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I wouldn't work on the webshops and they would not consist of only one page. From what i gathered every webshop will evolve a theme and have at least 5 different categories of products.

I was surprised by the amount of webshops too. The webshops were very diverse in product categories from what he told me. Still i have a hard time believing that he wants that much.

Aside from that, i'm still curious what would be the best approach to link these websites together.

Thank you for the reply

You could use this extensive guide: http://moz.com/blog/how-to-perform-the-worlds-greatest-seo-audit

If after this guide you still have questions let me know and i would be happy to help you with that

Fellow mozzers,

Today I got an interesting question from an entrepreneur who has plans to start about 100-200 webshops on a variety of subjects. His question was how he should like them together. He was scared that if he would just make a page on every website like: www.domain.com/our-webshops/ that would list all of the webshops he would get penalised because it is a link farm.

I wasn't sure 100% sure which advise to give him so i told him i needed to do some research on the subject to make sure that i'm right.

I had a couple of suggestions myself.

1. Split the amount of pages by 3 and divide them into three columns. Column A links to B, B links to C and C links to A. I realize this is far from ideal but it was one of the thoughts which came up.

2. Divide all the webshops into different categories. For example: Webshops aimed at different holidays, webshops aimed at mobile devices etcetera. This way you will link the relevant webshops together instead of all of them. Still not perfect.

3. Create a page on a separate website (such as a company website) where the /our-webshops/ page exists. This way you only have to place a link back from the webshops to this page. I've seen lots of webshops using this technique and i can see why they choose to do so. Still not ideal in my opinion.

That's basicly my first thoughts on the subject. I would appreciate any feedback on the methods described above or even better, a completely different strategy in handling this. For some reason i keep thinking that i'm missing the most obvious and best method.

Thank you Paddy, Carla and bradley for your answers.
For everyone else, this thread is not so much of a question, but more of a discussion of what YOU think is the best and why you think so. Would be cool to see some people's opinions and experiences with different CMS's.

Don't forget that I am from Holland and that a lot of the American directories do not work for for Holland. But thank you for the advice.

I know what Local SEO can do for your business:)
My question is however whether the small local listing directories are worth spending time and effort on.

The reason i'm asking this is that i got a discussion with some quite recently on the subject of how important the smaller local listing directories are towards your ranking in both the normal search results and in the local search results.

Thank you for responding

So if i understand your answer correctly. You think that the smaller local listing directories are not worth the time and effort or they do not provide any benefit at all?

Hello fellow mozzers,

I would like to start a discussion on whether certain local listing directories are worth it.

Most people are of course familiar with Google+ Local(Google Places), Yahoo Local, Bing Local, Yelp, Hotfrog etcetera..

I know there are a lot more of these big local listing directories.

I am situated in Holland and we have a lot of small local listing directories.
Some of these directories are not really good quality. For example:
http://dordrecht.cylex-bedrijvengids.nl/bedrijf/pizza-presto-dordrecht-12014914.html

This domain is filled with ads in prominent locations. They have a domain authority of 44 and as far as i can tell there are close to 0 reviews on companies. (So not a very active community).

When you perform SEO for a local business you want the business to be found in the local search results. Google goes around the web to see if the business information (contact and address information, website etcetera) is consistent on different local listing directories. The links from the directories are still links and therefor they pass a certain amount of PageRank.

How much value do you think local listing directories such as the links i will provide below will add to a business? Do you think it is worth the time to find these small directory sites and fill in information about the business there or is your time better spent on other SEO activities?

I would love to hear your input on this subject

Links

http://dordrecht.cylex-bedrijvengids.nl/bedrijf/rietveld-doe-het-zelf-j-10800715.html
http://adviesbureaus.zoekeensop.nl/0392908-parket-expertise-bureau-etten-leur/
http://www.allewinkels.net/ijzerwaren-en-gereedschap/rotterdam/henk-schell-ijzerwarenhuis/

Hello fellow mozzers,

I have a lot of experience with Magento and a little bit of experience with Prestashop and i am quite aware of their strengths and weaknesses regarding SEO.

I was wondering which E-commerce CMS is the best for SEO. I am talking about the CMS as you download it. There are hundreds of plugins for the popular systems which improve their SEO power tremendously, but i'm interested in which CMS is the best right out-of-the-box.

Let me know what you think and why you think so.

Thanks in advance

I agree with you up to a certain level. I don't think using blog posts is a lazy or uncreative way. People like to subscribe for to RSS feeds to keep up with the latest content. I don't know if Ben will keep posting after this set of 50 new pages/posts, but i think saying that it is lazy and uncreative to 'slam' in into blogpost is a bit rude.

