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Posts made by MonicaOConnor
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RE: Screaming Frog showing 503 status code. Why?
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RE: Need help determining how toxic this backlinking is
These all look like directory listings and guest blog posts. I don't believe they are toxic, but I also don't think they are the best kind of links either. I would have a chat with your seo company and give them the clear understanding of exactly what you want your content to sound like and where you want it to be.
Guest blogging is not an unacceptable form of backlinking. In my opinion it is just not 100% best practice anymore. You want high authority natural links.
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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: What should I do about not found pages?
In this instance, I would remove the URLs from the index. You can do that in GWT. The alternative is to leave them as a 404, but that isn't my preferred method. You don't want to redirect them because they are spammy pages that could potentially negatively affect other pages.
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RE: Hypothetical SEO Question
There is no "penalty" per say for duplicate content. But, if you have the same page in two places they will be competing for a spot in the SERPs. The best way to handle that is a cross domain canonical tag.
I agree with Doug however. I think that there is more value having this information on your current site. Is there a particular reason you want them separate?
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RE: How many redirects are too many?
It depends on how the redirects are done. If you do them in the htaccess file and they are dynamic, not manual, you can have thousands. What Kevin is referring to is how many times can you redirect the same page. You can't redirect page 1 to page 2 to page 3 to page 4 then to page 5. But you can redirect multiple pages on you site.
I understand from your previous post you are talking about your blog. You will be fine redirecting these URLs to static URLs. Do them through the HTAccess file. After about 6 months the old URLs should have fallen off and been removed from the index so you can move the 301 redirects. If anything gets missed you will find it in your GWT 404 errors.
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RE: Social widgets, iFrames, Duplicate content and more...
If all you can see in the source code is the widget, then that is all that the bots will see. If this widget is helpful for your searchers, then that will be the benefit. Google will only see that there is a widget on your site. It will not see any content that isn't in the source code. If you want the content to be seen, an RSS feed might be a better option.
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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: E-Commerce Cart Migration SEO Advice
You are correct in keeping information the same. You have to redirect the URLs if they change. If you don't do that you will be starting at 0 with ranking power. I am not sure that you will be able to move with out changing URLs completely. The set up could be different, there could be a different protocol (PHP, HTM, etc). Make sure any 301 redirects are done properly.
I am not sure how to handle the second part of your question as I have 0 experience in that area.
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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: Is there a way to track mobile rankings vs desktop rankings in Moz?
The way that I tracked mobile performance (before my site became responsive) was in GWT. If you go to Search Traffic > Search Queries, at the top of the page select filters, Search > Mobile. This will give you a pretty broad scope of where some of your key terms fall. Here is what you should see.
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RE: Dynamic vs. static URLs
I look at the URL. I don't know if it is because I am trained to, or because I copy and paste a lot. Using Dynamic URLs means setting parameters in GWT, it means constantly watching for 404 errors. In my opinion it isn't worth the time and effort where a static URL is implemented once, and you move on with the rest of your page.
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RE: Why are my 301 redirects and duplicate pages (with canonicals) still showing up as duplicates in Webmaster Tools?
Do you have more than 1 canonical tag on any of these pages? If you do, Google will ignore any tag.
Have you set the preferred version of your site? Is it possible that Google sees both the www and non www versions of your site?
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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: 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: Webmaster Tools Search Queries Data Drop
You don't need to add a secondary dimension. I just look at my traffic. For example, I had 1627 Google Organic visits last week. 60% were new sessions, or unique visits. That tells me that I should see about 975 clicks for the week in GWT.
I am not sure what is causing the discrepancy. In my opinion the issue isn't with what is in GWT. The update they submitted didn't affect accuracy of data, it was merely implementing the ability to compare data sets over a period of time.
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RE: Webmaster Tools Search Queries Data Drop
What is your server response error? How about the sitemap warning? I would be interested in seeing if the data in Panguin Tool showed anything weird going on with the update in the middle of February. What Google has indexed vs crawled shouldn't matter to your impressions and clicks.
