David,

This looks very interesting. I am running a test on the results now and can already see errors in the list above that I also noticed. Thanks for your input and information about the feed checker. This will certainly get me going in the right direction.

Best Regards,

Josh

Hello Noamflint,

Getting the "likes" seems to be not as important as getting "shares". Having shares over likes correlates with higher rankings in the top 30 results.

I believe that having more on-page likes or tweets could motivate a person to like/tweet/share the content. Visually seeing that a page has hundreds or thousands of people liking an piece of content usually I am a bit more interested in reading more.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/facebook-twitters-influence-google-search-rankings

Hello David,

Currently all the products are have been assigned a google product category.

For example, Electronics > Audio > Audio Players & Recorders

The products all have designated unique product identifiers.

For example, Google: [g:brand] & Google: [g:mpn]

When uploading the XML feed to Google Merchant Center, data quality is good and no warnings are recognized. All products within the feed are being disallowed.

I am still wonder if this is a issue with the having refurbished products previously being labeled as "new". All refurbished have been disabled from site so the new feed only contains new products. After making adjustments the feed is basically being denied.

Here is the XML feed URL: http://www.retrohomeaudio.com/gmerchantcenter.en.us.xml

Thanks for Inquiry!

I have noticed Google Merchant Center has been making many changes of over the last month. Feeds can now be optimized for certain product attributes. The dilemma currently is that I have a Google Merchant Center Data feed that shows zero warnings and that the data quality is good.  Unfortunately, the entire feed has been disapproved. Across many other websites that I noticed the same issues, I have been able to fix all warnings and the feeds are taken perfectly. This one sites issues are eluding me.

Anybody have any suggestions or experience dealing with this problem?

Possible issues I have looked into but could be affecting feed.

Merchant Center Guidelines have been reviewed multiple, multiple times and here is what I have found.

1. Website has limited duplicate content taken from distributors product listings (I have fought a unending battle with site owner to make all product content original)

2. Refurbished Products Issue: The sites feed has listed all products as "new". I found some of the product content in the site had "refurbished" listed. The guidelines state that products must be listed & marked as refurbished in the feed. To overcome this issue I disabled all refurbished products and resubmitted the feed. This did produce a good approved data feed.

I agree with Andy, www - non www doesn't matter. I would go with a redirect to the non www since most of your links don't include it. I also recommend along with the 301 redirect utilizing the canonical tag and setting the preferences in Google webmaster tools.(what we do). If your using a Linux based server here is the .htaccess code to redirect to the non www (be sure to place it at the top of the .htaccess)

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^yoursite.co.uk$
RewriteRule (.*) http://yoursite.co.uk/$1 [R=301,L]

(you may already have done this since you mentioned that the site currently resolves to the non www version, but I included it for anyone who may be considering it).If it's not feasible to utilize the .htaccess still use the webmaster tools and canonical options at the very least:

As for the drop in rankings I personally noticed a few of my stores dropped in page rank recently around the same time Google released it's Panda updates. These stores were placed into a link building software that a company I used to work for created. I suspect that since a good chunk of these links were distributed onto blogs that were spam in nature, this may be the cause of the drop, but it's not for certain. So if you participated in some gray or black link building in the past with your site then this could be the reason as mentioned in this article [As for the drop in rankings I personally noticed a few of my stores dropped in page rank recently around the same time Google released it's Panda updates. These stores were placed into a link building software that a company I used to work for created. I suspect that since a good chunk of these links were distributed onto blogs that were spam in nature, this may be the cause of the drop, but it's not certain. So if you participated in some gray or black link building in the past with your site then this could be the reason as mentioned in this article http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2067687/Google-Panda-Update-Say-Goodbye-to-Low-Quality-Link-Building Best of luck!">http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2067687/Google-Panda-Update-Say-Goodbye-to-Low-Quality-Link-Building](I agree with Andy, www - non www doesn't matter. I would go with a redirect to the non www since most of your links don't include it. I also recommend along with the 301 redirect utilizing the canonical tag and setting the preferences in google webmaster tools.(what we do). If your using a Linux based server here is the .htaccess code to redirect to the non www (be sure to place it at the top of the .htaccess) RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^yoursite.co.uk$ RewriteRule (.*) http://yoursite.co.uk/$1 [R=301,L] (you may already have done this since you mentioned that the site currently resolves to the non www version, but I included it for anyone who may be considering it).If it's not feasible to utilize the .htaccess still use the webmaster tools and canonical options at the very least: <link rel= "Search Engine Watch Panda Update")

Best of luck!

