I think that it is a good possibility. I wouldn't put Canonical tags on the product page however. The product page isn't the same as the category page, the html coding is just very similar between the two.
Best posts made by MonicaOConnor
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RE: Why is Moz Crawl Diagnostics labelling pages as duplicate when they appear to be different?
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RE: Still Keyword Stuffing? With NO tekst?
That is just not true. I run an ecommerce site and I can tell you that if I don't have unique content on my pages they don't rank because of all of the HTML containing too many of the same terms. I don't necessarily disagree with some of what you are saying, but your overall message is incorrect. Keyword density and keyword stuffing can affect your keyword rankings. You have to have natural, unique content and if your keyword density is off it appears unnatural whether your sentences are grammatically correct or not.
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RE: Should my website link to my google business listing given that I already link from google business to my website ?
My personal opinion would be to link your Google Business page to the home page of your site and then the corresponding location pages to their respective pages on your site. There is no such thing as too many links from Google to your site.
It generally looks a lot better the the engines if everything you do ties together and does so appropriately. I don't think it's the best idea to take a general page and point that to specific locations if each location has a corresponding Google page.
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RE: Clarification around 301 redirects.
I agree with everyone here. But I do have some separate thoughts.
Bulk redirects aren't negative if they are done correctly. For example, I just moved a website that had about 1000 discontinued products. As opposed to losing those valuable pages, we redirected them to the corresponding category pages or to the replacement products. The 600 or so links that had to be redirected to a category aren't going to hurt my site. It will help my customers who are looking for those products, however. A client would probably rather land on a page that says "this product is no longer available, here are the replacements" than a 404 error page.
In the case of a blog, it is a lot better to redirect each blog to its new home. For blogs that no longer exist, I would redirect them to the corresponding category. No one likes to hit a 404 page, and if there is a chance that someone could land on a page that no longer exists, it is better to have them get to somewhere on your site.
As far as your blog's home page, is that a separate category on your site or is your entire site a blog? If your page was just a landing page where your blogs were listed, then you should redirect to the corresponding page on the new site, like Jonathan suggested.
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RE: Webmaster Tools Search Queries Data Drop
My opinion is that there should be more data in GWT than in GA because "not provided" is not accounted for in GWT. There is no data loss with the updates in GWT in Feb, only a longer lag time between reports.
Has you data always matched prior?
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RE: Image names, product names, alt tags the same. Image names with various sizes the same?
If I understand your post correctly you are trying to figure out the best way to optimize your alt tags for different versions of the same image. Alt tags should really focus on the keywords you are targeting on a page. I can give you an example from my site:
Product - Generac 6244 20kW Guardian Series Home Standby Generator with Aluminum Enclosure and 200a Transfer Switch (That is a mouthful)
Keyword - Generac 6244
URL - apelectric.com/generac-6244-20kw-guardian
Title Tag - Generac 6244 | 20kW Guardian Generator | Generac Generators
Image Alt Tag - Generac 6244 20kW Guardian Series Generator
Meta Description - The Generac 6244 has been our customers go to 20kW home standby generator. This unit is in stock and ready to ship same or next day for FREE. Call us today for more information, 123-456-7891
The image alt tag should reinforce your targeted keyword and include a shorter description than your description. Focusing on putting the most important part of the product first, then a secondary description and perhaps then a size. You don't want to have several of the same alt tags on one product, but sometimes this is unavoidable. I would say break the more specific description up between the numerous pictures. In my example I would do something like this:
1 - Generac 6244 20kW Generator
2 - Generac 6244 Guardian Series
3- Generac 6244 Home Standby Generator.
The alt tags are a good place to reinforce your keyterms and let the engines know the whole page is really centered around that specific product. It is also how Google Images display certain pictures, they use the alt tags.
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RE: I've submitted a disavow file in my www version account, should I submit one in my non-www version account as well?
I would definitely add it to both as Google sees these as two different sites.
