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Fore sure.  The reason is that not all sitemap files are simply sitemap.xml it may be sitemap.gzip sitemap.zip or in my case, sitmap_index.gzip.  Also, some people may not be able to include their sitemap at root.

Including sitemap exacts in robots.txt gives a clear directive to each of the search engines exactly where to find your sitemap.  Google and Bing/Yahoo will have no issue finding it as you probably submitted it to them but crawlers like ask.com will usually look at your robots.txt and skip your site if no map is placed in it.

For another view, OpenCart is great.  It has some wonderful features out of the box like coupon codes, gift certificates, an affiliate program, customer loyalty points and a lot more.  It is on MVC architecture so your theme, your code and your data are all fully separated.  This makes it nice if you want to add a mobile store then normally you have to either build one from scratch or use a program that manipulates the desktop site and make it work on mobile to some degree.  MVC allows you to simply use the same product pooling and build up a mobile site the same way the desktop site is.  But it is built to be mobile from the ground up.

I am sure many have this as well but if you adjust product much for $30 you can get an excel upload download module that allows you to build your product in excel which makes it uber simple to view a layout of your keywords and work with them to get the right flow through the cart.  You can even pull it and do a side by side with MOZ.com spreadsheets and fix your issues with ease then upload it and done.

It also has VQMOD which means that plugins can be added via XML at run time.  If you remove the xml file then the default files are rendered again instead.  So if a plugin breaks your cart, just delete and go.

The multi-store system is nice as well if you have use of it.  I spend about $400 on scripts with each OC install and end up with a eCommerce, mobile commerce and Facebook store that is fully integrated with oAuth2 and builds a newsletter list as well as a push to Facebook marketing list and control center in the admin.  Orders are emailed and print on payment receipt, abandoned cart reminders, GEOIP with 37 languages and 17 currencies that are fully automated and even rewrite parts of the code in the native language which helps with SEO.  Very CDN friendly and while there are a few quirks they are very easy to work around.

The MVC makes it fast to learn because you do not have all the code in one spot.  This makes it easy to follow and learn.  I have an OC install with a 5 pic 980x400 jQuery slider and over 2.5mb of other pictures alone on the front page with all the bells and whistles that loads in just under 1.5 seconds.

Security is also easy to achieve.  Of course nothing is secure out of the box but it does have SSL integration etc.  You can find a walk through to harden it and be done in about 5 or 6 hours your first time and 2 hours total once you know what to do.

The simple answer is No, you should not use a plugin to build back-links.

There are some great WordPress Plugins out there that help you with tracking your back-links, I suggest the MozLinks one, it's great.  But it monitors your work, it doesn't do it for you.

Much like their brick and mortar your client needs to understand that business online is business, all the same.  You wouldn't trust a script written by a shady company to hire your employees or automate your accounting, you should not take such a route for building your site either.

Automated scripts are a clear violation of the Google Webmaster Guidelines (and the other search engines too) http://goo.gl/bdca8 you can read it on their site.

The other thing is, automation means no control.  You can end up linked to bad neighborhoods like porn and RX sites as well as get de-indexed and not show in the SERPs at all.

What to do?  Put your efforts on building a purpose  for your site.  Provide value in its vertical that is unique and useful.  Build links when you find others that have done the same and ONLY link to sites when you are willing to put your reputation on the line for them, as in a way that is what you are doing.

Want more visitors?  Answer one question.... why?

Why would someone want to visit your site?  Ask it everyday and answer it in a new way and you will have more traffic than your shared hosting plan will allow.

I have dealt with this quite a bit and I think first off it is important to mention that your sites are about your customers.

Do you think that a client or potential client could end up on one site but intending to find the other?  With Google, Yahoo and Bing out of the question, what would you do?

I spent my first 3 years trying to SEO for Google.  In the end, they did not purchase a single item from me.  My point is that even if they were to hit you on SEO (which I do not think is going to happen) I would choose the hit vs leaving a client stranded on the wrong site with no way to get to the content they are searching.