If the different h1 tags are all about different subjects and they are in different sections then i think there should be no problem.:)

If you mean cancel the Moz subscription. There is a button on the billing screen (on the right).

https://moz.com/users/subscription

Did this answer your question?

I see a link to http://www.odin-groep.nl/Home/ctl/OverOdin/OverOdin/HeutinkICT.aspx from http://www.odin-groep.nl/Home/ctl/OverOdin/ReindersICT.aspx.

It's the bottom left block which causes this link. This way you will get a big nesting effect.

Which URL(s) is/are causing problems?

You don't necessarily have to remove the link. As long as you can verify that it directs to the right page.

But curious to see what caused the problem

Are you somehow linking to www.website.com/dogs/dog.html from the page itself? There could be something wrong with that link.
I made a small mistake not so long ago with a redirection plugin. I told it to go to domain.com. This plugin was looking at the base + what i told it to. So it went to: domain.com/domain.com. Perhaps you made a similar mistake.

Maybe you can send me the URL and i can take a look at it?

If you are really sure that there are mistakes in the software then you should probably contact the Moz Technical Support.

If you contact them and together you will find something out let me know what the outcome is.

What is your exact question?

It could be possible that you dropped ranking around the penguin 2.0 update. It doesn't necessarily have to do anything with penguin though. It could be that the user engagement around this area on your site has been less good because for example the information is out of date.

I could take a look at your site and see if i find anything which could have caused this if you give me the url and the set of keywords you have dropped ranking for.

John, did you use an incognito browser where you are not logged in to your Google account?

Hey Chris,

What would be the function of the multiple H1 tags on a single page?
The h1 tag should be used for the heading of the particular page is on. So it should be a short title for the entire page.

If you need multiple h1 tags because you have several different subject within the page then you might think about splitting the content over several pages. This will help your rankings for those pages as well because they are more specialised around a certain subject.

Hope i anwered your question. Let me know if you have more questions or if anything was unclear.

Perhaps you did something to send people who end up on a 404 page back to the homepage and typed in 'www.domain.com' in the place where to want them to end up. You should type in '/' at these kind of plugins to go to the root domain.

In my opinion blog posts build be better.

Blog posts are part of categories and then you can create a category such as 'How to's' and then place all blog posts under that category. This way you can create good looking and good scoring pages (the category pages).

If you use pages you will have to do it with direct links such as a big list of menu items. Nothing wrong with that but i would prefer to use posts.

That shouldn't hurt your site. I rebuild an e-commerce site which had 50.000 redirects in place at the moment i was working on it. Of course it adds a little bit of load to the server but it's not really noticable. This way you will keep the value of the old links.

Thomas Hall is right about the soft 404 pages being generally more acceptable. If you care more about the user experience then about the value from your old links then you could build a dynamic 404 page.

This page should tell the visitor that the product no longer exist and should give them a couple of products which are similar of relevant to the product they were searching for. This way you will improve the user experience with a soft 404.

Just to be clear, you don't have to set a redirect to the home page. You could also do it to the category pages or to popular products. It's very difficult to say since i don't know which branch your in. Who your target group is and what they are interested in.

The 301 redirect would be a better option.

I will try to explain why this is better than a 404 page.

1. If people posted a link to the product PageRank to your website.(This is one of the ranking factors in Google) If the page doesn't exist anymore and brings up the 404 page it will lose the value from all the links to that particular product. If you use a 301 redirect to send visitors to a relevant product or to the homepage then the value from those links will have effect on the page where you send them to.

2. Nobody likes a 404 page. There are very cool things you can do with a 404 page so that they are still helpful to the visitor such as most popular pages, a search function and even jokes. But in the end nobody would have clicked on the link or typed in the url to your website and think: Now i want to see his 404 page.

I hope i answered your question. Let me know if anything was unclear.

It has a lot to do with the kind of website that you have.

In general you want to get a lot of links to the pages that you want to get found on. (blog posts, product pages etcetera)
But in general the homepage gets the most links because when people see your website and they like it the homepage is the most logical URL to link to.

Strengthening the home page will be helpful to your site because the homepage should be your content hub. You can find more information about content hubs, website architecture and a lot more here: http://moz.com/blog/how-to-rank

Hope i answered your question
Let me know if you have any other questions or if i was unclear about something.

Good luck!