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RE: Dynamic vs. static URLs
Hutch has the best answer here, it needs to be readable by the users. To add to what he said, it is also important to know that the dynamic URLs can and will be crawled, This can lead to errors, specifically overly dynamic URLs and 404 errors. It is good if you can keep them clean, but that is difficult. I prefer to use static URLs because I can control them and optimize my pages better.
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RE: Getting listing in Google map results
If you Google your Business name you should see something like this: (see attachment)
If you have set up your Google My Business, are using Google Plus and have verified your listing you should see a result in Maps.
search?sourceid=chrome-psyapi2&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8&q=AP%20Electric
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RE: Is their value in linking to PPC landing pages and using rel="canonical"
Wherever you have duplicate content you should try to minimize the effects, usually with canonical tags.
I would shy away from your strategy only because showing viewers one thing and bots another is frowned upon. What's wrong with PPC visitors landing on your SEO pages?
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RE: How to deal with duplicated content on product pages?
Adding product options is usually best practice, like Hutch said.
Using canonical tags would be the next best thing. If you have Product A that has 6 colors and subsequently you have 6 pages for product A, I would create one page with a product description and product reviews. I would make that the canonical page. For the 6 subsequent pages I would create them to mirror the first page, but only have details specific to the color on that page. Then, add the Rel = Canonical tags to those 6 pages. All of the link juice and page authority will be pointed to the main product page.
The second thing I would do is add links to the specific pages with different colors to the content on the main page. This will help users find it easier and help with overall user experience.
So, it would look something like this:
Product A - Description, Reviews, Links to all versions of product A. Fully optimized page for Product A
Product A Colors 1 - 6, Add REL=Canonical tags with Product A as the Canonical. Include descriptions specific to the individual colors. Using the canonical tags will tell the engines that your preferred page is Product A, which will help you control the negative effects of the duplicate content.
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RE: Is there any harm to display NAP more than once on a location page ?
Are you saying you have your NAP in your footer at the bottom of the page or hidden in content below the fold?
In my opinion, you should have your NAP on a contact us page above the fold where a client or potential client can easily access it. Having the information also in the footer of this page isn't harmful. If you want people to contact you then the information should be easily accessible.
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RE: New Google Update on 21st April
I understand that tablets are mobile devices, all I am saying is that Google sees them differently. The reporting in Analytics, AdWords, and GWT separates Tablets and Mobile. I don't understand it either, but that is the way the cookie crumbles. I am not saying I understand it or that it makes sense, but there is a small separation for some reason.
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RE: What should I do about not found pages?
Use the tool in GWT, Go to Google Index > Remove URLs
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RE: How to use remarketing using GTM?
https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/3210317?hl=en
This is a Google Help page that should set you up. It is a lot like setting up a Display Ad, just very targeted. Hope that helps!
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RE: Possible to Change Domain Name without Negative Rankings
No, that is not realistic. You will implement 301 redirects which will help you keep some traffic and link juice, but your DA and PA will not be transferred seamlessly. You will have to build the DA and PA of your metro-manhattan.com site the organic way with quality links and great content.
The 301 redirects might cause a boost in DA, but it will not be equal to what you have now.
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RE: Screaming Frog showing 503 status code. Why?
Did you recently have your site in maintenance mode? That is usually what the 503 code represents.
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RE: Ecommerce data in universal analytics
I have this issue and for a couple of reasons:
The first being someone adds something to the order after they place it. This is the most common for me. Because the order is already placed and has the same order number, it just puts the whole thing back through Analytics.
The second time I see this happening is when someone uses Paypal. It is recorded once when the order is placed and when we get the transaction from Paypal and enter it into our website.
The third time I see this is when there is unusual change to the order, like a return, a discount added, a cancellation. If you track your revenue by Sales Performance you will be able to filter out the old orders by order number. It is a little time consuming, but you will get the clear picture. You can export the data to excel and remove duplicates, or filter them out manually if you do this daily like I do. If you do it by month it is easier to filter out the duplicates with the "remove duplicates" tool.