The code should definitely go into the websites root directory's .htaccess, however .htaccess can be weird, a few days ago I ran into a similar issue with a client's website, and I was able to remedy the issue with a variation of the code.

index Redirect RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /([^/]+/)index.(php|html|htm|asp)\ HTTP/ RewriteRule ^(([^/]+/))index.(php|html|htm|asp)$ http://yoursite.com/$1 [R=301,L]

If you give me the URL for the site I will take a look at it and let you know what would be feasible.

@Dan

Thanks for your reply.  It seems like there are lots of different ways to solve this problem.  I just watched this video on Matt Cutt's blog where he discusses his preference for 301 redirects over rel canonical tag.

Where would you say your solution fits in?

sorry about the delay of this response, i didn't realize the that you were asking me a question right away. When placing the code I provided in my previous answer this will cause a 301 perminant redirect to the original URL. That's actually what the

[R=301,L]

portion of the code is stating (R) redirect (301) status is referring to. After reviewing the Matt Cutts video, I realize that I should have asked you if you were operating on a Linux server  that you had root access to. We actually utilize both redirects and canonical tags since it was recommended by the on-page optimization reports. Heck Google uses them, I would assume because it's easier for the user to be referred to a single page URL. Obviously though if you don't have server header access, and are not familiar with .htaccess (you can accidentally break your site) then the canonical solution is appropriate

For dynamic pages that contain a ? in the URL

To specify a canonical link to the page http://www.example.com/product.php?item=apple-ipod, create a  element as follows:

Copy this link into the  section of your site.

Copy this link into the  section of all non-canonical versions of the page, such as http://www.example.com/product.php?item=apple-ipod&sort=price.

For static pages

To specify a canonical link to the page http://www.example.com/apple-ipod, create a  element as follows:

Copy this link into the  section of your site.

Here is a link to Webmaster Tools about rel=canonical - http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=139394

This is correct, Rand Fishkin actually did a blog post a few years back stating that it is more valuable to have a blog located in the site's sub directory as apposed to a sub domain. So I would assume that if your creating site that will encourage links to it, it would be more beneficial to create it in the subdirectory so that the popularity will be transferred to the master domain.

Odd enough I just recently answered this question. The SEOmoz crawler is correct, because without a redirect you will be able to access both versions of the page in your browser.

www.yoursite.com/

www.yoursite.com/index.html

To resolve this issue simply rewrite the index.html to the root url by placing the following code into your .htaccess file into your root directory.

Options +FollowSymlinks                                                                                                            RewriteEngine on

Index Rewrite                                                                                                                                RewriteRule ^index.(htm|html|php) http://www.yoursite.com/ [R=301,L]                                      RewriteRule ^(.*)/index.(htm|html|php) http://www.yoursite.com/$1/ [R=301,L]

You can also do the same with the index file in any subdirectories that you might create, by simply placing a .htaccess into those sub directories and using variations of the above code. This is how you create nice tight URLs without the duplicate content issue that look like - http://www.semclix.com/design/business/

Here's the .htaccess rewrite command that you can use for the index.html redirect -

Options +FollowSymlinks                                                                                                   RewriteEngine on

Index Rewrite                                                                                                                   RewriteRule ^index.(htm|html|php) http://www.amarasoftware.com/ [R=301,L]              RewriteRule ^(.*)/index.(htm|html|php) http://www.amarasoftware.com/$1/ [R=301,L]

We set  up our site to utilize a index redirect for all of our sub directories as well, so with this method you simply name your sub directories to match the url path that you desire. Each sub directory has it's own index which you redirect with a variation of the above code. By doing this you can have nice clean url paths like http://www.semclix.com/design/ecommerce/ - and mitigate the duplicate content issue. We hope that this helps.