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I have to develop a strategy for link building.

The SEO guy I have been speaking with has started putting links on .edu sites etc .

To me - this "stinks" of manipulating the search engines - which I know we will get stung by at some point.

I hope this isn't standard practice - but I don't know what the best way to improve rankings in terms of links etc.

We sell health products and are starting to put out 3-4 high quality articles per week.

Ideas?

Kind Regards

Martin

I'm a bit divided about the URL structure for ecommerce sites.

I'm using Magento and I have Canonical URLs plugin installed. My question is about the URL structure and length.

1st Way: If I set up Product to have categories in the URL it will appear like this

mysite.com/category/subcategory/product/  - and while the product can be in multiple places , the Canonical URL can be either short or long.

The advantage of having this URL is that it shows all the categories in the breadcrumbs ( and a whole lot more links over the site ) .  The disadvantage is the URL Length

2nd Way: Setting up the product to have no category in the URL

URL will be  mysite.com/product/

Advantage: short URL.  disadvantage - doesn't show the categories in the breadcrumbs if you link direct.

Thoughts?

I still think the better option is to have 1 URL.  I was using the root URL for products ( effectively 1 URL ) and not having the category in the URL and my SEO was doing well - BUT I wanted the Categories to be displayed in Google as clickable - so I changed to the canonical method having different URLs with 1 Canonical. Over a couple of months my SEO suffered terribly - some categories in the top 10 down to 20-30 . I have just implemented having 1 URL ( with category in it ) - we will see how we go..

yes - sorry , had a brainwave this morning.. I put the offers in conditionally only if there is a ?cur=aud  parameter in the URL. that way there are 2 scenarios:

1. Organic Listings = no currency parameters so no offers shown

2. Google Shopping , forces cur=aud  parameter in the URL so offers ( pricing ) and availability is available to google shopping

I re-submitted .that page about 6 hours ago via webmaster tools .. so fingers crossed.  If there is any reason why you think it wouldn't display snippets for ratings let me know ( I know google change things ALL the time  )

Thanks.  Realistically the Currency specific pages are purely for google shopping to verify the right price corresponds with their experience - so I didn't really need to have offers in the page.

My workaround was to remove the offers in multi currencies for regular page and only show the offers when a currency was selected.  Snippets ( stars ) have returned

Kind Regards
Martin

Why would you canonically link Product pages to the category page?  Of course that is going to disappear the product pages.  Why not just link from the product pages to category pages with a normal link <a>to increase page authority on the category page?</a>