Oh, I have found this is most common with users who are in IE, Safari or Opera. I am not sure why, I don't see it happening a lot in Chrome or Firefox.
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RE: Possible to Change Domain Name without Negative Rankings
That is a really good point. The - in a domain name is usually not a good thing.
Just to be clear, I wasn't saying it isn't impossible to regain rankings over time. It just won't happen instantaneously. It is possible over time to actually grow more and be better than the old domain, but that will take work.
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RE: Webmaster Tools Search Queries Data Drop
I agree. You will need to add the https version of your site to GWT. Google sees these URLs as two different URLs, so you will want to add the HTTPS version of your site.
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RE: Adwords in google analytic Transaction showing more than actual adwords
Alick has some good points, but I would also point out that depending on where you are accessing data in Analytics you might be picking up information for your Bing PPC account as well, assuming you have a Bing PPC account.
Do you have conversion tracking set up in AdWords? Are you tracking calls and clicks as conversions or are you only tracking revenue?
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RE: Possible to Change Domain Name without Negative Rankings
DA is mainly influenced by link activity. I don't think that it would be any easier to build DA and PA on your metro-manhattan domain as it would any other domain. It will take time to build links effectively and organically. I also agree with EGOL. I believe you should look into metromanhattan.com instead of having a hyphenated domain.
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RE: Redesigned and Migrated Website - Lost Almost All Organic Traffic - Mobile Pages Indexing over Normal Pages
Did you also move to HTTPS? It looks like your canonical tags are set to the https version of your site. Have you added that site to GWT?
There is something in your CSS/HTML file that is taking forever to load. I would look for bad JS. The page spins for about 45 seconds before it actually loads.
In GWT, go to Crawl > Sitemaps > and look at your submitted sitemap. Make sure it sees all of the pages. You should also be able to see if pages are being indexed. It looks like you have about 565,000 pages indexed for www.jmac.com. You still have 360,000 pages indexed for www.jmacsupply.com. So, I would infer that the old site is still being deindexed and until that is finalized you might be having issues with duplicate content. Two weeks is a little premature to freak out in my opinion. This can take 4-6 weeks to finalize. There is always a period of time after a migration where traffic kind of plummets. If after 4 weeks you are still having issues, I would try fetching some pages as Google and seeing what happens.
Google's mobile bot tends to crawl pages faster than the desktop bot. That would explain why your mobile page is ranking in engines for specific product searches. If I just Google the name of your company, your mobile site is a few pages deep.
Some things to check would be that your 301 redirects have been implemented accurately, make sure you have set the preferred domain in GWT, add both the www version and non www version of the site as well as the https and non https version of your site, and make sure that your canonical tags are set correctly. If the https is your preferred version, whenever someone types in jmac.com they should land on the https version, and that is not happening.
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RE: Huge Traffic Drop without any change on website
I would just like to add that this could just be seasonality of your site, or events going on that generally affect search volume, like holidays or huge sporting events. Sometimes it isn't an issue with your site, but a general decrease in search volume.
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RE: New site. How important is traffic for a new site? And what about domain age?
Don't worry, it happens to the best of us!
My thoughts, you need some quality backlinks and more content. Your URLs are not optimized very well, meaning you don't really target your key terms in them, and the site is small. I would say getting a blog and adding fresh content, having a social media presence, building some quality backlinks and adding more content to your pages will help you. The design of the site is beautiful, though! Good Job!
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RE: What canonical makes sense in this particular situation?
If you have more than on canonical on a page, Google will ignore them all. Pick the page that will be the canonical and add the same tag to the subsequent pages with duplicate content.
www.site.com = canonical
the canonical tag on all subsequent pages will be link link rel='canonical' href='www.site.com'
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RE: Site relaunch and impact on SEO
Hi there,
After reading your post i would just like to say, I feel your pain. I have been working the past few months at helping a company out a similar situation. Scrapping a website and starting fresh could be very instrumental in your SEO success, but you have to ask yourself is it the overall best thing for my customers?