Usually, I have more data in GWT than in analytics. I would go to Acquisition - Source/Medium and check the amount of unique traffic (not the total sessions, just the new sessions) from Google Organic and compare that to what you see in GWT. They should be more closely related to each other. My numbers never match exactly.
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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: Webmaster Tools Search Queries Data Drop
Do you have a screen shot you can add by chance? Are you looking at your Source/Medium or are you looking at Channels in Analytics? If you are looking at overall organic traffic in analytics you will see a discrepancy because it will include information from Bing and Yahoo as well.
Remember also that GWT doesn't account for "not provided" searches and usually only count unique clicks.
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RE: Changing 301s or using 302s after a relaunch?
Above everything, Google looks for your user experience. If you have a ton of 302 redirects you will have duplicate content errors, If you start changing 301 redirects you will eventually create a spider web that is hard to navigate. If you set up your 301 redirects and have to change a few, you should be ok. If you set up 5000 redirects and end up changing 4500 of them or creating duplicate 301 redirects you will eventually have really slow page speeds and bad user experience which Google will recognize and not like.
302 redirects are not common or best practice. I would avoid them all together.
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RE: Webmaster Tools Search Queries Data Drop
GWT did update their reporting features and has been slow to release it to everyone. There has also been some rumors surfacing on an update the second week of February that really impacted Ecommerce websites. It had a lot to do with responsive websites. Do you use Panguin tool at all? I would start there to see if your drop in traffic has anything to do with some of the updates. If it is just misinformation in GWT, then you should see some things leveling out over the next two weeks. The update isn't complete yet, but lots of people lost days of information.
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RE: Changing 301s or using 302s after a relaunch?
Are you doing these redirects in the HTAccess file? If so, you should be able to change them at a later date without any issue. A 302 redirect is not going to help you in this situation. Using a 302 will still allow the engines to crawl the old URLs which will lead to duplicate content errors and tons of problems ranking pages in the future.
Whittie is correct, you should be able to go back and edit 301s individually after you dynamically redirect them. It depends on your CMS or Platform how easy that will actually be.
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RE: Removing phone number from GMB = lower rankings?
In my opinion it would be a bad trust signal to remove the phone number from this page. If you wanted to do it however, you would just go into the "manage my page" option and delete the number. Here are the instructions.
Again, this is not really best practice, and can have some negative effects. Consistency across the web is important, and I would think it is even more important in any Google Property.
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RE: Company FB Page Automatically Friend-Requesting Admins' Contacts
It sounds like there was the option to find similar friends or get friend suggestions. Are you sure the admins didn't reach out to their friends? FaceBook doesn't generally send automated friend requests.
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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: My website does not allow all crawler to crawl, Now my question is that whether i need to give permission to moz crawler if yes then whaat is moz bot name?
I don't know that you need to add permission, can you add a picture of your robots.txt file?
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RE: Is it okay to design different mobile site for different browsers
Generally, you want to provide the same experience for all customers. There could be some compatibility issues between browsers, so if you had to do something technical for compatibility that should be ok.
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RE: Is there an issue if we show our old mobile site to Google & new site to users
If you have a new mobile site, best practice is to 301 redirect the old site to the new site. If you do that, the value of your links will pass to the new mobile site which will help you maintain your rankings. Laura is correct, what you are proposing is black hat and very risky.
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RE: Adding content to an eCommerce site
Do you have a Knowledge Base or FAQ section on your site? I would add content like this in one of those places. If you don't have something like this built in, I would recommend using the category pages. This kind of content is great for user experience. My only hesitation would be that more likely than not, most of the content would be below the fold, and it might not get as much view as it would if it had its own page on your site.
Can you split content on your category pages? Maybe show one paragraph above the products and the rest below. Or, if you can add JS to the page, use a script to hide a portion of the content behind a read more button. Ideally, content like this should really have a page all its own. If you can manipulate how content is displayed on the category pages, you should be able to make it work there as well.
