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How do you deal with DMCA takedown notices related to product descriptions? With Google it is simple enough for any person to submit a DMCA takedown notice irrespective if the owner holds right to the content.

One such example is this http://www.chillingeffects.org/notice.cgi?sID=1012391. Although Google dealt in that particular case properly (and did not remove content), we find that nowadays more and more competitors use the DMCA takedowns as an easy way to de-index competitive content.

Since the person registering the DMCA takedown does not require to provide any proof of copyright, de-indexing happens quite quickly.

Try this URL: http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/removals/copyright/domains/mydomain.com/ (replace your domain) to see if you have been affected.

I would like your opinion if you have been affected by takedowns on product descriptions - in my mind if product descriptions are informative and relate to the characteristics of the product then takedowns should be denied.

Use Google's disavow tool - detailed description here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487?hl=en

I hazard to say that if the new product was in the sitemap it would have also appears in the SERPs. We submit sitemaps every day and products are in the index within hours.

I guess the GWMT manual submission is okay if you need to manually fix some pages, but then it asks the question, how your SEO efforts could not make those visible to bots (via link structure or sitemaps).

Sida, what I meant is that I use the Google Webmaster Tool function "Fetch as Google" only as a diagnostic function to see how GoogleBot receives a request from my website.

It seems that people fetch URLs via the GWMT "Fetch as Google" and then use the function to submit it to the index. I find that not a good idea as any new content should either be discoverable (via SEO) or should be submitted to Google automatically via a sitemap (hinted in robots.txt)

There might be an underlying business model (i.e. paid advertising or affiliate scheme) for displaying 3rd party banners. As long as you nofollow the banner links there is no SEO damage and you will "only" suffer the churn from customers.

On a technical level you can implement Analytics click-tracking on the banners and then show your clients if the click-through is high or not and then motivate the use of banners accordingly.

Use it as a "diagnostic tool" to check how content or error pages are retrieved via the bot. I specifically look at it from a content and HTTP-status perspective.

I would not use it to submit URLs - for that you should rather use a sitemap file. Think of "Fetch as Google" as a troubleshooting tool and not something to submit pages to an index.

I don't believe that the parent backlinks have caused a drop in ranking. My first port of call would be to check Google Webmaster toolkit to ensure that you do not have any errors as part of the crawling or indexing.

I would also check keywords via SEOMoz and would then analyse who (and possibly why) took over the top ranking spots. The nofollow will not help you and the backlink removal also not (unless you have received backlinks of non-reputable sources).

It depends what you want to achieve. If the 404s are pages which no longer exist than it will be the fastest to use the GWMT removal tool to remove the page pattern and also add a noindex in robots.txt. In addition obviously returning a 404.

The soft 404 is a case where content is not found but HTTP-status 200 is returned - this needs to change if you currently serve non-existing pages.

We generally do the following:

• Content which we know does not exist anymore (i.e. a deleted product page or a deleted product category) is served with a SC_GONE (410) and we provide cross-selling information (i.e. display products from related categories). This works great and we have seen a boost in indexed content.
• URLs which don't exist will go through a standard 404 - this is intentional as our monitoring will pick this up. If it is a legitimate 404 put of SEO value, we will do a redirect if it makes sense, or just let Google drop it over time (takes sometimes up to 4 weeks)

You can have multiple versions of 404 pages, but this would need to be coded out - i.e. in your application server you would define 404page which then programmatically would display content depending on what you want to do.

True, there is obviously a lot more to SEO than just filling meta-tags. My example above was just something we do for categories and obviously elements such as TITLE, H1-H3 are important.

I would look at SEO in eCommerce holistically:

• Understand your product category taxonomy and related categories. Provide a mechanism to "boilerplate" tags important for SEO. This also should include microdata such as breadcrumbs.
• Provide a "fall-back" mechanism if your content team fails - i.e. if your product team introduces new categories without SEO meta-data, craft them from the information you know about the category (i.e. category title and generic keywords)
• Don't forget about pushing Sitemap data to Google - this will push your whole taxonomy and products into the index.
• Ensure that your search indexes (many people say don't but we have not found an issue with it).
• Pay attention to canonicals for both products and categories and ensure that all links are SEO friendly
• Craft your brand verbs (buy, sell, cheap etc) in searches and categories

I think it is more important to have a high index-ratio in search than stuffing keywords which result in irrelevant search results. Over 80% of our products get indexed through Google and since we have mostly user-generated content, we ensure that the meta-data for the products is good.

If your client has a product catalogue SEO becomes a lot easier, as data should be very structured, but it will be challenging since the same content is syndicated to many other competitors.

I honestly would not stuff keywords like that. Meta tag keywords and descriptions should hint at the actual content on page.

