Welcome to the Q&A Forum

OK. In a product page, the individual page is modified by a customer selecting options? If so, is that accomplished with Javascript substitution?

How do those pages appear? In response to an AJAX call? A sitesearch? I've been hearing that Google has increased their ability to crawl pages that appear through dynamic calls.

Hm. You are well within the character limit for a description. Maybe try utilizing those remaining 20 characters to pump up the description.

What is Webmaster Tools saying? Any HTML suggestions, crawl errors, etc?

Unfortunately, there are no guarantees that Google will use your meta description in the SERPS. How long has the page been active? I once had to wait about 4 weeks for my descriptions to start showing up properly.

The interesting thing is that SEOMoz threw a bunch of 404s that, overall, are not 404s whereas Webmaster Tools is showing discontinued products which makes sense. We didn't see any outages this weekend so I'm a bit confused.

I'm curious what might cause an inordinate amount of 404s in the reporting from SEOMoz's dashboard.

I'm exploring links that are marked as 404s and they are (for the most part) working. I talked with the sysadmin and there were no outages this weekend. We also had a number of 500 errors reported in Webmaster Tools but everything seems to be up.

Any ideas?

I think that you can do a virtual machine instance of OpenCart and see what the system returns by viewing page source. I haven't personally used Shopify but as a hosted solution, you'll have to test to see how that works out. Then do an audit of the code both spit out.  Remember, the on-page optimization is only one part of your solution.

Thanks Saijo,

We are trying to silo product types/categories and break them into different sitemaps. I'm familiar with SF but I don't think it will create sitemaps with the granularity that we are looking for.

I'm using XMLSpy but I'm finding it hard to break out blocks of content.

To my knowledge, Screaming Frog doesn't allow you to create an XML sitemap. Perhaps Excel allows you to format the output from SF but I'm not sure. I did find a utility called XMLSpy which, though pricey, allows me to do some of the sorting I was looking for. Once sorted, I can manually pull out sections to segment my sitemap. It is a pain in the neck because I can determine a silo and do it automatically. That being said, I think I can develop a sitemap template and have our new web programmer to develop a way to auto generate a group of segmented sitemaps.

Anyone know if there is a canned solution that works with IIS?

I have a site with around 17,000 pages and would like to create a sitemap and then segment it into product categories.

Is it best to create a map and then edit it in something like xmlSpy or is there a way to silo sitemap creation from the outset?

Unfortunately, there are no guarantees that Google will use your meta description in the SERPS. How long has the page been active? I once had to wait about 4 weeks for my descriptions to start showing up properly.

I am confused. So lets that I have an ecommerce site that has 20 types(books, toys…) / 20 categories each / 20 subcategories each and thousands of products under each subcategory.

When we say go flat, is it ideal to go all the way like http://www.website.com/type (20 of these), and http://www.website.com/category (400 of these) and http://www.webiste.com/subcategory (8000 of these)and thousands of product pages. So there is no page more than  1 directory level down. Does this mean flat architecture?