Google has cracked down on single purpose sites for a single business trying to dominate the SERP ie. one restaurant with the same content on 4 sites trying to get 40% of the first page SERP.  So if you have two location of Bob's Restaurant you should have one website for this.  However, if you own Bob's Restaurant and Lucy's Diner, you should have two.  They should be connected via links as they should connect to other local restaurants as well.

There is nothing wrong with linking to other sites you own, ++ if they have similar topics.

What to avoid?   Linking to them on every page.  Forget Google!  Where would you put the links so that it best helps your users?  Now remember Google, they want to see you put the links where it will best help your users.

You can read more on the Google Product Forums

Your client's would have to OK it but often when products are no longer available it is an internal issue and not a lack of manufacturing.  On my sites, if I chose to drop a line I will offer both alternatives if I have any but then also a link to where the exact product can be purchased (rel-nofollow of course).

It is more important to me that customers feel like clicking the link to my shop will never be a waste of time than it is to hope for the occasional conversion to another product.

Once a few click throughs mount up, I also find products I have the that the other shop does not and send a "Hi you may have noticed the X clicks I sent you for X product at URL.  I noticed you do not offer X but have content relevant to it.  If you think it would help us both out, I would welcome the partnership and be happy to keep sending business your way.  I think a link to X would work well "here", let me know your thoughts.

I sell a lot more to people who are looking for exactly what I have then I ever did tried to convincing them that what I have is what they are really looking for.

There are several reasons that this happens.  The main being that Google simply does not index everything you have, especially if many of them are the same size, same meta, or they find patterns real similar to other sites.  The more social signals you have, the longer people stay on pages etc. will have an effect on what they index.

But the easy answer is that they are not all indexed because Google does not want to.  

In their words:

The number of indexed URLs is almost always significantly smaller than the number of crawled URLs, because it does not include URLs that have been identified as duplicates or non-canonical, or less useful, or that contain a meta noindex tag.

Read all about here:  http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2642366

Also, there is a great resource on Google's indexing of sites found here

I am not sure what you are seeing or the conditions but I have noticed that sometimes when cdn's are used you will actually be sitting on the subdomain or another domain all together when you click on the page.

Some caches can make the same thing happen sometimes.

Make sure you are sitting on the actual page when it pulls up.

As far as the opensite not showing any links, if you copy n paste from the address bar and have any variation of the page, it will not read correct.

Make sure you have your actual desired url, is my advice as SEO juice will follow the canonical meta but the tools will not.

That is all I can think of anyways.

I do not know anything about Followerwonk as it has always just worked for me but my suggestion would be to:

1. completely log off and shut your browser down.  Restart it and clear all cache and cookies.  If using Internet Explorer you may also want to shut off the PC (Not hot restart but shut it down) and let it set some seconds and then restart it.  (be sure to clear the cookies before restart).  Also, if using Internet Explorer you may want to invest some time looking into a better browser.

2. No go?  Log into Twitter and remove Followerwonk from your approved apps list.  Log into Followerwonk making sure that you are logged into MOZ.com first and reconnect the two.

Again, I am not familiar with Followerwonds idiosyncrasies but I know that when my Twitter apps are having any type of issue with aligning oAuth2 accounts about 80% can be fixed with a reconnect.

Several factors are at hand.  I understand the obscurity but it also makes your question impossible to answer because a keyword like Nike or Coke is going to have a huge effect while a keyword like Chicago is going to have next to none.

The separate sites does in deed have some merit but I would look into that.  I know that Google is on the hunt for the same businesses that are trying to keep two sites in the organics acting like they are different but in fact are not.

No matter what I did, I would move fast because it will not be long until keywords being in the URL will have little to no effect at all, unless a branded keyword of course.

The other thing to consider is that sending clicks from 1 and 3 to an experience that is noticeably the same offering is only going to skyrocket your bounce rate, maybe on both sites and then send them to the bottom of the tank.

If you are to get your new site up to the top spot, you are going to have to build a completely unique and individually relevant experience for it to do you any good and I would make sure to not have them sharing any resources.