The first things I would like to point out (just a little unsolicited advice) is that perhaps moving to a completely new site might be the easiest and most efficient way to do this. You will be able to keep your domain and all of its domain authority while bringing your site into the 21st century. You want to give site structure just as much attention as site content. Is your site mobile friendly? If not, you want to move to a responsive design asap. Now, to answer your specific questions.
- If I go with the approach above, is there any value from the old content / URLs that is worth retaining? - The old URLs are worth retaining absolutely. There is a chance that all of the URLs drive traffic to the site, and you want to preserve that. As far as content goes, you seem to think only the content on your 4 "traffic driving" pages are actually driving traffic, so I would say scrap it. If your customers find no value in it, then there is no value to it. It is probably taking up good real estate on your site.
- How sure can I be there is no indirect negative effect on the four important pages? I really need to protect those pages - _There will be a little give and take when you redesign a site. You might see some ranking fluctuations, but if those pages are great performers now, chances are they will still be if you change nothing. I always believe when it comes to content,you have to keep what works, but also add freshness to it. That is why User Generated Content is so valuable! It lets you keep static, keyword targeting content while adding something uniquely valuable. While those pages are performing well now, chances are they will be outdated one day like the rest of your site's copy. _
- Is throwing away the vendor links simply all good - or could there be some hidden negative I need to know about (given many of the links are broken and go to crappy/small web sites, I'm hoping this is just a simple decision to make) - **I recommend you have someone do an indepth analysis of your link profile before you make any changes. Depending on how many links there are and whether or not you would have to disavow them, it could be extremely negative for your SEO. If these links make up 5% of your link profile, you shouldn't see a huge issue. If they make up 50% of your link profile you could end up in a world of trouble. The most important thing you can do for your link profile is build new links, and diversify your link profile. **
And one more uber-question. I want to take a performance baseline so that I can see where I started as I start making changes and measure performance over time. Beyond the obvious metrics like number of visitors, time per page, page views per visit, etc what metrics would be important to collect from the outset? - Heat mapping would be a great tool for you to use. The click trails will give you great in page metrics. GA offers this for free, and Moz offers HotSpot with a Pro membership. I always measure the following things:
- Organic CTR
- Search Impressions
- Percentage of increase/decrease in clicks
- Percentage of increase/decrease in New Sessions
- Bounce Rate
- Organic conversion rate
- Decrease in PPC spend
- _Increase/Decrease in Phone calls - I measure this because it is one of our Key Performance Indicators. _
I hope that you will get lots of good answers to your questions! These are my professional opinions based on experiences I have had with older websites. Good luck to you!
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RE: New site. How important is traffic for a new site? And what about domain age?
Yes, ideally your URLs would build as you go through them.
abcinc.com/online-mixing/studio
abcinc.com/online-mixing/software
abcinc.com/online-mixing/software/download
Something like that
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RE: What is the optimum schema for a Website and how important is it really is for SEO?
I believe the Schema markups are better for user experience, which is why they are important to SEO. What is the point of having a completely optimized site and great content if you can't get anyone to click on your SERP? This is especially true for ECommerce stores. Those markups give the customers the first glimpse of a price and the quality of a product, and, can often drastically increase CTR.
You should add Schema markups to the things that are important on your site, prices, brands, reviews; the things that are more important to the searcher. What is good for the searcher is good for the search engine. Highlight the things that you have over your competition. Highlight the things you want to be recognized for, like promotions or guarantees. The benefit of the markups should be thought of as what is good for the searcher, not the bots.
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RE: What link building techniques would you recommend for a dating site?
Using your blog would be a really great way to build organic links. Make sure you share you blogs on social sites, it will help drive traffic and send relevant social signals.
I think about the EHarmony commercials and how they are always using scientific facts and then they use like common sense Q&As. If you could write some guest blogs to e-magazines or industry related forums with that kind of content it could be a great linking strategy. I would just make sure that you are staying within your industry. You might accidentally have links from less than reputable sites if you aren't careful.
