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I'm not 100% sure what he's seeing, but when I plug his robots.txt into the robots analysis tool, I get this back:
Googlebot blocked by line 5: Disallow: /
Detected as a directory; specific files may have different restrictions
However, when I gave the top "**User-agent: ***" the "Disallow: " it seemed to fix the problem. Like, it didn't understand that the **Disallow: / **was meant only for the 008 user-agent?
Hmmm...one thing I notice is that you have the
". That would be my first, easy fix to help boost the products.
Also, you may be stuffing your title tags a little much. The title for the Zen Physio page is 77 characters (Reviber Zen Physio | Percussion Hand Held Deep Tissue Body Massager | Reviber) You should try and keep it under 70.
I think, if you have a robots.txt reading what you show above:
User-agent: * Crawl-delay: 20
User-agent: 008 Disallow: /
That just basically says, "Don't crawl my site at all" (The "Disallow: /" means, I'm not allowing anything to be crawled by any search engine that pays attention to robots.txt at all)
So...I'm guessing that's not what you want?
(Bah..ignore. "User-agent". I'm a fool)
Actually, this seems to have solved your issue...make sure you explicitly tell all other User-agents that they are allowed:
User-agent: * Disallow: Crawl-delay: 20
User-agent: 008 Disallow: /
The extra "Disallow:" under User-agent: * says "I'm not going to disallow anything to most user-agents." Then the Disallow under user-agent 008 seems to only apply to them.
Also, while URL structure can help, there are dozens of other things that can affect ranking. Does it use a CMS that renders the pages really slowly, but the homepage is solid HTML that pops up in no time? Do your product pages have useful/informative title tags and
There are loads of other things to consider.
My pleasure. To be honest, I'm still fairly new to it myself, so I'd be curious if anyone else had a different opinion. I just know that in the past, I've just ignored some pages that don't have anything on them that will necessarily bring home the bacon. Sometimes, a page that will be useful for a user will just look like a list of brands to a search engine, so...add it to the list of disallow'd pages in our robots.txt and let it go, imo.
My initial thought is that having both the logos AND the tag cloud might be overkill and part of the problem. It's basically the same information twice.
The other thing is...maybe you don't worry about this page ranking? I mean...sure, you'll see warnings about this page, but maybe set this page to "no-index" and tune the rest of your site. This page isn't going to be the one to pull in organic search results, so I would think it can just be ignored. Focus on pages that will actually return results.
Do you mean that you have pages that list all the brands in one spot? Could you break those links into larger categories? That might help them to be more organized, more easily scanned and that would also be a better user experience, I imagine.
Thank you Alex, appreciate the feedback. Very pleased to hear about the duplicate content not being an issue, I was sweating that. I think I'll also take your advice on using my private question to investigate the effects of having the top level be US based, and what that would mean to geotargeting a folder.
Also, for those interested in this subject and who stumble upon this thread, I'll also submit this link: http://www.bing.com/community/site_blogs/b/webmaster/archive/2011/03/01/how-to-tell-bing-your-website-s-country-and-language.aspx on how to help target Bing. The only thing it really convinced me to do is to add the "content-language" meta tag to the top of all my pages to help differentiate the sites even more.
Heh...yeah, it was in the video.
There is more info here, for those who are interested: http://www.seomoz.org/q/is-a-slash-just-as-good-as-buying-a-country-specific-domain-com-de-vs-de
Again, thanks for the response, though! 
Thanks for the reply, Marc! Unfortunately, the .co.uk version of the site has been purchased by someone else and is currently in use, so that path isn't possible.
As far as adding folders to WMT, I found this while poking through the documentation (https://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=62399&hl=en), and it does appear as if geographically targeting a folder is possible. I'm still concerned it might be a bit weak, but there seems to be some indication elsewhere throughout the forums that others have had success. Still a bit nervous about leaning too heavily on that as the main indication that the content in that folder is "UK-centric", but not 100% I have much choice.
I think I agree with your advice re:canonical tags, but I'm still not sure if I'll get penalized due to duplicates.
One other thing to consider is that you have a lot of that text in graphics. I would especially get your links on the bottom (sitemap, stamp atlas, help, etc) out of the images and onto the page so it can be read. Check out Google Webmaster tools and view your page as Googlebot. That can really give you a good idea on the best way to optimize your site.
From what I've come to understand, dashes are seen as spaces by most search engines, so it helps to delineate your phrase. milliondollarquartet would be seen as one word, while million-dollar-quartet would be seen as 3 and would be more readable by both users and search engines, and it would help you get some SEO juice for the phrase, while milliondollarquartet would probably not be searched upon.
That having been said, I'm still fairly new to SEO, so hopefully you'll get more answers. But that's been my understanding thus far.
Hmmm...one thing I notice is that you have the
". That would be my first, easy fix to help boost the products.
Also, you may be stuffing your title tags a little much. The title for the Zen Physio page is 77 characters (Reviber Zen Physio | Percussion Hand Held Deep Tissue Body Massager | Reviber) You should try and keep it under 70.
My client wants a fancy jquery carousel at the top of their home page, as is all the rage these days. I would like to add some nice SEO friendly text to that carousel, but I'm not sure how best to do that..I assume that by keeping the text which will appear in the carousel in divs on the page, which will be swapped out as the images cycle, it should still be easily picked up by search engines?
I think, if you have a robots.txt reading what you show above:
User-agent: * Crawl-delay: 20
User-agent: 008 Disallow: /
That just basically says, "Don't crawl my site at all" (The "Disallow: /" means, I'm not allowing anything to be crawled by any search engine that pays attention to robots.txt at all)
So...I'm guessing that's not what you want?
(Bah..ignore. "User-agent". I'm a fool)
Actually, this seems to have solved your issue...make sure you explicitly tell all other User-agents that they are allowed:
User-agent: * Disallow: Crawl-delay: 20
User-agent: 008 Disallow: /
The extra "Disallow:" under User-agent: * says "I'm not going to disallow anything to most user-agents." Then the Disallow under user-agent 008 seems to only apply to them.
Also, while URL structure can help, there are dozens of other things that can affect ranking. Does it use a CMS that renders the pages really slowly, but the homepage is solid HTML that pops up in no time? Do your product pages have useful/informative title tags and
There are loads of other things to consider.
My initial thought is that having both the logos AND the tag cloud might be overkill and part of the problem. It's basically the same information twice.
The other thing is...maybe you don't worry about this page ranking? I mean...sure, you'll see warnings about this page, but maybe set this page to "no-index" and tune the rest of your site. This page isn't going to be the one to pull in organic search results, so I would think it can just be ignored. Focus on pages that will actually return results.
Do you mean that you have pages that list all the brands in one spot? Could you break those links into larger categories? That might help them to be more organized, more easily scanned and that would also be a better user experience, I imagine.