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RE: Link building… how to get high rewarding links?
Everyone here has some great advice and tips. I tend to disagree with a few of the ideas here. First, I don't think that having links from people that you have built relationships with is a terrible thing. If it is done properly it could probably generate some great referral traffic for you. That is very important. There is no link juice passed if there is no traffic.
You absolutely have to make sure that you watch the anchor text, but you also what to do a quick check of their link profile. As the Penguin updates are becoming more evolved, you can be penalized for just being in a bad link neighborhood. I would just run their domain through Open Site Explorer and see if there is anything that makes you nervous.
If these are sites that are related to yours, and they have the potential to generate good, engaged traffic, I think you don't have too much to worry about.
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RE: Ranking on google but not Bing?
How are your rankings in Google? Usually a site well optimized and ranking well in Google also does well in Bing. Do you have a Bing Webmaster Tools account? Sometimes Bing rejects sitemaps, you would get a message in your Webmaster Tools account.
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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: Consolidating two different domains to point at same site, duplicate content penalty?
If you are 301 redirecting these sites eventually the older URLs will no longer be indexed, leaving only the one site with it's unique content. You don't have to worry about duplicate content in this instance.
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RE: Duplicate Multi-site Content, Duplicate URLs
My first thought is that rewriting your product descriptions will not be as effective as getting user generated content, like product reviews, on your site. Even if you rewrite the content, it will still be the same context and it won't offer anything uniquely valuable to the searchers. You need uniquely valuable content, not just uniquely written content.
My second though is that flattening the URLs is not the best way to do that. Your category and subcategory names should be structured to help you get as much information into your URL as possible. You don't want to stuff them with keywords, but you want them to be progressively descriptive.
For example,
Category = Women's Pants / Subcategory = Boot Cut Denim / Product Name = Riders by Lee Women's Dark Wash Boot Cut Jeans
URL - www.mystore.com/womens-pants/bootcut-denim/riders-by-lee-womens-dark-wash-boot-cut-jeans.cfm
as opposed to
www.,mystore.com/riders-by-lee-womens-dark-wash-boot-cut-jeans.cfm
The first example would be the best possible URL format. Taking out the categories would only reduce your ability to target keywords effectively.
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RE: Now that Google will be indexing Twitter, are Twitter backlinks likely to effect website rank in the SERPs?
I think what makes this different is that the feed will be direct and live. I don't necessarily believe the links created in Twitter will be a good source of backlinks as they will continue to be no follow links. I do however see the face that Twitter posts can rank on the first page of Google as an extremely useful conversion tool.
If I can tweet a link to my site advertising a promotion, and that can feed to the first page of Google faster than my meta description can be recrawled and updated, that will still bring valuable traffic to my site. I am excited to see what kind of benefit this can have to SEO and marketing as a whole. I doubt it will really affect link building at its core. The value is going to come from traffic increase and the ability to get your content in front of searchers faster.
I do however, think that the way results are displayed will be heavily modified in the coming weeks. I think that the massive amount of data filtered through Twitter daily will have to be filtered and funneled for user experience. If the first page of Google becomes infiltrated with Tweets, it will probably only cause searchers to have to go to page 2 and 3 to find the results they are looking for.
In my industry, 5 of the 8 manufacturers Twitter profiles and tweets have already pushed my competition off of page one for branded searches. While I am not off page 1 yet, I fear that it could happen. I definitely foresee a lot more fine tuning ahead.
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RE: Site wide content like "why choose us" just above the footer on every single page
That all depends on what you are using it for. If you are in a market where your service or product can be found anywhere, than something that sets you apart from your competition should be highlighted in as many places as you possibly can. Best practice would be to incorporate this on an about us page, or add a tab to the top nav bar that would allow your customers to see it and then go to a page for the details. I do not like the idea of duplicate content on every page. I don't believe it increases the user experience and it definitely loses its SEO value.
