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Hi Forum, This is a two-part question. The first is: "what may be the cause of some rank declines?" and the second is "how do I bring them back up when the indexed page is the homepage?" Over the last week I noticed some declines in several of my top keywords, many of which point to the site's homepage. The site itself is an eCommerce site, which had less visits last week than normal (holidays it seems, since the data jibes with key dates). Can a decline in traffic cause ranking declines? Any other ideas of where to look? Secondly, for those keywords that link to the homepage, how do we bring these back up since a homepage can't be optimized for every single keyword? We sell yoga products and can't have a homepage that is optimized for keywords like "yoga mat," "yoga blocks," "yoga pilates clothing," and several others, as these are our category pages' keywords. Any thoughts? Thanks!

Hello Forum, We're about to embark on a link building campaign and were curious about how long, on average, it takes to get a response to an email requesting links to our page. We're trying to come up with a timeline estimate for our campaign. Thanks

Hi Forum, Our site has an errant product review module that is resulting in about 9-10 404 errors per day on Google Webmaster Tools. We've found that by changing our product page URLs to only include 2 dashes, the module stops causing 404 errors for that page. Does changing our URL from "oursite.com/girls-pink-yoga-capri.html" to "oursite.com/girlspink-yoga-capri.html" hurt our SEO for a search for "girls pink yoga capri"? If so, by how much (assuming everthing else on the page is optimized properly) Thanks for your input.

Hello Forum, We have just finished completely redoing a website and it seems that for several keywords either the plural or singular version is no longer being displayed in Google search results. For example, we sell yoga products, one of which is a bolster. In the SEO section of Google Analytics, the keyword "bolsters" has held a steady rank while "bolster" lost lots of rank and now no longer shows. Both keywords pointed to the same page and hold nearly equal rank, which has both keywords for "bolster" and "yoga bolster" Any idea what may be going on?

Hello Forum, My team and I have completely redone an eCommerce website, which offers new SEO-friendly URLs. We have also taken care to optimize our product and category pages for specific keywords, so as to keep our regular traffic and increase the long-tail. In the old un-optimized website, many of its Google search results simply took users to the homepage, thus the homepage has a lot of external link juice. Our new site is optimized so that users are taken to the page most relevant to their query. For example (we are a yoga site), with the old site a search for "yoga bolsters" would take visitors to the homepage. Now the search results take the users to the yoga bolster page. These new pages don't have the amount of external links as the new site and I've noticed a decrease in our site's average rank in Google Webmaster Tools 1.Given our new site with its new URLs, should this increase be expected? (we have implemented 301 redirects from the old site to the new) 2. What steps would you take to ensure you keep your rankings with the new site? Are they any special tools you recommend? 3. What the best way to increase the ones that have dropped? Page optimization? Link building? Both?

Hello Forum, My team and I just got through completely redoing an eCommerce website for a yoga company and I noticed that in Google Webmaster Tools our site's average daily position changed from ~25 to ~40 in the last 5-6 days (during this time period we submitted our sitemap). I exported the Webmaster Tools results and found a high number of new keywords (which weren't there pre-launch) related to yoga. However, these keywords are not related to the products we sell. Several of these keywords have positions of 240 or higher and are skewing our avg page rank. These terms include words like "cricket logo," "animal yoga," "dog pose," "cat yoga," We did move our blog into our domain name now and there are some articles related to animal poses. Any thoughts as to what may be going on? Thanks!

Hello Forum, We've re-launched our website with a new, SEO-friendly URL structure. We have also set up 301 redirects from our old URLs to the new ones. Now, is there any benefit to asking those external websites that link to us to update their links with our new URLs? What is the SEO best practice? Thanks for your insight.

Hello Forum, I am working with an eCommerce website (not huge, a site with ~300 products and a blog that is updated every few days) that occasionally adds new products and may make a few large edits per week, if that. Our CMS can automatically generate and submit our sitemap. Over what time interval is should we do this for? Daily, weekly, monthly, etc? Thanks!

