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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.

First stop would be to go to GWMT and then go to "Health -> Fetch as Google" and test the homepage and some public pages.

Have a look at the results provided by GWMT.

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

Go with WPEngine.com - you are able to get dedicated IPs per blog, multi-network Wordrpess hosting etc. In my experience the best "host-and-forget" option.

I would create a generic canonical "/tickets/liverpool_arsenal" which lists the upcoming games. I would create unique canonicals/titles with event information for each game.

Use a 302 to redirect to the most appropriate content (i.e. the upcoming game).

I would engage with your user base on as many (feasible) social channels as possible. Depending on your user demographics (and products you offer), you might find that Pinterest works in some instances better due to the largely female audience.

It is really difficult to get Google+ engagement but your audience is more loyal than Facebook.

I think you should focus on a full SEO audit first with actionable recommendations. Each SEO company should be able to give this to you with reasonable cost.

The actionable recommendations should be measurable. Some measures will be easy (i.e. implementation of a sitemap and improving the crawl-rate / index ratio) while other measures will be difficult (you want to increase your SERPs and organic traffic).

Best way to approach this is to set up KPIs which will then allow you to measure progress. It will oftentimes be very murky, especially if you do SEM at the same time.

Still way to early for me ;-). I block specific robots rather than excluding all but a few.

I have not tried the following (but think/hope it will work) - this should block all robots, but allow SeoMoz and Google:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

User-agent: rogerbot
Disallow:

User-agent: Google
Disallow:

You would already have something like this in your robots.txt (unless your block occurs on a network/firewall level).

I have it as "rogerbot"

<code>User-agent: rogerbot 
Disallow: /</code> 

Access-log: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; rogerBot/1.0; UrlCrawler; http://www.seomoz.org/dp/rogerbot)

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.

BTW: We tried to do segmentation via GA and in our opinion segmentation, custom variables, page groups or any other way of segmenting traffic is "broken" due to the way GA tracks a user's session.

We have confirmed this with GA engineers for the last 9 months (another meeting with them tomorrow), but we honestly believe that advanced segmentation (especially if you are in eCommerce) is currently not possible in GA.

The most reliable way we have managed to get this to work is with an alternative analytics package (doing a POC at the moment).

The disavow does not really help if Google still has a final say in what links/domains are disavowed. Also the processing time and the reversal are just insane. For once I wish they would have more transparency in the whole thing and I am wondering if anyone will be able to measure any success using disavow (considering that SEO is ongoing, algorithm changes rolling in and the long disavow processing times).

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.

Don't hide the content - if you have not done it, use microformats to "dress up" your content - this should include hproduct and hreview markups.

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 would do a 301 of ferienwohnungumbrien.de to your german landing page on the com-domain.

Unless you can find a 3rd party provider who allows you to "white-label" their rating/reviews to your subdomain, there is not much value having it. The review/rating system should work semi-automatic to block any type of spam and you should own the data (i.e. be able to export it).

Unless you can run this on a subdomain, there is zero SEO value for you though....

Go with a sitemap. Hint it via robots.txt and use a Gzipped SitemapIndex (not a plain sitemap). Make sure that your index files do not contain more than 50,000 URLs.

Verify that whatever you submit in the sitemap-index files is not blocked by robots.txt or onpage noindex-tags.

I am going to answer my own question We have been running Webtrekk in a proof-of-concept test for the last few days. If you are familiar with GA's custom-variable-, event and ecommerce-tracking, implementing Webtrekk is straight forward. The major difference (where GA fails miserably for us) is the content aggregation. GA tries to solve this with Advanced Segments or Custom Variables, but fails in the way GA tracks sessions. Webtrekk does this properly and the flexibility you have on filtering is far superior to GA. Data will be calculated on the fly (about 1 hour behind real-time traffic) and accuracy levels are much higher than GA. It is still too early to say if we will go with Webtrekk, but initial signals show that from an analytics perspective it provides more accurate business intelligence than GA. Although I have not had a look at Webtrends (they refuse to run a free POC, but will also cost more than USD 50K/p.a.) I would rank the analytics platforms we tested like this (in order of preference) (1) GA - it's free and as long as you just need indicative figures you are good (2) Webtrekk - paid, but sofar very good (usable) analytics data (3) Webtrends - paid (very expensive and not open to free trials) (4) GA Premium - (paid - super expensive and I don't see any value in it) (5) Kissmetrics - lacks full analytics functionality

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).

Only things I would improve on are:

• Your meta-keywords are empty
• Your meta-descriptions are empty on most pages
• You have many opportunities to add a "title"-tag to your HREFs (and alt-tags to the few images you might have overlooked)
• I would have a robots.txt to submit a sitemap
• Optimise those images - they are big: http://www.data-contracts.co.uk/images/flash_dummy_bg.png, http://www.data-contracts.co.uk/flash/images/slide1.jpg

Have a look at this http://www.webpagetest.org/result/121010_PS_F28/ you could squeeze a bit more performance out (HTTP-expires on some content)

Make sure that your CDN services provide you with domain aliasing - for example if your domain is www.example.com you want your CDN services host-name be part of the domain - i.e. cdnuk.example.com for the UK region.

