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This is where many misconceive the concept of guest blogging. If time is spent chasing algorithms, manipulating search engines and following through any process in the hope to get a backlink, it is unlikely that a) you are doing it right and b) that you will really be rewarded well.

As with anything online, a content strategy should be thought through, you should understand your target audience and know how to address the readers and what content to provide within articles. If the only reason for writing a guest post to get a backlink, then the article is probably only low quality drivel and will subsequently only find a home that is equally the same.

I for one would much rather spend the time creating a fantastic, well researched piece equipped with imagery, citations and the like and be rewarded with placement at a high traffic authority blog with a link back to my site that sends targeted traffic that may convert rather than a bland, uninteresting 500 word article at a blog that no-one reads. Of course, I'm not saying that this is what you do however think of it like this:-

Why should Google devalue weight passed through a link from an article published on a blog that receives plenty of traffic, has significant social signals and a high level of engagement. Just because it's a guest post doesn't indicate that the content is any less worthy than anything else online.

Sure, if the same author bylines and anchors in links are used each and every time, then it's going to be pretty easy for Google to spot - but then, if you're doing this, then you're going about it wrong anyhow.

Write quality, unique content, identify awesome blogs to publish at, encourage audience engagement and maximise social potential. Google will never devalue your efforts if you are only thinking about your audience and customers, that's the bottom line and always will be.

You may find this useful: Link Building Due-Diligence: The Guest Blogging Checklist

How I would handle this would depend upon the performance of the ecommerce website and which entrance paths via the website convert higher.

You could easily instruct search engines not to index the search results page by adding the following in your robots.txt:-

Disallow: /search.php?search=*

But is there a real likelihood of duplicate matching content with your actual category pages? It's unlikely in all honesty - but depending on your website content and product range, I suppose possible.

If many visits to your website arrive via indexed search result pages, I would be inclined to leave them indexed however and implement measures to ensure that they won't be flagged as duplicate content.

Ways to handle this depend on your ecommerce provider and it's capabilities sometimes but more often that not, is just a case of ensuring there is plenty of unique content on your category pages (as there should be) and there is no chance of other pages of your website hindering their ranking potential then.

Hi Bill,

I did just type out a long response to you but it got lost when I posted the message, I think because the message I was replying to was deleted as a duplicate.

In short though, I described how the current template is better from a design perspective but all the issues are still apparent though. I checked out a product page form a 3dCart demo store and the issues are there too. The software is not open source either so unfortunately you're limited with their poor design / development whilst you host your store with them - just one of the many issues with hosted ecommerce solutions.

All you can really do is ensure page copy is clean, tidy and optimised along with ensuring page titles are unique, descriptive and optimised (required on the page in question).

We're actually building an RC Model ecommerce shop for a new client in the UK from within the next month or so if you would be interested in checking it out when it goes live.

It amazes me that there is still discussion about dofollow social bookmarking websites, article spinning, automated backlink sourcing and the like.

Focus your attentions on other efforts that matter, other efforts that will prove genuine, legitimate and natural.

Sure, if you feel a social bookmarking websites such as Mister Wong will drive targeted traffic to your website, go for it. The likelihood is, it won't. Social bookmarking has had it's day really, few of them are really great traffic drivers and even those that are, the value of the traffic is questionable.

I wouldn't recommend wasting your time on sourcing dofollow links only, it's not natural, it only indicates to a search engine that you're trying to game their system. A handful of relevant nofollow links that send traffic is going to prove far more useful than a handful of dofollow links from websites that no-one ever visits.

There are plenty of automated tools on the market to produce what you're after, but expect to get penalised further down the line.

The design of the website / product pages are poor and would be unlikely to convert well due to the layout and presentation of the information.

Just a redesign of the page would make a significant improvement to onsite behaviour I would expect.

A few points include:-

Conversions

• Design is not fluid.
• Too much whitespace.
• Everything just appears in one wide column, needs to be split into easily digestible sections with call to actions.
• There is nothing catching my attention and no existing call to actions.
• Ask yourself - Why should people buy from you?

Optimisation

• Page contains stacks of CSS / junk type tags from MS Word
• Majority of page is built with tables rather than external CSS and DIVS.

Competition

• Are your prices competitive?
• How does your website compare against your competition?
• What can you take away from your competitors websites / business model?

Analytics

Have you analysed the data you have to learn:-

• Where visitors are leaving your website.
• Whether they are viewing any other pages other than the landing page.
• Are the pages driving the traffic the most relevant for the queries / referrals?

Overall, the website doesn't install trust in the consumer, this on it's own, won't necessarily produce a non-converting website but coupled with various other onsite factors, it's not going to prove overly successful.

Often, many ecommerce stores make very initial poor choices choosing poor ecommerce providers / solutions and this can lead to more design/development and conversion optimisation / SEO later down the line.

