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

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 honestly exclude all your internal search pages from the Google index via robots.txt (noindex) exclusion. This will at least re-distribute crawl-time to other areas of your site.

Just having the noindex,follow in the meta-tag (without the robots.txt exclusion) will let GoogleBot crawl the page and then eventually remove it from the index.

I would also change your search-page canoncial to the search term (i.e. /search/iphone) and then have a noindex,follow on meta-tag.

I would start with a robots.txt like the one below and add in anything else you don't want to be crawled/indexed:

Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml

# Google Image
User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow:
Allow: /*

# Google AdSense
User-agent: Mediapartners-Google*
Disallow:

# digg mirror
User-agent: duggmirror
Disallow: /

# global
User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/
Disallow: /wp-content/plugins/
Disallow: /wp-content/cache/
Disallow: /wp-content/themes/
Disallow: /trackback/
Disallow: /feed/
Disallow: /comments/
Disallow: /category/*/*
Disallow: */trackback/
Disallow: */feed/
Disallow: */comments/
Disallow: /*?
Allow: /wp-content/uploads/

I suppose one easy way via robots.txt would be a NoIndex / Disallow across all content on the new site. And with this you would only measure new brand/page design.

If you are not really that interested about SERPs but the user traffic and the look and feel, why don't you try A/B testing?

I think running two different domains will not really validate much as you are not covering indexing (due to canonicals) and will probably only rank on the new domain/brand for your landing pages.

Is the intention to eventually get rid of the old domain/brand (provided that the new one is successful)?

Duplicating a domain would mean that you would pay extra for PPC (driving different brand terms) and would also mean that the reskinning would include some brand-term landing pages.

I don't think your new site will take off from an SEO perspective - especially considering that it will take about 4-8 weeks for the index to properly build out and you will only know about any duplicate content issues after it happened.

I think "trying out a new brand" is a bit dangerous, by just duplicating content on another domain and slapping a new skin on it. Unless of course the current domain does not have much SEO value with regards to branded keywords.

Depending on the number of products I think it would be better to pull up the new domain with a set of landing pages (preferably covering some of the most revenue-driving and least revenue-driving products) and a set of product pages with canonicals to the new domain and sitemap for the selected set of products and then setup PPC and funnels and do a side-by-side comparison.

If the new domain/SERPs/conversion performs better, 301 the old domain to the new one and move your products over. Anything else feels like being half-pregnant

Have a look at this Q&A which touches on similar points: http://www.seomoz.org/q/how-much-copy-should-there-be-on-a-category-page

I would get rid of the product descriptions on category pages - I think it is more an user-experience issues and I do think that having so much copy on the category pages it will weaken your category pages.

Splitting a client's website into multiple domains could affect you in branding (unless you incorporate the brand name and the vertical you want to split into the domain).

Subdomains only make sense if you really want to target different audiences and there is little chance of cross-over (i.e. there would be a slim chance that customers would overlap if you sell cosmetics on one domain and DYI products on another). The danger of subdomains is that if content is not properly managed, you will run into all sorts of content issues.

I would rather focus on a single domain with a good product category structure, product pages and a good set of landing-/conversion pages to target the different verticals.

I also think that a single domain will afford you better long-term value (both from a SEO and SEM perspective).

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.

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

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.

Have a look at this Q&A which touches on similar points: http://www.seomoz.org/q/how-much-copy-should-there-be-on-a-category-page

I would get rid of the product descriptions on category pages - I think it is more an user-experience issues and I do think that having so much copy on the category pages it will weaken your category pages.

Are those images for search results (i.e. product thumbnails) or actual product pages? A link would help to understand how your site currently looks.

If you have not done it yet, I would run you page through webpagetest.org (or pagespeed) and then look at obvious optimisations (CDN, HTTP cache directives, image-size optimisations) first.

It sounds to me that you are "caching" multiple products in JS and based on user interaction show then the relevant content. Depending on how this is done, you might actually not get any SEO value from this.

I personally would update your robots.txt and then submit a sitemap with the URLs in question via GWMT - this will result in your pages being crawled very quickly (within 48 hours) and then dropped out.

I would also look at either using 301's if you see link-juice from those URLs or using 404s/410s.

I personally found that resubmitting takes longer than pushing an updated sitemap.

Is the intention to eventually get rid of the old domain/brand (provided that the new one is successful)?

Duplicating a domain would mean that you would pay extra for PPC (driving different brand terms) and would also mean that the reskinning would include some brand-term landing pages.

I don't think your new site will take off from an SEO perspective - especially considering that it will take about 4-8 weeks for the index to properly build out and you will only know about any duplicate content issues after it happened.

I think "trying out a new brand" is a bit dangerous, by just duplicating content on another domain and slapping a new skin on it. Unless of course the current domain does not have much SEO value with regards to branded keywords.

Depending on the number of products I think it would be better to pull up the new domain with a set of landing pages (preferably covering some of the most revenue-driving and least revenue-driving products) and a set of product pages with canonicals to the new domain and sitemap for the selected set of products and then setup PPC and funnels and do a side-by-side comparison.

If the new domain/SERPs/conversion performs better, 301 the old domain to the new one and move your products over. Anything else feels like being half-pregnant