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Background: We have a popular open source e-commerce platform at http://spreecommerce.com.  Right now the documentation is on http://guides.spreecommerce.com.  We have "edge" documentation (for stuff that's not yet released) on http://edgeguides.spreecommerce.com but since it's largely duplicative we've told google not to index any of the edge stuff (via robots.txt). Question: Should we consider moving the guides under the main website under /docs or something like this?  There's a ton of great content that people often read to learn more about the platform.  Seems like we might be diluting our juice a bit to have it on a separate domain.  WDYT?

We're considering changing the URL's for our blog posts and dropping the date information. Ex. http://spreecommerce.com/blog/2012/07/27/spree-1-1-3-released/ changes to http://spreecommerce.com/blog/spree-1-1-3-released/ Based on what I've learned here the new URL is better for SEO but since these pages already exist do we risk a minor loss of Google juice with 301 redirects?  We have a sitemap for the blog posts so I imagine this wouldn't be too hard for Google to learn the new ones.

I recently added meta descriptions to several community-supplied pages for our open source website http://spree.tw/N53HuO Google Webmaster Tools is complaining/warning that the meta descriptions are too short.  The descriptions are being supplied by our users and they typically do not lend themselves to anything much longer than what is being entered already. I was thinking of adding some text to the end of the meta description.  Something like "This is one of many third party extensions for Spree supplied free of charge by our community" or something else like that. Is it acceptable practice to reuse a snippet in your meta description like this?  Do you suggest other alternatives?  Since meta description doesn't affect page rank can I use terms that I'm trying to rank for on my home page without cannibalizing my link juice? TIA, Sean

I've recently made a few changes to my site based on some advice from the seomoz tool.  I've noticed some changes in the traffic data (see attached image) which I can't completely explain. First, the good news is that total organic search visits is up 2%.  I assume this is the most important metric and I'm obviously happy with total increase in organic search.  At the same time the number of number of URL's entered on search is down 1%.  I think this can be explained by the fact that I removed some duplicate pages (like archives that had the same content as the blog post pages, etc.) The part that I don't quite understand is that total number of non paid keywords sending search is down 3%.  That seems like an unexplained decrease that I can't really account for. Any ideas on how to interpret this?  Is it also possible that a single week's results can be misleading about how well your SEO efforts are paying off? 20120711-j4ti8ynwi1hn4rbrsppe167m6.jpg

I noticed that SEOmoz does not have a "root" sitemap called sitemap.xml.  On the other hand, there do appear to be sitemaps for various sections of the such as http://www.seomoz.org/blog-sitemap.xml I was planning on having a root level sitemap that referenced difference sections of my site (blog, support, etc.) but I'm a little concerned that this site itself doesn't seem to be following that practice. Presumably this website is submitting the individual section maps to Google directly since they aren't linkable through sitemap.xml?

Using the SEOMoz pro tools and several of the terms I have listed get a report card of "F" but they also show Google rank of #1, #2.  Is this unusual?  And should I spend a lot of time "fixing" this if we're already ranking high?

We have some e-commerce software with several dozen websites that use our technology.  The websites have links to the developer and design shops that made the site as well as the site itself.  All of these sites are moderated so we don't have to worry about spam. My question is should some or all of these links be rel=nofollow?  The links are definitely pointing to legit development shops but those sites aren't always strictly related to e-commerce or the keywords we're trying to rank for. Any thoughts on how to treat these links?

We have an online store product and we're working on the SEO for our new domain (foo.com in this example.)  Our customers have the ability to change the domain of their store but many of them will likely stick with the subdomains we give them (store1.foo.com) We could potentially have thousands of stores soon using our subdomain.  Each of these stores will have a very small link at the bottom to our own domain but other than this, the content is completely user-generated and not under our control. Are there risks/problems associated with this type of strategy?  If so, could we perhaps avoid them by using robots.txt to block entire site until they change to their own domain? TIA, Sean