I did some more research and seems that you are probably right. Publishership shows the big box on the right of the search results. Try googling Moz: https://www.google.com/#output=search&sclient=psy-ab&q=moz&oq=moz&gs_l=hp.3..0l4.430.621.0.822.3.3.0.0.0.0.333.806.0j1j0j2.3.0...0.0.0..1c.1.15.psy-ab.u-o2krTtAw0&pbx=1&bav=on.2,or.r_cp.r_qf.&bvm=bv.47244034,d.d2k&fp=c582336016c8cd9&biw=1745&bih=980

I can really remember seing brand logo's in the search results though. If i ever see one again i will verify whether a rel=author or rel=publisher tag was used.

Thank you for confirming

I have seen company logo's in the search results from time to time. Can't think of an actual query right now where i found one though..

Unless it were people using it as an rel=author tag it should work (maybe google is still testing it and that's why we see them so rarily).

But that would be against Google's guidelines if i'm not mistaking. I'm not 100% sure that an author needs to be an individuel person. Can anyone confirm this?

Very good one Takeshi. Didn't think about whether the site in question had similar products like these. You are also right about the user reviews.

User reviews are a great way of getting unique content on a page. If you implement user reviews and ratings make sure you mark them up with structured data such as HTML5 Microdata. This way it can appear in the rich snippet. This page explains a lot about it: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=173379&topic=1088474&ctx=topic

It's indeed not something people would look for..

Very difficult problem you have there, at least it's good that you're making changes to it.
Don't forget to set a 301 redirect to the new page on any page you delete and if there is no new page then to the most relevant or the home page.

From what you told me i don't think it is an option to rebuild the entire site. The structure which is now there is way too difficult to change as much as it should in order for the best results.

The swingset website doesn't have very big descriptions either. I think you can make some good improvements on that area at least. There is one webshop in particular which i always use as a reference for how much content you should have on a product and that is vat19.com.

Not only is their marketing strategy perfect for their target audience. They offer so much information about their products. Images, text, specifications and video.

I hope i helped you at all with your problems and if you have any other questions or need more advice or a brainstorm partner let me know either in this thread (if it's relevant) or in a new thread (the you could send me a private message to let me know where to find it :)) or you could of course send me a private message directly, but then other people couldn't benefit from the problems and solutions we found.

Good luck with .. well everything

Chris, they do this in a lot of cases. If you have a Google+ company page try including the rel=publisher tag on a page where you did not use a rel=author tag. Use Google's structured data testing tool and you will see that they do show the publisher photo (which should be a company or brand logo.

Ah, it's difficult to see anything on the page because i can't read Turkish.

The only thing you should know is that every single page in a website should have unique content. So if two pages are exactly or almost exactly the same then Google will think it's duplicate content.

In my experience Google uses the Rich snippet information above the Authorship(publishership).

One more thing though. You mention a **company **logo and the rel=author tag.
You should create a Google+ company page and use the rel=**publisher **tag.

Hope i have answered your question

4000 products is indeed a hell of job to tackle if you want to write an original description for every single one of them. It is recommended to do this since it will improve the site.

I agree with Doug that you should start on the products which sell the most because you want to get found better on these products. I would start doing a given amount of products each day and keep good track of which products you did and which you didn't change.

Furthermore what i think is the most important thing is the title tags and description tags of those 4000 pages. Are they well optimized? Even if the pages are ranking well at this moment the title and description tags are the only way you can convince the visitor to click on your link in the search results and therefore they should be compelling and descriptive.

That does make the situation quite difficult.
Are there a lot of different combinations possible?

You could create a product page for every combination. This way your dealers can still direct the phone customers to the appropriate URL and you would still have a clean URL structure. For example: www.domain.com/category/outback-5ft-playset.

This still isn't perfect but as far as i can see it's the best option given the weird circumstances.

Hmm, all links are pointing to the home page with the brand name. That doesn't seem like a natural link profile and that is something which could get penalised.

But one problem at a time. Do you think the URL structure suggestion i provided will work?

It would be better to post on a regular schedule. (In your given example that would be every two weeks).

This is for a variety of reasons.

1. The search engines will see that you have a fresh batch of content every now and then.
2. Users will see that there is a blog post every two weeks and if they think that your blog is interesting enough to follow they will visit you every two weeks to read the new post.

Hope i answered your question

I agree with Jesse and Allen.

Of course the problems in Google Webmaster Tools will disappear by no-indexing it.
Low quality pages isn't a good thing for visitors either.

It's difficult to give you any other advice then the very broad advise: Improve the quality of the pages.
If you could give us some links to let us know which website and which pages we're talking about then we could give you a better advice on how exactly you can improve those pages.

I'm not sure if Google if able to tell the difference between good or bad English at this moment.
But i do know that this is one of the criteria which they want a website to rank as is described in this document about Google Panda: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.nl/2011/05/more-guidance-on-building-high-quality.html

This method is not permitted though and you may have a benefit for this on the short term, but i can tell you that it won't be long before you will get a penalty for this technique. Link building is not about buying links in any form. It's about creating awesome content that people want to share just because they think it is awesome.

