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It may allow more of URLs to get crawled, resulting in more URLs in the search index, hopefully resulting in more visitors. Here is what Google says about sitemaps:

Sitemaps are a way to tell Google about pages on your site we might not otherwise discover. In its simplest terms, a XML Sitemap—usually called Sitemap, with a capital S—is a list of the pages on your website. Creating and submitting a Sitemap helps make sure that Google knows about all the pages on your site, including URLs that may not be discoverable by Google's normal crawling process.

read the whole post here.

If you can't find them, you could put a disallow in your robots.txt files to keep them from being crawled.

you can use:

 <meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow, noodp" />

If you are talking about the shopping cart itself, after folks put stuff in it: I would make that a noindex. I get paranoid about security and privacy so I would keep anything that is personalized in any way out of the search index. You don't want a link to a shopping cart with specific shopper id to get into Google. Even if the shopper id doesn't tie back to any personal data, you could have multiple people with the same cart id.

Anyway... I would suggest making the cart a noindex... I'm paranoid about it so I'd play it safe.

You can have canonical from one domain to another.

I am talking about have the ability to actually control eBay's meta data at the canonical level. They already have canonical tags going back to their own pages and I doubt they would give you control over it. Again, I am not 100% sure but I would be shocked if they gave you control of that field. eBay has its own SEO concerns so I image they would retain control of that field.

I just don't consider a product page on eBay to be a duplicate of a product page on a third party site even if the site were feeding the data to eBay. Your site and eBay are 2 totally separate entities and I don't think these would be considered duplicate pages.

A couple things we looked at when it comes to abandoned carts was shipping and tax. We'd often get comments that our shipping rates were too high. If you wait until the last minute to show them these additional costs... you can expect more carts to be abandoned.

Also - if you run promos you want to make sure the customer can see any discount. If there are problems with a promo or if you apply the discount after the order is finalized, the customer may think it is not working and will abandon the cart.

Another thing - if you suspect orders are being dropped during authorization - if possible try and pull the data from the cart as soon as the button is clicked. Make this a server side collection so you don't need to wait for or relay on any third party connection. Then you can compare your data with the final order data to make sure they are all going through.

Hope this helps!

Hi. You want to make sure they are unique and the interesting stuff is up front. These descriptions can help with click through as that is what the search person will first see after the title.

I'd suggest something like: [blog title] - [blog category] - by [blog author] - [blog date]

This will keep them unique and if it gets truncated the important stuff is up front. With this in mind you could tell them bloggers to make sure they have relevant and catchy blog titles to garner that click!

I would focus on the fruit. I'd have fruit categories and put the refurbished on the top of that structure. People are searching for the fruit first and foremost and not "refurbished" in general. I would not canonical back the new product URLs to the refurbished ones. Keep them pure. However to push the refurbished fruit you could add links and advertising on the new fruit back to the refurbished fruit pages.

I would think you would want to link build back to the category unless the content is real specific to a model. I am thinking the category will be more permanent and you wouldn't want a link back to a product that is sold out or no longer available.

Hope this helps - good luck!

I don't think it would be too bad. A cleaner name would be better but having the new images show is important too. More important in my opinion.

Landing pages.... or doorway pages are a no no. You should move away from them all together if you are trying to rank. Packing a page with keywords to get ranking on it can get you penalized and dropped from Google.

Instead make a site that include relevant content and include your relevant keywords in that content. Make your page titles and page descriptions relevant to the content on the page and the keywords included. Organize the site in a logical manner and use H1, H2, and H3 tags but not too heavily.

That's it in a nutshell! Hope it helps!

We use an RSS feed for new product lists. We may have some lag time before a new product gets put in a category and able to be browsed to on our site. The RSS feed gives a few days head start getting these new products into the search engines. We redirect all RSS links back to the main site links that include canonical tags for the main product pages.

Google may have the images cached and not realize you have new ones. One rule of thumb I try to promote is to always use unique image names. You may find your customers also see old images if an image of the same name already resides in the browser cache. I encourage our marketing folks to add a date stamp to the end of an image so it will be seen as new. Versioning will work as well.

I think I got it. Do you have a Google Analytics account?

If so... if you click on the ecommerce section, you should find a section called "keywords" where you can select "non-paid keywords" to get a list of all the keywords that sent traffic to your site. You can also get this list by going through the "traffic sources" section.

Once you have your list of referring keywords, you should see a drop down that says "none" in the column next to the keyword column. If you activate the drop down you can add another parameter...select "landing page" which will bring up the landing page associated with each keyword.

So you'll have visits per keyword per landing page... I think this gives you enough info for your report! Let me know if you need more info or if I am off base.