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RE: Canonicals & 301 Redirects to new Domain
You will want to do the 301 redirect. That is the best way to address a domain name change. You would use a canonical tag if you were keeping both sites live, which isn't best practice. The canonical tag is not necessary when you use the 301 redirect. You will use the canonical tag to set the correct version of your URL, for example, if your set version is abcde.com and not www.abcde.com you will add a canonical tag to the page for abcde.com.
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RE: Facing Link Crisis
Do you actively work on your link profile? Is there a company you have hired to build links? What were your total links at the time of your last index?
Definitely investigate your site in GWT. If you have more than a 10% increase in links that is truly a crisis as you put it. Definitely look into it further. It could be that they have been there and were just recently discovered because of the updates that took place in October.
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RE: 2015 Disavow Links on Bing?
In my opinion yes. Since disavowing the links doesn't necessarily remove them, I am a little more cautious on what I disavow from Bing. It is tough to have two different sets of standards for search engines, but unfortunately I have found this to still be the case.
Everything else though, like on page SEO and Social Sharing, still holds true that what is good for Google is also good for Bing and Yahoo. So far the only piece of the puzzle that doesn't fit is the links.
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RE: Redirecting 301 or 302?
Is the 302 redirect the only way to get users from one page to the other?
The difference between the 301 and 302 is that the 301 will remove the page from the index over time. The 302 redirect is more of a fork in the road allowing the other page to remain indexed. It should really be your decision, if you want the page to remain indexed then don't use a 301 redirect, keep the 302. If it is irrelevant or if there is duplicate content it might be better to use a 301 redirect.
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RE: Possible to Change Domain Name without Negative Rankings
I guess it depends on what kind of links you want to build. You can buy thousands of links all at once but that will only hurt you in the long run. The rule I follow is to stay within 10-15% of your existing links. That is just a metric I use to help explain to clients what "natural" link building should really look like.
You will be passing some link juice to your new domain, but it isn't a fluid transfer, meaning you will not reach the DA of 23 simply by redirecting the old domain. You will get a higher domain authority by building reputable, quality links. I wouldn't do anymore than 20 a month, since there are only 100 links to the metro-manhattan.com domain.
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RE: Is Schema markup important for SEO?
I agree with the Zen Agency. They explained it perfectly! I have seen a significant growth in my CTR, which has affected my overall KW rankings, after implementing the Schema.Org markup.
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RE: Using Brand Descriptions
This is something that I am very familiar with. We are in almost the exact same situation. Matt Cutts at Google is pretty responsive on this subject. Here is a video where he describes in detail how Google views duplicate content : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQZY7EmjbMA
My professional opinion is that you should try to get as much unique content on the page as possible. I have been successful at getting my customer reviews to appear on site and in the source code of the page. I believe this has directly helped the rankings of my product pages. If everyone has the same content there is really nothing to separate its relevancy in the eyes of the engine and most times the searcher as well. If you are all on the same level where is your competition? What sets you apart from their pages.
Customer reviews, in my opinion, are the holy grail of on page content. If you have no product reviews (tsk tsk) then you can implement in house reviews, like a manager's review or have someone in the company write, in their own words, some informative article between 500-600 words to help give you content that is unique.
Content is king, even duplicate relevant content can be harmful in my opinion. Just because it won't cause a Panda penalty doesn't necessarily mean that the content isn't negatively effecting your SEO.
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RE: Is <title>different from <h1> and "meta tag title"?</title>
I just moved out of Volusion, and yes, there are some issues with that platform, specifically URL structure, that make optimizing a pain. Ryan gave you awesome instructions. I would just say do not use the custom meta tag field, it is buggy and creates issues sometimes.
URL text is what shows after the .com/ but before the p/1234.htm
Photo Alt text is your alt image tag
meta tag description is your meta description
The meta tags override is kind of buggy, I wouldn't use it.
