settings.

You didn't ask but I'd strongly suggest you go over some PageSpeed and YSlow recommendation. It's very slow and JS heavy, and this is simply bad for all the reasons you already know.

After comparing your links, I see that there are a few parameters that your ticketing platform added to the end of the URLs, like ReturnURL and CntPageID. You can go into your Google and Bing Webmaster Tools, and Yahoo Site Explorer as well, and tell these search engines to ignore those parameters on all URLs of your site. I'd also recommend canonical URLs if you have the option in your ticketing system. Now I'm not sure whether or not those parameter handling settings will be sent to SEOmoz when linking to Google WMT. Anybody?

Coinidentally, I just touched on that today here http://moz.com/community/q/duplicate-title-tags-how-to-solve-that

I would go the way of subfolder over subdomain. There is a lot of info out there, but the crux of it comes down to all traffic improving domain rank for a single TLD. If you go the route of ccTLDs instead of subfolders, then you're spitting that rank among those domains. What circumstances would prevent you from concentrate all link juice to one domain? Then that duplicate content issue you're fearing becomes a nonissue.

Hi Thomas,

While just a bit off-topic, I was curious about your Hubspot experience. While I'm seeing great performance from my current application set up, I've been eyeing Hubspot for some time now, but I just can't justify the cost. Does Hubspot allow you to do anything to increase conversions that couldn't be done with Wordpress? Any thoughts, please do share.

Thanks!

The only addition to Richard's comments would be to keep domains short and add keywords as appropriate. A single "About Us" page, XYZ.com/about-us, would be preferable to four different pages, i.e., XYZ.com/auto-detailing/about-us, XYZ.com/auto-sales/about-us, etc.

You might want to check Google page policy about having multiple pages for the same business. That might have consequences.

The biggest concern I would have as a business here is site visitors going to the wrong physical location because the website wasn't clear. That would really upset visitors, so this company should have SOPs in place in case this happens to minimize complaints. You'd be right to emphasize this in your site design suggestions.

Your settings in Google supplements existing information, so setting a geographic target won't impact your appearance in search results unless a user limits the scope of the search to a certain country. Do you have a top level domain or a country specific domain? That will also single to Google where to list your site in search results. Lots of info at http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=62399 Hope this helps!

Oh man, multilingual Wordpress. Just got through with one and bounced through a few plugins. I finally settled on mQtranslate. Still, with the template that was chosen by the client, there was a lot to work getting all that squared away. There are usually settings in these plugins for pages and posts in each language to either skip missing translations or show the untranslated version. While you're probably safe from duplicate content because of the doc type lang declaration, it's still not a great user experience.

As far as domains are concerned, I'd definitely go with subfolders over subdomains simply because search engines will see all languages as a single site and not split rank between subdomains. Matt Cutts also recommends this approach if it's a technically viable option, but you can use alternate tags, lang tags, and other canonicalization methods to ensure both visitors and search engines get to where they want to be on your site.

One option you might want to consider is running a Wordpress Multisite with subfolders, one for each language. This keeps Wordpress content in different languages completely, absolutely separate and avoids the problems with plugins.

Hope this helps.

Magento Wordpress installs are my specialty. From a marketing perspective, a blog will definitely be helpful for your visitors seeking relevant info. Most clients I set up tend to neglect their blog, so make sure to approach this with a plan. From the feedback I've collected from customers and clients, a consistent brand image tends to build more trust.

From a technical perspective, there are several ways to integrate Wordpress and Magetno. Fishpig http://fishpig.co.uk/magento/wordpress-integration/ will take a lot of work out of the project if you select to run Wordpress "inside" Magento. This extension basically uses your Magento template and puts Wordpress content into Magento, but you administer Wordpress through the traditional back end. If you have multiple languages/blogs, this gets a bit tricky. You can visit www.88k.com.tw for my site example running a Wordpress multi-site inside a multi-store Magento instance on a custom LEMP stack.

Anyway, to answer your question, a blog would be good if done right. Be careful not to cannibalize other site pages by adding the same keywords, and also make sure to link related blog posts to products. I personally agree with you--the purpose of your blog should be to inform visitors, not to sell. However, consistency is good, too. If you want to sell on your blog, there's nothing wrong with that, as long as you have a good plan.

From the example you've given, it appears you're targeting local, long tail keywords. From my experience, you certianly stand a good chance of outranking the competition, and here's a activity you can try to show you exactly how difficult it would be.

Login to your Google Adwords account and create a campaign and adword group with some of your long tail keywords. Then create and ad and let Google calculate how much it would cost you for your Google ad to rank #1. If you can afford a month of adwords, let it run and see if the ROI makes sense. You might find that your keywords for your ad might not even be eligible to show because they're associated with very little search traffic.

Just a suggestion here, but there really is no way to tell how much work it would take for you to out rank your competition. If you do outrank them at some point, they might boost their own efforts to pull ahead. It just never stops...

If you do choose to keep the www, make sure you have redirects in place so when a user doesn't enter the www, he or she will get to your home page. Just FYI, www.domain.com is a subdomain of domain.com, so if your site can be access through both, search engines view these as two different pages and possibly split rankings.

That's a tough one without more to go on. Google releases updates to it's ranking algorithm every so often and some site get hit hard. If you're content hasn't changed and you haven't engaged in any unusual activity in terms of link building or advertising, then I'd say wait it out. Give it a week or two, which is how long it's taken many other quality sites to bounce back from a Google update. Unlikely you'll have issues here, but you still might want to check your webmaster tools to see if any manual actions have been applied.

This might be a good time to go over your site, again, for the first time;-) See what could be done to answer visitor questions and lead them to the right pages.

Since your using Volusion, you'll need to check their documentation and contact their support to see what can be done. You can certainly add parameters and tell GWT how to handle these search and sort URLs, and you can edit your robots.txt to block search engines from indexing those overly dynamic pages.

Maybe you can turn off the sorting, pagination, and search features if you don't need them, but do it to improve the visitor experience, not for the search engines.

But I doubt those pages get indexed by Google now anyway, so don't worry too much. These aren't going to hurt your rank for the majority of your key words and target pages (unless of course your key word is "searching").