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We currently run an e-commerce store that is online only. We do have an office address that I could list for Google Places, but it is not open to visitors so I am not sure if this would contravene the TOS.

At the moment we are in the process of trying to build reviews and Google's revamped 'Places for Businesses' looks like it would be a great tool for monitoring and responding to reviews. From what I can see, though, it is only available to those with a Google Places listing.

I am also looking into independent review services, but typically these cost £100 per month minimum, whereas Places for Business would be free.

Is there a way that we can use Google Places to build reviews, given that we do not have an actual shopfront? If not, does anyone have any advice on how an online only store can build reviews in the same manner using Google's own tools?

Thanks for the suggestion Anders. I have considered this, although other advice suggests googlebot should not be blocked.

I have now managed to get Google analytics set up for the mobile domain. Before I had been relying on webmaster tools which for some reason is reporting that there is no traffic landing on my m.domain.com, whereas GA shows that it is now getting traffic from mobile and not desktop, as desired. So even though the mobile urls are ranking in the desktop results, users are not landing on them.

I posted last month about problems with a mobile site, which is served from a separate URL (m.mydomain.com) as currently responsive design is not an option.

The problem was that the mobile site was being returned in the desktop index along with the desktop site, and the desktop site was being returned in the mobile index instead of the mobile site.

I have therefore implemented rel=canonical and rel=alternate as is advised by Google, but this has stopped the desktop site from appearing in the mobile index, but hasn't caused the mobile site to rank instead.

What should I do now? One idea I have is to remove the rel=canonical and rel=alternate links so that the desktop site ranks in the mobile index again. There is a redirect in place anyway so when people click on a desktop link from a mobile search, they will still be redirected to the mobile equivalent.

I could then set the m.mydomain.com to noindex to stop it from being returned in the desktop results and potentially causing duplicate content issues?

What do you think about this as a work around?

Hi Bridget,

Thanks for your response. Since asking the question I have implemented the advice that you offer.

Should there also be a rel=alternate and rel=canonical on the corresponding homepages?

Yea it's not that easy to just implement a responsive design unfortunately otherwise I would. That is the long term goal but not a realistic option at the moment, so in the meantime I need to solve the problem described.

I have just noticed that the mobile version of my site is sometimes ranking in the desktop serps either instead of as well as the desktop site. It is not something that I have noticed in the past as it doesn't happen with the keywords that I track, which are highly competitive.

It is happening for results that include our brand name, e.g '[brand name][search term]'. The mobile site is served with mobile optimised content from another URL. e.g wwww.domain.com/productpage redirects to m.domain.com/productpage for mobile.

Sometimes I am only seen the mobile URL in the desktop SERPS, other times I am seeing both the desktop and mobile URL for the same product.

My understanding is that the mobile URL should not be ranking at all in desktop SERPS, could we be being penalised for either bad redirects or duplicate content?

Any ideas as to how I could further diagnose and solve the problem if you do believe that it could be harming rankings?

Thanks Doug,

I will perhaps try having the links removed from the product page and see if that helps.

It's possible that we could add the content to the product pages. Perhaps it could be added to the product page first and then posted to the blog with the website being specified as the canonical link.

Thanks for the suggestions about analysing the different traffic once it lands on the product pages,  I hadn't thought of that.

The setup is that content is added to the blog and linked back to the relevant product page. The blog content is tagged with the name of the product and then any content with the specified tag appears on the product page via an rss feed for that tag.

You're right about different stages of the buying cycle and this is why the supporting content is posted. We have tested some CTA banners with reasonable success but need to find a successful way to implement this feature in wordpress without adding an image file each time.

Nope content is written afresh and not copied at all from manufacturers.

There is the option for customers to leave reviews, although currently no scheme.org markup to add it to the metadata.

What makes you think that a 301 to the product pages will stop them from being indexed. I have 301'd other pages in the past without it casing problems?

I'm not sure what's causing the blog posts to outrank - in most cases it is the other way around. I think Google just prefers certain type of content in some instances - e.g if there are not many reviews available for a product but my client has reviewed the product and posted it to their blog, Google will prefer that to the product page itself.

