Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Calling all those with ecommerce SEO chops! What are the high impact tasks that you would always start out your new campaigns with? I've got this far in my thinking: Identifying query classes, identifying the intent of each query class and setting up ranking indices ensuring templated META page titles match the most valuable query syntax identify any issues with crawl budget that might prevent deep product page indexing
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??? Hoping this can be one of those discussion threads that is so useful people bookmark it for future reference! Many thanks!

Hi, I have a new client that has pagination handled incorrectly on their website.... They have it setup as follows: example.com/article?story=cupcake-news&page=1 example.com/article?story=cupcake-news&page=2 example.com/article?story=cupcake-news&page=3
etc etc rel=canonical from page 2 to page 1
rel=canonical from page 3 to page 1
etc etc i.e. they aren't using rel=prev, rel=next To get them to invest in the development time need to change this I need to explain to the client how what they have is negatively affecting things? Anyone? Thanks in advance!

I'm hoping that Mozzers can weigh in with any recent experiences with eCommerce SEO..... I like to assume (perhaps incorrectly) that Google's 'Quality' filters (formerly known as Panda) have evolved with some intelligence since Panda first launched and started penalising eCommerce sites for having thin product pages. On this basis i'd expect that the filters are now less heavy handed and know that product pages with no or little product description on them are still a quality user experience for people who want to buy that product. Therefore my question is this...
Do thin product pages still need noindex given that more often that not they are a quality search result for those using a product specific search query? Has anyone experienced penalty recently (last 12 months) on an ecommerce site because of a high number of thin product pages?

In an interesting study by DeganSEO titled 'Negative Impact of 301 Redirects - A Case Study' a drop of rankings was observed when popular blog posts were redirected to product pages. One hypothesis is that the suppression is due to topical difference between the redirected pages (blog posts) and the target page. The topical difference issue is an interesting one when you consider it in the context of website migrations. We always recommend that 301 redirects are done at a page level and that if an equivalent page doesn't exist to just 301 anyway but to the most logical page. If you think about it Google are likely to frown on this because a) it's not a good experience for the user - 404 would be more accurate for them
b) it's lazy - if you have good content that has gained authority/trust then create the same content on the new site don't trytp pass that to an entirely different page. Thoughts? Experiences?

I'm currently researching this area in order to show to a client that social shares aren't as valuable for SEO as they might think. Can anyone point me in the direction of the best studies done on this topic? Thanks in advance!

I'm wrestling with something that I'm hoping members of the community can provide input on.... I've working with an enterprise level client that is in the business of data capture and distribution. I've diagnosed a clear drop of traffic on May 22nd, i.e a loss of search visibility post Penguin 2.0. Their link profile is big! Discussions with internal stakeholders who have been with the company 10's of years confirm that no "link building" service providers have ever been hired and no over-zealous employee is ever likely to have tried to "do" link building internally. They are just one of those lucky companies that by their nature publish information that people want to link to and share. As a first port of call I've grouped links by anchor text and can see groups of hundreds of matching anchors based on their brand URL and specific page titles. The matching anchors have resulted from big take up of interesting data that they have marketed via press releases. NOT for link purposes. My question is this.... Does the community think or have evidence (or can point me toward any case studies) that show that Press release syndication alone could result in: a) a penguin penalty   or...
b) a devaluing of press release type links during Penguin 2.0 that could have resulted in a loss of search visibility and give the impression of a penalty Your thoughts are much appreciated!

When working on ecommerce websites we insist that product list pages need at least 250 words of copy that is optimised for our keyword phrase ... lets say "17 inch bike frames". So we have some crappy copy written that goes something like this.... "We have a great 17 inch bike frame for you whatever your requirement. Take a look at the frames below .... blah blah blah totally pointless text blah blah blah........." This text is of no use to the user as the page is merely a means of  them getting to a suitable product page. However, the copy is pretty essential if we want to rank well for "17 inch bike frames" and not having copy on product list pages could land us in hot water with Panda ...especially if we have lots of them on a site using the same page template and with no copy on them. Does anyone else feel uneasy with adding this crappy text to pages? It's only there for search engines and that is something that Google say's we shouldn't do but I know for sure they're not going to rank me as well if I don't have it. I'd be interested to hear other people's opinion on this. It's always annoyed me. Does anyone have any good tips for making this type of copy on product list pages less forced and crappy?

