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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?

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.

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

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.

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.

Yes it does improve CTR on organic search. Regular product pages rely on the content Google crawls (i.e. title and description).

With the hproduct spec you will get price, availability, product category bread-crumb and review information - i.e. your search result will stand out from everyone else.

I have only worked with hproduct and single offers, but I would say that the offeraggregate would allow you to cater for different currencies. A good starting point is http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=146750

Don't use microformats. Microdata/Schema.org is your first choice but RDFa works just as well.

Depends on the content of either. Blogrolls are normally just syndicated content and I would attribute less value to those. Having said that, some blog posts are just as bad and don't necessarily contain valuable content.

I would use the user review snippets provided that you have active participation in reviews.

I would go through this page first: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1093493 and then follow the instructions for implementing hproduct here: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=146750#usage

Before you take your pages live, use the Richnsippets tool to test your markup: http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets

Make sure that you include category breadcrumbs in your product pages. The product markup and offer-markup is obvious and quite easy. If your site offers reviews on products, use the hreview tags as well - this will give you great exposure.

Be aware, that Google is quite difficult when it comes to "Your markup contains hidden data" - one example is if your price tag for example looks like this, Google will reject it: $100.50

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).

35 USD for SEO services? You are better off going through some of GWMT's best practises and SEO blogs.

If you really want to have a proper audit done (Aaron Wall or others) where you actually get some valuable and relevant feedback, you will pay a few thousand USD, but the information provided is relevant to your business and will actually benefit you in the long run.

Why don't you just use http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/?

If you have multiple sections listing the same products and there is only one product URL (and the product page itself uses a canonical) there isn't an issue. (and I am not quite sure where the duplication problem comes in).

i.e. "Bedroom" would list "/lamp.html" and "/carpet.html" as unique product URLs. Your "Hallway"-section would also list "/lamp.html" and "/carpet.html" - although there is duplication of products on the listing pages, this is irrelevant from an indexing/SEO perspective.

Your category URLs (Bedroon and Landings) are also unique and not the actual cause of duplication (i.e. a category map with unique anchor texts but duplicate URLs and not canonical)?

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.

Are you saying that all your pages have a canoncial pointing to your home-page? If so, then this is not good. Having distinct canonicals for different content is fine.

If you feel that some pages should not be crawled/indexed then rather use noindex/nofollow instead of pointing the canoncial to some other page.

Not the bots, but if your site undergoes a manual review, "trustworthy signals" such as existence of company contact details, privacy policy, terms and conditions and any security seals will certainly provide more credibility.

I don't thank the content of any policies will have any relevance (it's impossible for reviewers to know legal constructs across every country in the world).

I would share your blog posts on all social networks. I would also consider creating a newsletter which goes out to your user base.

Promote and engage your audience on your blog with competitions and give-aways. You could also try and engage the other end of your demographics - I would assume that the majority of your users are male - kick off a Pinterest competition to engage with the female audience.

I would also feature specials/recommended products (links to your main-site) from your blog posts as well as feature excerpts of certain posts on your product- or category 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

Are you able to change the domain of buyproduct.com to shop.product.com and then have the shop's product pages and content which is duplicate have the same canonical? Not ideal as your shop would not feature any content.

If you are able to rework buyproduct.com then I would change the product page structure, enrich with hproduct data and other relevant markup (reviews).

Just be aware of the following limitation when using Advanced Segments - this is related to the way Google tracks visitor behaviour during the session:

If for example you configure an Advanced Segment as "Include Page Begins with '/solutions/A'", and then a visitors visits that specific page (or a subdirectory) and then also visits other pages in that session, you will find a few issues:

• /solutions/Y appearing in the Content Page reports (since the user viewed your /solutions/A page and subsequently within that session also viewed /solutions/Y)
• Your segmentation across goals and eCommerce will not work (if you segment on /solutions/A) and hope to see goals originating from that page, you will get mixed results - i.e. also goals or transactions if the user started from another page.

Just do some sanity checks across the data you want to see in the segments - chances are that you will overreport or report on a slightly wrong thing.

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.