There are no automated h1 tags on product pages, so I used to add them manually at the top of the Product Description box. I would just copy the product name and throw an h1 tag around it. The same for h2,3, and 4. For some reason Volusion doesn't automate that.
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RE: Does a publicly available PDF embed impact Uniqueness
If the PDF is available in other places, then it could be considered duplicate content. If you want to prevent that then no index the PDF. Unless the PDF is something you want to rank for.
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RE: SEO SEA strategy
Hi Leonie,
I hate organic cannibalization. The company I am working for now had a monthly AdWords spend of 100k and 0 organic rankings. Of course, you need an AdWords campaign, but you shouldn't sacrifice the organic rankings to have a productive campaign.
I cleansed the AdWords account of everything I wanted to rank for organically. As the CTR increased organically the AdWords spend decreased. If the key term is on page 1 organically and paid you will exponentially increase your CTR, however you want to attract those clicks organically because CTR is important to your rankings.
Is the conversion rate higher through paid traffic? Just out of curiosity is the AdWords campaign affecting the conversion rate of organic traffic?
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RE: How to stop crawls for product review pages? Volusion site
I did that in my Volusion store. I also added ReviewNew.asp?ProductCode= as a parameter in Google Webmaster Tools. Do you have an enabled mobile site as well? If you do there are several 404 errors that you will start to see from there. Make sure you are adding parameters accordingly. I am not sure if Volusion has started offering their responsive templates yet, but if they have I would see if you can implement that over the mobile site.
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RE: Does adding relevant keywords to social postings help with SEO?
Facebook and Twitter are no follow links, which means that there is no benefit at all to your link profile. I agree with Robert mostly. Since these links are no follow, the key terms will only help if users are searching the respective social media platforms for your product. The benefit to SEO from Social networks comes solely from the trust factor social signals send.
High engagement tells the engines that you are a reputable business, and, as we continue through 2015 most SEOs expect these social signals to increase in importance. I would recommend that you use your social media to build popularity and increase your audience. Stuffing your pages with keywords will have absolutely no effect on your SEO rankings.
The exception to this is Google Plus. Posts on Google Plus can influence the SERPs of people who are in your circles. For example, when I am logged into my MCC account and I search for one of my key terms, I often see my Google plus posts in the results. Other than that, there is no benefit to that platform either.
Here is another post with some more information I might have missed. Hope that helps!
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RE: How to stop crawls for product review pages? Volusion site
No you should be fine
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RE: Best Name for Business and Backlinks / SEO
I think you have the jist of it. Ryan did a really good job of breaking it down and making what I was trying to say a little clearer. Without knowing specifically what your domain is I cannot tell you whether or not I think it is best practice. And at the end of the day, you have to make the decision that best suits your business and strategy. I only recommend, like Ryan said, using the name on your business cards and letterhead. Branding is very important.
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RE: Ecommerce filter views, URLs and the SEO implications
You can set up Canonical tags in your template. Usually the default is to canonical the page's URL, but if you create the canonical tag to the main page, you should be ok. It will help reduce duplicate content and tell google that you want them to pay attention to the content and structure of your main page.
I would also set parameters in GWT, this will help reduce errors, like 404 errors if product options change in the future. When you are using dynamic URL structure like this, it also helps Google understand and read them better. I would implement both of these changes. Depending on what platform you are in, you should be able to export the URLs to easily import the canonical tags.
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RE: Best Name for Business and Backlinks / SEO
The difference is web mentions vs Backlinks. If someone mentions your name, Blue Widgets Foundation, that is valuable in its own way, where as if you were using anchor text it would more likely be for a term you are trying to rank for, like a product or converting term. Not that you couldn't link to your name, because you can. Web Mentions are kind of how engines gauge the popularity of your brand name, and back linking is used to increase the rank of a particular key term and domain authority. Does that make sense?
So, it would be like saying "You can find household widgets (Backlink using key term) crafted by the Blue Widget Foundation (web mention - increases brand value and awareness)"