My personal advice, if you want to make the switch then do it Google's way.  I know many do not like that path but personally, I have enough challenges from day to day without positioning myself where a $200 billion company is dedicated to blocking my success.

For my business we provide services to a broad client base and people were getting confused on a single site.  At the end of the day, we build websites for people first and everything else is second on.  For UX it was necessary and we did what we had to do.  We fight to still make it very clear to the bots that we are one company and we have some overlapping content which now we can cross domain canonical.  The right way is to 301 your old site to your new once it is up in the rankings and pass your juice.  The other way is to make a few extra bucks and invest in them in tissues.  You will need them when you wake up to the "Site not found in the top 100" X 2.

To their blog for more?

One option you may consider so that at least you can have one page found from the gallery is to add a rel=conanical tag to their headers designating one of them as the page to index.

If you are willing to block all of the pages then your better option is to leave them as is.  Duplicate content on your site does not black flag you at Google or make non duplicate pages rank worse.

All it does is this:

Content page has an example Authority of 50.  If it is the sole page with that content then all 50 points go to that page.

However, if you have 5 pages with that content, then each of them shares the seo goodness and have 10 points each.

Now when the SERP is built your 50 points that would have maybe got a first page rank is only valued at 10 so it falls much further back.  Still higher than noindex tagging will get though.  

Hope that helps.

I have no idea what MOZ is planning to do but you have to love the SEO benefits of offering mobile friendly sites and video as well.

I have had the 1, 2 or 3 spot for SEO my town for nearly 3 months from a half hour of work with video and while we have double the amount of desktop traffic we are tracking 3 times as many of our sales or goals from mobile devices.

I just want to inject, we had a client worried that this was hurting their desktop results because they were scoring better on mobile but it is not an indicator of that at all.  Google bot Mobile is one index and Google bot is another.  The mobile simply has few competitors and is easier to rank in.  This is why you do not have to worry about duplicate content when you chunk out pages for mobile as long as you make your sitemaps correctly.

I didn't serve to answer your question at all but I loved seeing your post and had to comment.  

To answer your first question, yes it can hurt you.  Are they doing this without your permission? You can always send them a take down notice.  You will find a great article here by SEOmoz's Sarah Bird titled 4 Ways to Protect Your Copyrights.

I am not sure exactly what the question is in the second part.  Are you asking if you should put hundreds of site-wide links in your RSS Feed?  Either way, here is good measure to take.

1. Make sure you are pinging your posts to more than just one service or so.

2. Make sure you are linking your posts on Google+ as soon as you post them and Facebook / Twitter / Etc. Too.

3. Make sure you have SOME good links to establish clear ownership of content.

4. I would not put a bunch of links in these feeds.  Google may see this site, which is probably involved in other not so great activity as a desired backlink to you and you could end up with undesired association, especially if the link count is very high.

5. There is nothing about an RSS feed, once parsed and restructured as a web page that will make it known to Google that it was an RSS Feed.

6. Why do you have an RSS feed and does anyone follow it?

If you do not have anyone following it, you may want to just shut it down for a while.  If you have a good following for it then that is not an option.  I had an issue with copy-n-paste content hijacking and we put a small bit of JavaScript in that would whatever you wanted into the clipboard as they copied and then they would paste it in their site.  We noticed a big drop in activity after they noticed alerts on their website like

"ALERT:  All readers of the content, I have a confession.  I have stolen this content and I am involved in Blackhat SEO.  For those of you who do not know what that is you will probably know my tools.  Ever had a virus or got spam mail?  You got that because of visiting sites like mine.  Please click here to report me because this message was actually inserted by the guy I stole this from and I do not even realize it is here yet."

Not only does it reduce the theft, it is also fun for the whole family.    I am sure by now there are similar tools for RSS.

Yes, optimize for mobile.

The only consideration for title and description is to remember that you are dealing with smaller screens that usually have larger text, as few as 10 characters may be visible on screen but around 45 is suggested for the serp title and 100 is visible for the serp description.