Hey guys We think we have been seeing some over-optimisation penalties outside of Penguin updates. One possible penalty seems for over-optimisation on page and one penalty for a page with an over-optimised exact match link profile. Does anyone else suspect, or have seen word elsewhere, that Google's main ongoing algorithm now has Penguin like capabilities and is able to bring over-optimisation penalties without a separate refresh being run?

Hi everyone. I have a client who has a lot of sponsorships etc and therefore a lot of inbound image links (many of them sitewide). Unfortunately most of these don't have alt text, and [img no alt-text] links now make up over 50% of their link profile. Should I be trying to correct this and requesting updates from the people who are linking? Obviously I wouldn't want loads of keyword stuffed alt texts, but maybe I should request alt texts on the brand name or URL instead. Do you think this would make a significant difference and be worth the time it will take to contact all these webmasters? Thanks in advance.

Something I always do to assess how easy/difficult it will be for a clients site to rank against competitors is to compare domain and page authority scores with the scores of the competitors on page 1. This  is great when Moz have spidered my clients site and can provide scores but what about where a clients site is brand new with only a few natural links? Anyone suggest a ball park figures for Domain authority on  brand new websites?

I am working on a site that has a home page containing  2 links to each category page. One of the links is a text link and one link is an image link. I think I'm right in thinking that Google will only pay attention to the anchor text/alt text of the first link that it spiders with the anchor text/alt text of the second being ignored. This is not my question however. My question is about the page rank that is passed to each category page..... Because of the double links on the home page, my reckoning is that  PR is being divided up twice as many times as necessary. Am I also right in thinking that if Google ignore the 2nd identical link on a page only one lot of this divided up PR will be passed to each category page rather than 2 lots ..... hence horribly watering down the 'link juice' that is being passed to each category page?? Please help me win this argument with a developer and improve the ranking potential of the category pages on the site 🙂

I have taken over the SEO for www.domain.net. The way i've inherited the setup is that www.domain.net is 301 redirected to  www.domain.net/index.aspx Looking at top pages and linking root domains in Opensiteexplorer I can see that www.domain.net/index.aspx has 1,006 linking root domains www.domain.net has 806 linking root domains. I assume that www.domain.net is passing the value of it's 806 domain links to www.domain.net/index.aspx via the 301 redirect and because of this would expect www.domain.net/index.aspx to be the strongest page on the site and be the url that ranks in the listings for many relevant searches. It appears however that www.domain.net is what is shown in listings and not www.domain.net/index.aspx ?? Can anyone explain why this might be?? If I do a site: search in Google then www.domain.net is indexed and not www.domain.net/index.aspx ??

OK. I'm working on an international site. The site is setup with folders for UK, US, AU    e.g www.site.com/UK/index.aspx The root  (non folder based) is the international version of the site  e.g www.site.com/index.aspx www.site.com/index.aspx has the lions share of links. Therefore, the pages immediately linked from www.site.com/index.aspx have page rank distributed between them. My UK, US and AU home pages are linked via a country selector  from the www.site.com/index.aspx page via an aspx redirect page that 301's to the appropriate country home page. Therefore the home pages of UK, US, AU are recieving some of the 'juice' that is coming in to www.site.com/index.aspx (but only a fraction via the redirect links) Am I right in thinking that pages on the international version of the site will have much more potential to rank (because of their 'juice') than the pages on UK, US and AU versions of the site? If so, am I right in thinking that these will tend to rank over the equivalent UK, US and AU versions of the pages in each country version of Google despite having set directory level Geo-targetting in GWT?