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Hi there, We are currently doing an SEO audit of an ecommerce website and we ar eunsure on the best practice in terms of using canonical link tag for some product variations. An example is that the company has a product with two colour variations: Black and Tan. These are for the same product and have 99% the same content. Within the content of the page the colour is the only thing that changes (along with the meta information and imagery of course). My question is should we choose one product and canonically link back to that one i.e. Black is the main product and we link Tan back to this via a canonical link? Many thanks in advance.

Hi We have a client who wishes to have a site created and duplicated onto 3 servers hosted in three different countries. United Kingdom, Australia and USA. All of which will ofcourse be in the English language. A long story short, the website will provide the user 3 options on the homepage asking them which "country site" they wish to view. (I know I can detect the user IP and autoredirect but this is not what they want) Once they choose an option it will direct the user to the appropriate ccTLD.  Now the client wants the same information to appear on all 3 sites with some slight variations in products available and English/US spelling difference but for the most part, the sites will look the same with the same content on each page. So my question is, will these 3 sites been seen as duplicates of each other even though they are hosted in different countries and are on ccTLD's? Are there any considerations I should pass onto the client with this approach? Many thanks for reading.
Kris

Hi all, As the title says, I am redeveloping a website for a client who sells car parts. The market is saturated with competition and 9 times out of 10, www.eurocarparts.com appears within the top 5 SERPS when searching for the same things that my clients' website sells. Now I know it will be very difficult to compete with the likes of these sites but given time (plenty of time) you never know so I have dissected Euro Car Parts website for many hours to look at their internal link structure and so my question is related to this area. My site only sells car parts for 4 car manufacturers. The left hand "shop" navigation menu will list the categories in which the shop sells products for e.g: Air Filters
Break Pads
Coilovers
Dampers
Suspension etc. When you view one of those pages, there will be a form to allow the user to filter down to their particular make/model of car etc. Now when I search for "Air Filters" in Google, the results come back as nearly 40 million. If I prefix that search term with a car manufacturer name i.e. "Audi Air Filters" the number drops down to 8 million - quite a difference!
So my thinking was to do the following but I wanted to see if you guys think I am barking up the wrong tree or if this is a good approach: Create pages for my 4 car manufacturers for each "shop category" listing all the products I have in those categories for the manufacturer along with well written unique, relevant content, ie:- Audi Air Filters
Audi Break Pads
Audi Coilovers
Audi Suspension ... this would allow me to target the slightly long-tailed version of "Air Filters" as I now have a page for "Audi Air Filters". This would then mean when users click the "Air Filters" link from my left hand category menu, I would need to ensure that those pages were not indexed by the search engines as they would essentially be showing the same subset of products but with the title of the page being "Air Filters". I hope I have explained myself enough for you to understand my question. Ultimately I want to know if my approach is a typical one when knowing that even attempting to target "air filters" with a new website is going to be a lost cause - I need to try and get some of the lower hanging fruit. Thank you for reading.

Hi I have a website which is mostly dynamic content from a database. In the header of the site I have a function which outputs the rel="canonical" link and in some cases the canonical is the page the user is visiting and not another page on the site but I still show it in the source. However we have just recently launched our mobile website which is stored on an M DOT domain (i.e. m.mydomain.com) which has different URL's to my main website so following Google's recommendations we have created rel="alternate" links on my desktop site to point to the equivalent mobile pages and on the mobile pages I have created rel="canonical" links which point back to the relevant desktop site keeping everything tidy.
My question is, is there an issue with having both a rel="canonical" and rel="alternate" in the source of of a single page on my desktop site?  Is it conflicting or detrimental in anyway? Thanks for reading

Hi all
I have read a few post that are similar to mine on this forum but still wanted to ask my specific question. We have a .com domain hosted on a dedicated server in the UK for our main website which takes online bookings and payments. We have purchased the following TLD's of our domain name:
.it, .es, .ch, .fr, .es, .at We essentially want to create a satellite site on each domain where the idea is that users in those countries will find our satellite sites via organic search engine results when searching for the information we sell. Due to the nature of our infrastructure, each satellite site will connect to the mysql database on the UK site to drawn down its text content.  This is where the main CMS is located. I understand the following are important from an SEO point of view for our satellite sites: Hosting in the country we wish to target
Geographical targeting via WMT
Local addresses and telephone numbers on the site
Correct lang=" " tag in the source code
Content presented in the correct language (goes without saying really) Can you advise on any other considerations? Many Thanks Kris

Hi all I recently watched the latest Mozinar called "Making Your Site Audits More Actionable". It was presented by the guys at seogadget.  In the mozinar one of the guys said he loves the website www.sportsbikeshop.co.uk and that they have spent a lot of money on it from an SEO point of view (presumably with seogadget) so I decided to look through the source and noticed something I had not seen before and wondered if anyone can shed any light. On this page (http://www.sportsbikeshop.co.uk/motorcycle_parts/content_cat/852/(2;product_rating;DESC;0-0;all;92)/page_1/max_20) there is a paragraph of text that begins with 'The ever reliable UK weather...' and when you via the source of the containing DIV you will notice a bespoke attribute called "threedots=" and within it, is the entire text content for that DIV. Any thoughts as to why they would put that there?  I can't see any reason as to why this would benefit a site in any shape or form. Its invalid markup for one. Am I missing a trick..? Thoughts would be greatly appreciated. Kris P.S. for those who can't be bothered to visit the site, here is a smaller version of what they have done: This is an introductory paragraph of text for this page.