Yes, separate sitemap.  Also it is suggested to use 3 more if applicable.  News, Photo and Video.

NO.  Googlebot and Googlebot Mobile are two separate indexes.  They do not utilize each others data in a way to compare a page to itself cross index.  Now, with that said....  you will not optimize UX by using the same content on desktop and mobile.  They have different needs and desires.

ie.  Search

Desktop

Mylocal's Italian Restaurant MyTown Special Lasagna - Pictures, ingredients and description are very important.  Taking a moment to sell the dish and then post availability.

Mobile

Mylocal Lasagna - Availability should listed first.  Chances are they simply want to know if the special lasagna is available tonight and would prefer to find out before the light turns green.  Pictures etc. should occur in a lazy loading manor after the onload() event.

This is an are that is currently being addressed by the new Google update this July.

The short answer is:  Yes absolutely kind of not really.  

Double benefit:  No

As each linking C block has it's own bonus the second link is from the same C block and has less benefit.

However, the second link may point to a certain page instead of the home page and be a big benefit to that page.

This has limits though.  A link or two is great, a link from every page will discount all of the links by a big margin (as of July 2013)

Normally, I would bow out as I must be mistaken to any of the SEO Staff at SEOmoz as each of them have forgotten more than I will know.  However, I have spent a lot of time on this issue, I learned jQuery for the reason of combating this.  I am 100% certain, at least for how it was between June 2012 and Feb. 2013.

I realize that Google has stated they can tell the difference but, Google has a policy of misinformation as part of it's strategy to protect search integrity.  I give misinformation it's due credit, it ended the cold war, but it also means you cannot trust anything Google says until it is proven true.

You can parse an RSS feed in a manor that will not retain anything to identify it as coming from an RSS.  Google will only know it is your content by chronology, in other words that they always find it on your site first.

How would google know that this:

SEO Software of Choice

Came from an RSS feed?  It is just an a link, identical to the other billions out there.

I have tested this with two WordPress Installs.  Both had Google Analytic and were Verified with Google Webmaster.

On the first I would post articles of 100% original content.  On the second I would pick them up and then parse the feed, post it as a post, mention it on the social medias and 100% of the articles would stay indexed on the not original domain and 0% would stay indexed on the original domain.

Then, we switched  and had 100% indexed on the original domain.  We tested it again on two more domains that were not new.  One a PR3 and one a PR1 with the exact same outcome.

The single best thing you can do is post it on Google+, in my experience, after I post on Google+, within just a few minutes I have Google bot on the page.

Establish ownership on each of your pages with meta author or meta publisher tags too, it will help a lot.

Good read on topic

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/11/help-google-index-your-mobile-site.html

I spent a few moments looking at the site and source.  I am not sure yet why you have gone to PR0 for all of your blog pages.

A few things that I saw while checking things out (some of it is probably opinion over fact as I am not sure the overall effects)

Your robots.txt is setup to have all of your WP-Admin and WP-Includes indexed in Google.  I would set both of these folders to not be included.  (You may already have it done in metas etc. but I would put this in my robots.txt

Your robots.txt also needs to declare http://robt.info/sitemap.xml as your sitemap.  It is currently pointing to an attracta sitemap that points to another attracta sitemap and then declares your website to have 9 pages in total.  I am sure you have your sitemap submitted with Google but it is still  a much better practice to have the sitemap link in robots.txt point at your actual sitemap.

You may know something I do not but in your meta tag I do not think you need the /posts/ after your publisher google+ meta link.  This link does not actually appear on the site and used only by the search engine to identify the link between your other online works, Google+ and your site.

I saw these things and thought I would mention them.  I do not think they are the cause of your issues however.  Do you have a Google Analytics and Webmasters account setup?  Do they offer any insight as to why you went to PR0 and it seems like Google may not have very many links for your site.  This may just be the datacenter I was looking at though.

I will follow this post and try to be of more help.  To be honest I now, like you, want to know why.

How many links exist with anchor text like HERE, Click Here, See Now, Click to See etc.?