My client has a blog that posts information about products to support its ecommerce store.

The blog's main purpose is to support the products listed on the main website, but it has become so strong that its posts sometimes rank in the SERPS in place of the website product page, which is undesirable.

The blog posts always link to the product that they are supporting. Are there any other methods, other than doing a 301, that could help the product page to rank instead of the blog post?

Sorry for the delayed response Kane.

I have been running it for a while now and seems to be OK. Some speed test results have suggested that it  may have slowed page load times but too early to say yet so will test further, then test again once it is disabled.

Has anyone tried switching on the Photon for Wordpress CDN/image caching feature?

If so, did you experience any problems and have you noticed any improvements?

I noticed by chance that the competitor of an ecommerce client has completely copied one of their product overviews, which is around 500 words in total.

The site does not outrank my client, but could the scraped content be harmful in any other way?

There are no links included within the text so there's no advantage in that sense.

Is Google's algorithm intuitive enough to figure out where the original content came from and attribute it to my client, or is there still the possibility that it could have a negative affect as duplicate content?

Any insights and suggestions much appreciated.

The site I am working on currently has no robots.txt file. However, I have just uploaded a sitemap and would like to point the robots.txt file to it.

Once I upload the robots.txt file, if I allow access to all agents, is this the same as when the site had no robots.txt file at all; do I need to specify crawler access on can the robots.txt file just contain the link to the sitemap?

One of my clients is going through a redesign and I am considering implementing schema.org and GoodRelations as it is an e-commerce website.

The site sells cutting edge products and competes with some of the top tech blogs for rankings on the first page. Essentially, this means that e-commerce product listings are competing with news stories. It is becoming more and more difficult to rank as Google puts more emphasis on news over products in the serps, especially prior to a product release.

My concern is that in implementing schema.org and GoodRelations, detailing to seach engines that this is in-fact a product page and not news could harm rankings.

What opinions do others have on this?

Thanks for all your help guys, much appreciated.

I have an established website that ranks well in Google. However, I have just noticed that no xml sitemap has been registered in Google webmaster tools, so the likelihood is that it hasn't been registered with the other search engines. However, there is an html sitemap listed on the website.

Seeing as the website is already ranking well, do I still need to generate and submit an XML sitemap? Could there be any detriment to current rankings in doing so?

That sounds similar to my experience. I have just realised that what is in fact happening is that it is picking up a different variant each week.

So one week it picks up the black handset in the top 10 results, the next week the black handset has dropped to below 50, but it is picking the white up on the 4th page.

Have you got more than one variant of your product listed at all?

Thanks for your response Vinod.

I have been adding back links over time so I'm not sure why it is so erratic.

One of the companies that I work for sells the latest smartphones.

It ranks fairly well for key terms in an extremely competitive field. Recently the rankings of one particular handset have been extremely erratic and do not follow the pattern of other products, I am wondering if anyone can offer some insight as to why this is happening?

When the handset was first announced, it ranked fairly well (20th). This is good when you bare in mind that it is an ecommerce site competing with top tech sites. Prior to release, the ranking gradually declined to 33rd. I believe this may be due to reviews being publsihed (as a result of review handsets being sent out prior to release) as Google has started to favour reviews and news updates.

I have seen a similar pattern with other handsets, reviews and news are favoured by Google prior to release, but once the product is available, my rankings rise and remain on the first page provided that links are still coming in.

However, the rankings of this handset dropped from 27th to below 50th upon launch. The next week the ranking rose from >50th to 7th, dropped to below 50th again the following week, rose back to 9th the week after and has now dropped again to below 50th. These are by far the biggest changes in rankings I have seen on a week to week basis.

The page has a strong link profile in order to achieve such a high ranking in the first place. With this being the case I have no idea why ranking can drop off so much in the space of a week?

Update: I forgot to mention initially that I have the variant listed twice, one for each colour variant. All content is the same apart from the colour being altered in the appropriate places. This has not been a problem in the past, but perhaps it is due to recent changes to Google algorithm?

Thanks Keri

I'm still looking into it at the moment Keri, although I haven't seen any negative affects so far.

Thanks for the suggestion.