Hello Forum, I've been optimizing an eCommerce site and our SEOmoz crawls are favorable for the most part, except for long URLs and overly-dynamic URLs. These issues stem from two URL types: Layered navigation (faceted search) and non-Google internal search results. I outline the issues for each below. We use an SEO-friendly URL structure for our product category pages, but once bots start "clicking" our layered navigation options, all the parameters are appended to our SEO-friendly urls, causing the SEOmoz crawl warnings. Layered Navigation :
SEO-Friendly Category Page:  oursite.com/shop/meditation-cushions.html Effects of layered navigation: oursite.com/shop/meditation-cushions.html?bolster_material_quality=414&bolsters_appearance=206&color=12&dir=asc&height=291&order=name As you can see the parameters include product attributes and page sorts. I should note that all pages generated by these parameters use the element to point back to the SEO-friendly URL We have also set up Google's Webmaster Tools to handle these parameters. Internal Search Function:
Our URLs start off simple: oursite.com/catalogsearch/result/?q=brown. Then the bot clicks all the layered navigation options, yielding oursite.com/catalogsearch/result/index/?appearance=54&cat=67&clothing_material=83&color=12&product_color=559&q=brown. Also, all search results are set to noindex,follow. My question is: Should we worry about these overly-dynamic and long ULR warnings? We have set up canonical elements, "noindex,follow" solutions, and configured Webmaster Tools to handle our parameters. If these are a concern, how would you resolve these issues?

Hello Forum I just worked on redoing an eCommerce website and part of the revisions were to change the site's URL structure. What I'm curious about is how to maintain the external links we had prior to redoing the website so that these external links continue to point to their respective product pages on the new website. From what I understand, you need remap the old links to the new links in your CMS and set up 301 redirects. What's the easiest way to find the all the old link URLs and remap them? Or is there a different, easier way?

Hello Forum , I am working with an online yoga equipment retailer and am trying to select keywords for their homepage <title>. Initially, I focused on 2 keywords: One is a high-level (i.e. not product-specific) keyword, "yoga equipment", that receives 5,400 monthly Google phrase searches per month. The other keyword is a more-specific keyword, "yoga mats", with 60,000 monthly Google searches. </span></p> <p style="color: #5e5e5e;">However, I'm noticing that Google is sending users who use other more-specific keywords to our homepage. For example, our search result for "yoga bolster" (1,900 monthly Google phrase searches) takes visitors to the homepage, not our page dedicated to yoga bolsters (this page is already optimized for the keywords "bolsters, yoga bolsters, etc") We have an optimized yoga mat page in our shop, but Google still sends visitors to the homepage instead.</p> <p style="color: #5e5e5e;">1. Should I add a keywords like "bolster" to the homepage title? Example: "Yoga Mats, Bolsters, Products, and Accessories." Or should I stick to high-level keywords? </p> <p style="color: #5e5e5e;">2. Would it be a good idea to add the word "yoga" to each term: "Yoga Mats, Yoga Bolsters, Yoga Gear and Yoga Accessories"</p> <p style="color: #5e5e5e;">I appreciate the insight and thanks for your time.</p></title>

Hello Forum, My team and I just completely redid a yoga eCommerce site, including its SEO. The old version of the site didn't feature page-specific optimization and, as a result, Google's search results for our keywords almost always directed visitors to the homepage. For example, a Google search for the term "yoga bolster" sent users to the homepage, not the product category page for yoga bolsters. After redoing the site and optimizing specific pages (i.e. the yoga bolster page is now optimized for the keyword "yoga bolster"), the Google search results are still taking users to the homepage, not the optimized page. (i.e. if you search for yoga bolster, find our search result, and click the search result link, you're taken to the homepage, not the bolster page) It's only been about 36 hours since we've launched the new website and submitted it to Google's webmaster tools. Does anyone know why Google is still sending people to our homepage and not the keyword-optimized pages we created? Is this a timing issue?