This will be critical to have in the mix and is part of a natural linking scheme.   It seems as if some of your generic keyword terms would have to have exact match keywords, correct?  You are still not ranking for anything?  Are your links on sites and pages relevant to target?  Are they on penalized sites?  If you have 1500 back links and nothing showing up in the SERPS I think you need to make more use of the disavow tool than you do more time back linking.

I have sites with 10 back links scoring well on local or low competition words.  I would wonder the condition of your robots.txt file and what meta tags you have such as any rel=noindex etc.

If all of that is in order I would ask the quality of the content.  Are you writing content or scraping it?  Using spun articles? Have a shallow site of just a couple pages with 3%+ keyword distribution and high html to text ratio?

I can't be exactly sure but I would venture to guess your situation has nothing to do with needing to crank out more back links.

You have a few choices here to avoid that.

If you want to avoid it completely, simply include this entire subdomain.domain.tld in the robots.txt as:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /
Disallow: *

Then place it in the root of your subdomain folder, for example if you sub was at subdomain.domain.tld you would normally have a folder called subdomain within your normal root folder.

Do not place this robots.txt file in your main folder or the whole site will not be indexed.

Extra measure, you can place a:

in the head section of each page.

The robots.txt looks fine.  I always add an allow all, even knowing it is not necessary but it makes me feel better lol.

The problem you have is with the sitemap itself.  How big is it?  I cannot tell how many links you have because it locks up every time I go to it in both chrome and firefox.

I tried to send a tool that is designed to pull sitemaps as the SERPS do and it also freezes up.

How many links do you have?

If you are wanting to continue to link to the old domain within the old domain but remove any hits from the new domain I would simply put a canonical tag in the old domain designating the new domain as the content source.  This way you can continue to use it and link to it within the old domain to allow a unified UX and give full SEO credit to the right spot.

I meant include this robot in the subdomain not include the subdomain in the robot.  Was answering an employee at the same time and crossed some wires.  

Also, here is the best place to answer your questions.

From Google:  "The Test robots.txt tool will show you if your robots.txt file is accidentally blocking Googlebot from a file or directory on your site, or if it's permitting Googlebot to crawl files that should not appear on the web. "  You can find it here

By the product segments not being directly related, I would ask how indirect is the relation?  Are we talking Fresh Produce and Cars or Tablets and PC's?

I would highly suggest building a single site unless you have some regulatory factors that keep you from it.  Think of other eCommerce sites and the product diversity they have.  eBay, Wal-Mart etc.  There is a lot of variations.

You may want to put product information and blogs into separate folders for each product, so you build a clear set of data defining the products you sell.

What you ideally want to do is set up the mobile site as a standard site.  Then utilize javascript to call each page in an order defined by the users actions with dynamic loading.

This has two benefits:

1. SEO and SERP.  The pages will be indexed as they should.  If you have one huge page you are still limited to the 2 or 3 keywords as always.  When you see a good infinite scroll website it is not one page, it only looks this way due to JavaScript calling additional pages at triggers that have been set.

2. No JavaScript graceful fallback (or fallforward as it is actually the native state).  If you have one page, lazy loading with JavaScript and they do not support it then you have 2,000 pages worth of images loading at one time which is otherwise known as a bounce.

You will want to build out the site with no consideration to the infinite scrolling (except in design ie. tile-able backgrounds for a smooth non stop flow) then apply the script after you have a logical site structure using silo'ed categories.  Google bot, Google bot mobile and users who do not have JavaScript will all have a useable site and the SERPS will rank pages as they should.

Tip:  Keep any page wide bar or graphic styles in the header or the footer of the page.  You will normally only call the content or article portion of the page to the infinite scroll so you have a non-stop flow on the site.

Hope this helps

I know your not using WordPress but I am assuming you are using some sort of templated PHP script for a 2K product store.  This WP plugin is pretty easy to understand and what I first used to grab the concept.  Also, if wanting to go a more Pinterest route look into Masonry JavaScript.  http://www.infinite-scroll.com/