Of course reaching out to people is also part of the process. But the key is always to make sure that you have to create a site that people **want **to link to because it is awesome of because their website will get better from it because your website offers great value to their visitors.

Always keep this in mind

If you still need SEO and/or programming advice/work done after the summer let me know

I think you would benefit from it because it removes difficulty from the URL. Furthermore you will get found better on 'basketball hoops' instead of on 'basketball' and 'hoops'. (Minimal difference though).

Just think about the user experience mostly. Keep the URL's as short and readable as possible. That you have to make combinations could be done on a single page with some AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript and XML)  instead of doing it on multiple pages.

That way your URL structure would be cleaner and the user experience would be enhanced. Furthermore you remove the possibility that people are linking to multiple URL's like now. So you will have more links to a single page and that will improve your ranking.

Was anything unclear?

Well, if there are links pointing to /basketball and there are also links pointing to /basketball/hoops then you would rank better on /basketball-hoops. Because of the redirects from the two old URL's to the one new URL you are creating a page which get more links. As long as the content on the page is of decent quality of course.

If you stick to the structure: www.domain.com/basketball-hoops/72in-backboard then the plural word is not a problem because it is the category name.

It would be awesome if they did that except that a lot of people would misuse it and SEO would be one giant scam (as it used to be with the meta keywords tag and cloaking and so).

If you can create a really good page for the basketball/hoops, then make a really good page for that.
If you can't create something good for that then you should change it to basketball-hoop. It will take care of being found on the query 'basketball hoops'.

You should take a look at how many links are pointing to /basketball and /basketball/hoops. Make sure you set 301 redirects if you change the URL structure.

The second website path is a little more difficult.
swingsets.com/swingsets? That is what i would call stuffing + users don't like long urls.

If it's possible try to stick to the following structure: www.domain.com/category/product-name.
I know it's difficult since you are doing something with combinations.

I'll think about it some more and if i come up with something i'll let you know.
Hope i was remotely helpful at this moment.

Very descriptive answer. Love that you describe your entire experiment.
Thank you for this extra bit of information.

A 303 won't send 'link juice' that means that all the value you website gets on mywebsite.com won't be send to mywebsite.com/fr/. You should use a 301 instead.

I've worked with some e-commerce sites before. I'll try and explain the way i handled it.

1. Know the opportunities and limitations of your CMS (Content Management System). I've worked with Magento and i did a lot of things by myself which were done automaticly by Magento. Such as creating XML sitemaps. Knowing what your CMS does for you helps you focus on the weak points of the CMS.

2. On page optimisation: An E-commerce site wants to get found on it's products in most cases. Are your product pages optimized? Make sure that all your product pages have a really good title and description. Not only for SEO purposed. Of course having your important keywords in there helps but make sure people would click on it too. Find someone from your target group and ask them about the quality of your titles / description. Would they click on it? If no, then why not. Use their feedback to improve them even more. Product descriptions should be really good too. This webshop http://www.vat19.com/ really knows how to create product pages which are aimed at their target group and contain a lot of content. The images and video's are rich media which are relevant for the target group and Google loves this.

3. Social: There are so many possibilities for E-commerce websites on the social platforms. Make sure you have a Facebook page, twitter account, Google+ account and Pinterest account. The buttons should be implemented on at least the product pages as well. Facebook and twitter allow you to reach your target group and get more exposure to other people. It is now even possible to include webshop functionality on Facebook pages. Google+ will soon get this too if i'm not mistaking. I mean they have Google shopping and they are making Google+ the center of all Google products with an added social layer. Pinterest allows you to pin all your products and recently they added the option of adding prices and stock to your pins.

4. Link building: As Takeshi said before this is an excellant list of link building techniques: http://pointblankseo.com/link-building-strategies. Make sure you have content that people want to link to. Some e-commerce solutions offer a blog next to the webshop and i know that there is a Magento plugin for making a connection to Wordpress. A blog is something to get a better connection to your customers and is great link bait by itself. If you do other things such as product review video's or so this is also an excellant place to gather feedback from customers.

I hope i helped you somehow and if you want more advice or if anything was unclear please let me know.

Good luck

At the moment I am very busy with a couple of projects. In general I do work as a SEO consultant.
Actually i'm a programmer, but down the line I started to fall in love with SEO and started to do that too.

Apperently Google keeps the original URL in the index as the source. It some ways it makes sense to do this.
It is still a pretty weird trick and I still don't know a good reason to do this. Would like to know if their are any consequences to this weird 'technique'.