Hi I built a website for a client a long time ago now and for a number of reasons I have decided to shut down the website. None payment being one of the reasons! My question to all you SEO guru's out there is, what should I do with 301 redirects. The site is an e-commerce based website and my personal website is simply advertising my services and portfolio.  If I 301 redirect all the traffic from the customer website, will there be any issue with Google (or any search engine) seeing that my website is receiving traffic for search phrases such as "Coffee Mugs"? I.e. abolutely no relevance at all to my website content! My worry is my site could be penalised for a flurry of thousands of redirected links. Also, if I redirect everything to my site and the customer decides to pay the bill in due course, I will then remove the redirects -  I guess this will have a massive impact on the rankings of the site? Thanks for reading and any advice.

Hi all I have built many e-commerce websites over the years and with each one, I learn something new and apply to the next site and so on. Lets call it continuous review and improvement! I have always structured my URL's to the product landing pages as such: mydomain.com/top-category => mydomain.com/top-category/sub-category => mydomain.com/top-category/sub-category/product-name Now this has always worked fine for me but I see more an more of the following happening: mydomain.com/top-category => mydomain.com/top-category/sub-category => mydomain.com/product-name Now I have read many believe that the longer the URL, the less SEO impact it may have and other comments saying it is better to have the just the product URL on the final page and leave out the categories for one reason or another. I could probably spend days looking around the internet for peoples opinions so I thought I would ask on SEOmoz and see what other people tend to use and maybe establish the reasons for your choices? One of the main reasons I include the categories within my final URL to the product is simply to detect if a product name exists in multiple categories on the site - I need to show the correct product to the user.  I have built sites which actually have the same product name (created by the author) in multiple areas of the site but they are actually different products, not duplicate content. I therefore cannot see a way around not having the categories in the URL to help detect which product we want to show to the user. Any thoughts?

Hi all I am a developer for a small agency in the UK.  I am using SEOmoz for a couple of our clients and I am also using it to learn from. So far I am finding it a great tool and this forum is also incredibly helpful. Now I also visit another forum called HighRankings.com and this months newsletter is a list of points that are defined as "SEO Mistakes".  In it, point number 2 reads: "Repeat after me: There is no specific number of times a keyword phrase should be used in my content. There is no magic number of words that my pages should have written on them. And there is no best number of words or phrases that belong in a Title tag. And most of all: There is no SEO software that can optimize my website (despite the claims of their creators). Use your common sense to optimize your site! Learn how your target audience searches for products, services and information such as yours, and write about it accordingly on your website. Then write to make an emotional connection with your visitors so that they'll convert into happy customers." Now as a user of SEOmoz I wondered what others thought of this comment? Many thanks for reading. Kris

Hi all I recently purchased the full licence of XML Sitemap Generator (http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/standalone-google-sitemap-generator.html) but have yet used it. The idea behind this is that I can deploy the package on each large e-commerce website I build and the sitemap will be generated as often as I set it be and the search engines will also be pinged automatically to inform them of the update. No more manual XML sitemap creation for me! Now it sounds great but I do not know enough about pinging search engines with XML sitemap updates on a regular basis and if this is a good or bad thing? Can it have any detrimental effect when the sitemap is changing (potentially) every day with new URLs for products being added to the site? Any thoughts or optinions would be greatly appreciated. Kris

Hi all I design and develop websites for clients within the UK.  With each website I build, I always add a link to the footer of the website which links back to my website. I have always used the link anchor text "Site By Jump" but then decided to try to use the link anchor text to our benefit by changing the links across all of our portfolio of sites to be: "Graphic Design by Jump"
or
"Web Design by Jump" In the hope that this helped us rank better for those keyword phrases. Now something occurred to me the day.  Most of the websites I build have no relevance to the content on our website.  For example, I could build a website for Baby Food and add a backlink to our homepage which doesn't even mention the words "baby food". In some cases, the websites can have thousands of pages, each with this footer link appearing at the bottom of each page. My question is, could these backlinks potentially be seen as black hat or spam to a search engine? I.e. thousands of backlinks from websites that have no relevance in terms of content all linking back to my homepage? Thank you for reading and any advice would be greatly appreciated.