You will then at least get some value from image crawlers etc. Don't go for any CDN service which does not allow your content to resolve to a subdomain of your primary domain.

SEO does play a role though as the speed of the CDN will affect your overal pagespeed and will also affect how much content a bot will be able to crawl within your allocated crawl quota. The faster your load-time/CDN the more content will be crawled.

I would not bother with localisation tags if your main objective is to optimise performance / page-load time based on your users geo-location.

It looks like you set your mind on Akami, but I would perhaps also evaluate Amazon S3/Cloudfront or Rackspace as those service deliver the same level of SLA but might be more cost-effective for your purposes.

Get your CDN provides to give you a 1-2 month free proof-of-concept (they will only offer this if your traffic is substantial) so that you can try out the service. Never sign up for contracts longer than 12 months, and only sign an annual contract if you receive a large discount. Most CDN companies will charge you for 10 months when signing up for an annual contract.

Also ensure that your CDN provider gives you (near-) or preferably real-time access to statistics and performance reports (you want to see how many requests/sec they have served and what the speed was.

Test your site / CDN via tools such as webpagetest.org or pingdom.com - they have POPs across the globe to simulate remote tests.

There is no value if you artificially inflate your like count through competitions or purchased likes in any other form.

Your social engagement across FB, Twitter, G+, Pinterest etc should come naturally. You should start engaging with your customers/users via the social channels. Social media provides a good extension to deliver content really fast to your audience.

It helps to have a social marketing strategy - the simplest form is to measure engagement via retweeting/sharing or commenting. More complex is to measure conversions originating from social media. Ideal scenario would be that you post something on social media which does not advertise something on your main site, and traffic results in conversion because of the engagement.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Yes, add it to the robots.txt (use a Disallow and a NoIndex statement). I did find that Bing for example has not reliably in the past honoured robots.txt (especially in the case where you have an explicit "index" tag on the page and a noindex for a URL path).

Do you have one where you deliver the same content to the desktop (rich user experience) as well as mobile websites?

In our case we provide content to www.domain.com, m.domain.com (for smart phones not using our native apps) and mo.domain.com (for older feature phones). We found that in some instances Google favours the indexing of our mobile content over our desktop site and we have now started pointing canonical content to our desktop site (i.e. to www.domain.com).

Possible downside is that Google might not present desktop indexed content on mobile devices. This is not really a big issue, as currently Google presents mobile content for desktop searches.

A better approach would have been responsive design, but we feel that dedicated apps will rule the mobile device space and desktop-websites will evolve to allow content to be displayed on all devices (we consider our m.domain.com and mo.domain.com stop-gaps to overcome legacy device issues and bandwidth limitations).

What is your mobile device strategy with regards to SEO?

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).

Placing the nofollow will not necessarily solve the problem, that Google for example does not classify the remaining content on your website good enough to rank well.

If you take any page on your site and strip out external links, there is hardly any original content left.

I would read this article which covers the user experience and algorithm change from January, and I think Google has demoted your site based on that.

I think you should build out your content - for example if you look at this URL there is hardly any content on it and a large count of external links. One could almost argue, that your site being an intermediary has no real value to a user.

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.

Do you have the URLs or the HTTP-status code? Any HTTP server will always return a status code such as 404 (not found) or 401 (unauthorized) or 403 (forbidden). Provided that other pages display, it can very well be a permission issue or a rewrite problem.

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

I doubt it is an automated bot, as it would not fire GA traffic. Best way to determine what happened is to look at your server log for that specific day and analyse the raw traffic data.

Depending on the nature of the website, it could very well be a hack-attack or competitors looking at your site. You will be able to get some information from GA (i.e. OS and browser versions), but to really determine what happened, the server logs are your best bet.

I don't think it is the canonical. I would first look at GWMT (crawl rate dropped? errors increased?) and then look at Google Analytics as well.

For what it's worth, your current site has duplicate keywords and descriptions and plenty of errors (JavaScript).

You could have very well been dropped due to a manual review - your site looks very much like an affiliate with plenty of advertising and not much original content (that was at least my initial opinion)

Google will not really care about FB likes. Not even FB cares too much about artificially inflating likes.

Almost all FB competitions attracting likes are short lived and hardly ever engage your brand with the user and there will be zero stickiness. Consider the FB likes a vanity number and nothing else. If a company has no social engagement on the FB wall (i.e. no shares or comments), then it's not worth it to run a campaign.

I would rather look at an all-inclusive social campaign where you stretch across Twitter, FB, G+ and Pinterest. We had good engagement from users with our photo- or Pinterest competitions and actually saw backlinks and referrals growing from this.

Also look at engaging new / existing users on your site and/or blog - this will have more value than just artificially growing some meaningless number.