Hi. I posted an answer a few days back that might help:

Google serves up the same results to smart phones and desktop computers. What they recommend is use the same site and use the style sheet to control the mobile display. In other words, not making a separate site for mobile. Here is a snippet from a Google & A.

John Mueller - @Paul If you have "smartphone" content (which we see as normal web-content, as it's generally a normal HTML page, just tweaked in layout for smaller displays) you can use the rel=canonical to point to your desktop version. This helps us to focus on the desktop version for web-search. When users visit that desktop version with a smartphone, you can redirect them to the mobile version. This works regardless of the URL structure, so you don't need to use subdomains / subdirectories for smartphone-mobile sites. Even better however is to use the same URLs and to show the appropriate version of the content without a redirect :). Here is the entire article where I found the snippet.

The other option would be to make the mobile pages and canonical those back to the corresponding main site pages. This way you don't have duplicate content and you have more SEO juice flow to the main site.

In my opinion, I wouldn't even worry too much about "traditional" cell phones. I found since the beginning of the year, on STP, we've only had 1 or 2 sales via dumb phones and only a fraction of traffic compared with smart phones.

It is very important. We also have dynamic pages... a ton of them. However we found a solution by bringing other data already on the page into the description and title. Let's say that each page offers a different vacation package. You should see if the name of the package can be imported into the title and description. Since the data is already there... it can be done.

Come up with some strategy that works with the data you have. For example... with our product pages, we did something like: [product title] - save 35 - 70% at Sierra Trading Post.

What rank are you achieving? I don't have a lot of my own data but it is my understanding that visitors only go up dramatically when reaching the very top. There is this one article I have bookmarked has an interesting graph measuring click-through rate by Google rank.

Here is the entire article. The graph is on page 2. I may have to run my own data now!

googleserp4.jpg

I am not sure if there is just a simple yes or no answer to your questions. It is hard to predict exactly to what the search engines will do and ranking will change.

1. It looks like the answer to this question is Yes. Here is a snippet for a Google Webmaster Blog article.

Additional URL properties, like PageRank and related signals, are transferred as well.

2. I can only assume the answer to this question would be yes too. I would assume that since both pages are identical and are on the same domain, page A would now rank the same as page B. It is hard to know for sure though. Sorry I can't be more definitive but Google is a complex animal.

Sorry for the response above... I didn't understand the problem when I answered. I tried to delete the response but got an error... I'll try again.

Is it a new domain? You could try and use the same tracking code for the new domain. If that doesn't work you may have to start new tracking. The old domain info will still be around if you need to compare to the new one.

I personally don't think it is necessary. The worst that can happen is that a competitor knows you are checking them out. Any good company checks out the competition.

If you are trying to hide your origin, it would be better to search from your personal account as the company IP maybe more easily identified.

Again though... I wouldn't worry about it at all. You don't need to be stealthy.

I think I got it now... again sorry for my first response... clearly I was confused.

Something is strange... I am seeing the information between the 2 sites getting messed up.

I have never seen that before. This is probably beyond my skill level but I will see what I can find out about it.

Hi!

I have never used this company or its services. I did find an interesting article on SEObook about their tool. I am by nature a little leery of third party link building services. If you do decide to give them a try, I would start with a short small "I'm testing you" contract and try and get as much info as possible on what they are doing for you. I would also ask for some real world examples.

You may also want to show them the article and see how they respond to the concerns the author mentions.

Good luck!

You are correct. Google serves up the same results to smart phones and desktop computers. What they recommend is use the same site and use the style sheet to control the mobile display. In other words, not making a separate site for mobile. Here is a snippet from a Google & A.

John Mueller - @Paul If you have "smartphone" content (which we see as normal web-content, as it's generally a normal HTML page, just tweaked in layout for smaller displays) you can use the rel=canonical to point to your desktop version. This helps us to focus on the desktop version for web-search. When users visit that desktop version with a smartphone, you can redirect them to the mobile version. This works regardless of the URL structure, so you don't need to use subdomains / subdirectories for smartphone-mobile sites. Even better however is to use the same URLs and to show the appropriate version of the content without a redirect :). Here is the entire article where I found the snippet.

The other option would be to make the mobile pages and canonical those back to the corresponding main site pages. This way you don't have duplicate content and you have more SEO juice flow to the main site.

In my opinion, I wouldn't even worry too much about "traditional" cell phones. I found since the beginning of the year, on STP, we've only had 1 or 2 sales via dumb phones and only a fraction of traffic compared with smart phones.

I think they would automatically use Google.es. When I went to Spain in January, Google recognized my location and served me up the Spain search.

One way to easily check your results is to do it the old fashion way. Do a search for it and count your rank manually. Since there are 10 per page, this is easily done.

Also make sure you have your campaign settings set to the proper version of Google when looking at SEOmoz ranking.