Our site-structure for eCommerce categories consists of the following (here is an example

• Meta tags with keywords and description
• Content lead-in (text below the banner)
• Subcategory links and content
• Content lead-out (text below pagination)

Each category has the same structure and our product team manages the actual content. This works very effectively.

I would do the following:

• For valid searches returned create a proper canoncial URL (and then decide if you want to do a index,follow or a noindex,follow on the result pages). You might not necessarily want to index search results, but rather a structure of items/pages on your site.
• I would generally not index search results (rather have your pages being crawled through category structures, sitemaps and RSS feeds)
• It does sound though that the way you implemented the search is wrong - it should not result in a soft 404 - it could be as easy as making the canonical for your search just "/search" (without any search terms) and if no results are found display options to the user for search refinements

The only time I have seen soft 404s with us is in cases where we removed product pages and then displayed a generic "product not available" page with some upselling options. In this case we set a status of 410 (GONE) which resolved the soft 404 issue.

The advantage of the 410 is that your application makes the decision that a page is gone, whereas a 404 could really be just a wrong linked URL.

Some time back we implemented the Google recommendation for pagination (the rel="next/prev"). GWMT now reports 17K pages with duplicate title-tags (we have about 1,1m products on our site and about 50m pages indexed in Google)

As an example we have properties listed in various states and the category title would be "Properties for Sale in [state-name]".

A paginated search page or browsing a category (see also http://searchengineland.com/implementing-pagination-attributes-correctly-for-google-114970) would then include the following:

The title for each page is the same - so to avoid the duplicate title-tags issue, I would think one would have the following options:

• Ignore what Google says
• Change the canonical to http://www.site.com/property/state.html (which would then only show the first XX results)
• Append a page number to the title "Properties for Sale in [state-name] | Page XX"
• Have all paginated pages use noindex,follow - this would then result in no category page being indexed

Would you have the canonical point to the individual paginated page or the base page?

Use Google's disavow tool - detailed description here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487?hl=en

Your issue is that the analytics script throws Javascript errors i.e. "Uncaught ReferenceError: _gat is not defined"

Go into GA and the setup/admin function for your domain and then "Tracking Code" and then replace your current (old GA code) with the proper async analytics code.

I think if it is done carefully it adds quite a lot of value. A proper site taxonomy is obviously always better and more predictable.

Use it as a "diagnostic tool" to check how content or error pages are retrieved via the bot. I specifically look at it from a content and HTTP-status perspective.

I would not use it to submit URLs - for that you should rather use a sitemap file. Think of "Fetch as Google" as a troubleshooting tool and not something to submit pages to an index.

The "Tracking Status" should say "Receiving data". Have a look at the attached image (and also this URL http://support.google.com/analytics/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1008083).

Your plugin is using the traditional (old) GA snippet. The async snippet is the preferred option (been around for more than 2 years now) as it will track more accurately.

Just doing a code comparison, your plugin does not load the ga.js (notice in the image attached the missing document.write line?).

My suggestion would be to use your Analytics plugin and replace it with another one - "All in one SEO pack" or "Google Analytics for Wordpress" comes to mind.

This will sort out your tracking. Your SERPs are another (unrelated issue). Your drop in traffic you can verify if you look at your server access log. If there is absolutely no activity (or a sudden drop compared to previous month, then you have issues). I do suggest to run something like Webalizer/Awstats over your logs so that you at least can get an independent view on traffic.

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I found (although many SEO's don't think it is necessary anymore) to have good title,meta keywords/description. And then structure the category page as follows:

• Your general navigation (menus, cart, search etc)
• Your category title as a H1 (should ideally be the same as your page-title)
• A category description (not more than 2 lines) - ideally the category description should overlap with the on-page content, title, keywords
• Your category bread-crumb, annotated with the Breadcrumb-microformat/RDFa markup
• You will obviously have some category drilldown (i.e. sidebar menu) - those should be crawlable links with relevant anchor texts
• I would present the multiple products per page with hProduct annotation, but would limit the number of products per page to not more than 40.

I disagree with the sentiment of the presenter, that text / additional links are unnecessary/irrelevant below products. We have found that we achieve good ranking on keywords by moving the category description from the top to the bottom of the category page.

From my experiments there is no noticeable difference in placement of the category copy, but then again this might very well depend on the overall site- and category-structure.

In-house. I think a nice follow-up question for agencies/freelancers would be how they work with clients marketing-/technical teams to improve SEO (and how do you overcome organisation barriers in this case).

I always found that SEO agencies (at least in South Africa) work too removed from clients and rather focus on link-building without any measurable metrics.

SEO 101: Don't ever pay for links, artificial content. I think paying USD 5 on Fiverr will have the same affect as paying thousands of dollars to a SEO consultant offering the same "link building" services. Your traffic and your backlinks should occur naturally and not via paid services.

Unless a SEO can understand your business it is not worth it engaging in their services. I think you would be better off just following some of the more authoritative SEO blogs.