I raised a similar question in the following Q&A - http://www.seomoz.org/q/duplicate-title-tags-with-pagination-and-canonical

My concern or question (we have rel=prev/next) would be more towards what the canoncial should be. There seems to be different opinions:

1. Use the current paginated page as the canonical - in our case GWMT reports duplicate titles (I suppose appending a page-number should sort this out)

2. Use the base search URL as the canonical - perhaps not a bad choice if your site's content changes and Google indexes page 50, but over time you only have results for 40 pages (resulting in an empty result page)

I currently only can conclude that having the prev/next implemented is a good thing as it will hint Google in pagination (in addition to setup the URL parameters in GWMT). I do plan to change the canoncial to the base search URL (and not having multiple paginated URLs) and see how this will affect indexing and SERPs.

Well, there are two problems: Your GA code does not work. If you turn on the console in Chrome you will see those errors. The broken GA code is the reason for no data feeding into GA. Also, whatever plugin you use to generate the GA code, it produces GA code which is wrong/outdated (see my earlier response regarding the GA async script).

The second problem is that when you guys ran a site:www.clintonpower.com.au, this is really wrong. It should be site:clintonpower.com.au - because:

• When you access www.clintonpower.com.au it does a 301 to clintonpower.com.au.
• Your sitemap content points to clintonpower.com.au and not www.clintonpower.com.au

I think you guys are looking at too many issues incorrectly. Fix the GA tracking first, because right now it does not track anything. You can check this in GA - Go to your GA profile and then select the Tracking Code tab - it should show in the middle of the page "Tracking Status: Receiving Data" - I would be surprised if it does show this.

With regards to indexing - your sitemap contains 63 URLs and Google has indexed 156 (site:clintonpower.com.au)

Don't look at Alexa, especially if the website is not certified (i.e. has the Alexa tracking code installed). Even if a site is certified and has the tracking code installed, the traffic (both PV and visitors) is hugely underreported.

Almost all their stats are still some guesswork and fluctuate. Remember that Alexa will only track traffic if the toolbar is installed and it will use the JS tracking code to for additional metrics. You will typically find that only techies will run Alexa.

I would do perhaps competitive comparisons (if this is what you are looking for) with Google Trends, SeoMoz or any of the other tools, but in most cases it will still be guess work as your competitors will not openly share information. Another means is Google Adwords.

I consider Alexa a nice "vanity" rank and good for marketing purposes - i.e. "We are #5 on Alexa" - it means really nothing and has no impact on PVs, revenue etc.

It's been a pleasure Clinton.

It will now be interesting to see if the non-working GA just was a false signal in traffic or if you still have other issues. Let us know - you should see changes within the next 1-2 days.

I would carefully monitor the reputation of the IP as well as the IP-range (and even the ASN) the IP falls within. If any of those loose reputation - for example if one of your 80 sites hosts a trojan, all your 80 sites will be flagged.

I personally would only host domains and subdomains on the same IP but would not share an IP with multiple domains.

I have seen several sites completely die due to IP reputation issues.

I would also exclude them via robots.txt and then push through a sitemap with your static content to "nudge" Google to recrawl your content (and hopefully drop the other pages off quickly over time).

You could face the risk if your sites are interlinked and a manual review flags the sites as similar and demotes some. I think this is a very rare case and it will be unlikely that it could happen. Just remember, Google has a better understanding of link-graphs then any tool available. I have seen some sites drop due to a manual review (the demotion was not because of same UI though).

I honestly would not worry too much about it as long as your copy, brand, keywords and onpage SEO differs.

This is already happening - do a search for "google manual review" and have a look at the manual review process. Google currently employs companies to perform manual website reviews based on search terms to classify web-sites.

So although you have the same template, different content and websites, the danger is that your sites from a link-building perspective interlink and a manual review might demote all of them.

Chances are slim as others said, but certainly possible.

It's bad to have redirects - especially when all your content does a 301. Why can't you sort this out via rewrite rules or through your system directly?

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)

I personally would change the form into a HREF - this would reduce page-size on the form-elements by 50% (i.e. 40 x 195 bytes).

i.e. 

I have not found that the amount of links on a page drastically affects link authority of other links (typically your important links would be structured above the product listing anyway)