For the purposes of standing apart from the competition, I would create a page highlighting what separates you from your competitors and then add it to your top nav bar. Call it "Why Choose Us" or "About Us", or even "What Makes Us Different". Something to catch the Users eye and give them an idea of what separates your company from everyone else selling your product or service.
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RE: Duplicate content issues from mirror subdomain : facebook.domianname.com
Sounds like someone doing off page optimization created a subdomain for the purposes of increasing domain authority by posting a ridiculous amount of social posts through a subdomain. This is extremely black hat and that is why it is on a subdomain, to protect your root. I have come across this issue on blackhatworld.com.
I recommend you shut down the subdomain immediately and ask whoever is handling your off page optimization what in the world they were doing. I doubt it is an older subdomain because this is a fairly recent practice. I would recommend getting rid of it fairly quickly and making sure that there are not many links between the sub and the root domain.
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RE: Rank product pages
I would add to Rob's suggestions that you need to make sure you have user generated content on these pages. If you do not add reviews to your pages you will have a very difficult time ranking. You will have to make sure that you have something uniquely valuable to offer your customers, something they can't find on any other site, and that is why user generated content is so important on product pages. You can only rewrite a product description so many ways. Chances are, your static content will not provide anything to a customer they can't find elsewhere. With a low DA in a competitive market, UGC is your best friend.
I would also add that it helps to have a video or two on your product pages. Add a video on how the product works or record an in house review of the product. It will really help your rankings and user experience.
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RE: Why do my search results differ from MOZ's rank tracker
I would just add that no tool is perfect. Discrepancies happen. Keyword tools are meant to give you competitive analysis and show your progress over time. Location can be making differences, as well as the time of day the queries are happening. The snapshot you are given isn't necessarily inaccurate. There are so many factors that change the SERPs, it is hard to always have the perfect result.
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RE: Why is Google Webmaster Tools showing 404 Page Not Found Errors for web pages that don't have anything to do with my site?
These extensions look like they are attachments. Go into GWT, click on the 404 link, then a box with pop up, click on the "Linked From" tab.. Go to the page and Ctrl U to see the source code. Do a CTRL F and search for the broken link. When you find it in your source code you should be able to figure out what's triggering that response. If you can't find the URLs in your source code, mark them as fixed and it should take care of the problem. Especially if they are older. It looks like it could be a shipment status, a product out of stock message, and a PDF of train schedules.
I would check the linked from pages and make sure that there isn't some erroneous code that is creating a page when it doesn't need to.
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RE: Other Visit in the Dashboard
Other traffic usually includes traffic that Google can't pinpoint, like referral clicks from no follow links, some clicks from Bing PPC, things of that sort. It is not usual for it to include traffic from AdWords. Google wants you to be able to analyze that data because they don't want to discourage you from spending.
If you want to be sure, make sure that your analytics code is correct, and maybe implement some of the conversion tracking tools in AdWords. Here is some detail on that.
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RE: 301 redirect question
I see the points that each of these people are making.
The general rule of thumb is that if there is any chance that link will be clicked on you should redirect it. Redirecting the page won't hurt you, but it could hurt you not to redirect it. Do you know if the page ranks at all?
I don't see the harm in redirecting it, it is better to be safe than sorry.
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RE: SEO Friendly Review websites?
Google plus reviews are great, so are reviews on BizRate, YotPo or any other 3rd party site where reviews can be left. Have you thought about getting involved with Google Trusted Stores? That is an awesome review system.
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RE: SEO transfer to new website
Redirecting the old URLs with 301s is the best way to carry over SEO value. You will transfer most of your link juice and help get traffic to your new pages.
As far as the PHP vs HTM, I don't believe it matters that much, I will say that your new URL structure is probably a little better than your current structure. The more information you can fit naturally into your URL is important, so having the product and the name is better than having just the name.