The Google bot fetches it successfully. Where would it display the error being triggered?

Not yet, thanks for the suggestion. I will have a look into it.

When I check the link metrics for my product pages in OSE, it shows a message saying that the page redirects to our custom error page. This page was recently created to display when there is an error with the website.

Do I need to be concerned that OSE is seeing all product pages as redirecting to this error page? Will it affect page authority etc,?

I have attached a screen shot of the message that OSE displays for reference.

YWbpM.jpg

Thanks David, appreciate your advice.

One of the sites that I work on has a high turnover of products as it sells cutting-edge technology products that quickly become outdated. For each product it is important to build a strong link profile as the competition is very high. I am therefore reluctant to remove pages once products have been discontinued (typically after 6-12 months). However, I do not want discontinued products to appear alongside the latest products as this will hinder the customer experience.

Is it worth me finding a way to archive the old products, so as to maintain the links that have been built up?

Yes, thank you.

I have the Yoast plugin installed but must have missed the option when settings up.

I have been trying to research adding ping services to the default list in wordpress, which only includes http://rpc.pingomatic.com/

A lot of the articles that I have come across seem to be quite old, can anyone tell me if this is still relevant and if so, which services do you find to be worthwhile using?

Thanks

Thanks Keri.

I did think perhaps it was something to do with that because the views starting coming in immediately after the exclusive content went up. I checked the homepage and couldn't see my blog there anywhere though, even when logged out of wordpress.

The strange thing is that while it shows my total views have had a massive increase, individual views have not gone up, so it's as if the extra views have not actually come to the blog, not even the homepage. If my blog was featured on the wordpress homepage, do you think each impression could be counted as a view? Perhaps that would explain all the extra views without extra traffic.

The influx of views has dropped off again now, the wordpress.com referrals ran for 7 days in total, peaking on the 3rd day and then gradually declining. All in all a nice problem to have provided that it's not a malicious attack!

Yes that's correct, on wordpress.com rather than wordpress.org and on the wordpress servers.

I'm glad at this stage that it is on wordpress.com instead of self-hosted as the traffic levels probably would have taken it down by now otherwise.

Just seems strange that the referrals are being shown to come from wordpress.com itself.

It's the wordpress analytics I'm using so I can't drill down into anything more specific unfortunately.

I can't filter out my own location but traffic has jumped from 3-4k views per day to 18k views, then 72k view and looks like today's views will even eclipse the 72k from yesterday.

No the site isn't monetized so no increase in ad revenue - it's a wordpress.com install.

The referring link just shows up as wordpress.com, but when I click through I can't see a link to my blog on the wordpress homepage.

Do you think it could be bots or a malicious attack? Surely if it was bots it would at least show up as views of the homepage?

My Wordpress traffic has hit an all time high over the last few days - in the last 48 hours I've had as many views as the last two months combined.

This huge spike in traffic has coincided with a great piece of exclusive content that went up, but I wouldn't expect the traffic to be nearly as high as this.

The strange thing is that all the extra traffic seems to be referred from Wordpress.com, however, I cannot drill down to a more specific URL. Also, the referrals do not seem to translate into page views of the homepage, nor a particular article.

Can anyone offer any insight into this situation?

Thanks

Thanks for the feedback guys, will give your suggestions a try.

Hi,

I've just run an SEOMOZ Pro scan for the first time and it is picking up duplicate content errors from the RSS feed. For some reason it seems to be picking up two feeds, for example:

http://blog.clove.co.uk/2009/05/13/htc-touch-diamond2-review/feed/

http://blog.clove.co.uk/2009/05/19/htc-touch-diamond2-review-2/feed/

Does anyone know why this is happening and how I can resolve this?

Thanks

Thanks for the reply, sorry it's taken me a while to respond.

I've used a variety of PR sites for the best part of a year now so it seems strange that barely any of them are being picked up.

Hi,

Over the last year I have used a range of different PR sites to post news articles that link back to various pages on my site. However, barely any show up as link backs on Open Site Explorer, neither follow nor nofollow links.

Can anyone explain why this is and whether or not the dofollow links count towards SEO if they are not picked up by OSE?