Hopefully that has been of some help to you though.

Google since released a 52 pack of updates since the roll out of Penguin and Panda 3.6 which you may have been stung by almost immediately after the first hit.

SEOmoz provide up to date change history of algorithm updates as soon as they are released.

Any backlinks you have which are associated to blog rings / networks - I would delete as many as you can. If the network has been identified and blacklisted by Google, then they'll be rolling out penalties for any domains that have used them. Parallel to this, build some natural links to balance out your link profile as soon as you can too.

Many websites have incorporated the necessary development that allows query parameters from their internal website search to be indexed by search engines - with the view of essentially driving more traffic - however untargeted it is likely to be - it also builds many thousands more indexed pages from their domain in the search engines.

A common way of doing this is by monitoring incoming search term referral traffic and then adding a widget on page to contain these search queries linking to the same search query processed via their internal search, hence how so many of these pages can be indexed for a particular domain.

It's very common with torrent / file sharing websites.

You unfortunately can't control what methods another website is using but it sounds like there is more to it in the sense of what they have done if they are outranking for a completely unrelated term to their domain yet have identified that your domain is authoritative for this same terms.

Without knowing the specifics, it's hard to elaborate further on this... Happy to look if you wanted PM domain/keyword.

Does it rank for anything worthwhile?

Does it have any legitimate / valueable links pointing to it?

If the answer is no to both of those questions, just delete the page and recreate it at a new URL and request a removal of the old URL from Google's index (and obviously don't 301 redirect it).

Regardless of why your question wasn't accepted or not by the system, I'll provide the answer to your question...

The pipe (|) symbol has been used in page titles for many years now, it used to best practice to format your page titles something such as the following:-

Keyword 1 | Keyword 2 | Keyword 3 :: Company / Brand Name

With the keywords being in the order of priority that you wish a search engine to perceive as being the most important for that particular page.

Search has evolved since then and everything Google look for is natural look and feel serving the most relevant and useful content for the end user so it is now advisable to write page titles manually and natural in the sense that it should read well, like a short, descriptive sense describing the particular page.

Check out this for further information which discusses writing page titles that will have the best chance of performing on the web.

I'm not entirely sure I follow the situation but certainly yes, if your website was only launched a week ago, it's highly unlikely it's ranking for anything and the authority of the domain is likely to be much weaker than others that are more established on the web.

What type of query are you analysing a ranking for? Is it a query on your brand / company name? Are the retail stores part of your company too or outlets that resell your products? Links are just one of many factors and quality of links far outweighs quantity of links so there is plenty else to consider if you want to outrank these other two websites. Without more information on this, it's difficult to point you in the right direction however.

The allow directives need to come before the disallow directives for the same directory/file paths. (I have never personally tested this although it makes logical sense to instruct a robot to access one particular path within a directory structure before it sees that it is blocked from crawling that directory).

For example:-

Allow: /profiles

Disallow: /s2/profiles/me

Allow: /s2/profiles

Allow: /s2/photos

Allow: /s2/static

Disallow: /s2

As per how Google have formatted their robots.txt.

The scenario you describe...

"I started eight blogs on a different host with keyword rich domain names to get some links to the shop. Today I don't update them, but they have a lot of links to our shop and the blogs have something like DA 20 and PA 30-40. There are lots of links between the blogs as well."

...is likely to match much of the criteria Google are using to hit sites with Panda / Penguin updates, to be honest, unless the blog content is of high unique content and not 'over optimised', I would not make any efforts to associate yourself with the network of blogs as it will likely do more harm than good over the forthcoming 12 months.

Really, you need to be assessing the overall value of each blog and whether similar content on your current webshop is a good match for the content on each of the blogs. If you're just contemplating 301 redirecting to improve ranking of keywords, then it's unlikely that this will be the result.

At some point, someone has hired one of these worthless 'link building' packages online that pays for however many forum profile backlinks. Whilst many of them have been deployed incorrectly (thankfully for you) - You can tell this by the fact BBCode was used on the forums when some of the forums in questions don't accept this and use an HTML editor instead.

This kind of artificially generated link profiling was targeted in the Google Penguin algorithm updates, this could largely prove the outcome of any recent deterioration in your domain's performance as it is blindingly obvious most of the backlinks are from link spam.

Perhaps the company you wrote the article for, once published, then buy useless packages online to build lots of links to their content which then links to their own website...?

If it were me, I would take down the article and request a URL removal from the index in Google Webmaster Tools. It may even be worthwhile creating a 301 redirect to point to somewhere else so that lots of 404 errors aren't triggered on your site (if there is any worthwhile traffic coming via any of the links pointing to the article).

You can view the link profile for this URL here.

All local listings for Yahoo! UK are managed and maintained via a 3rd party company called Infoserve.

You're lucky if you don't get spammed from them every week telling you to list a free business with them.

Learn how to add your business, clicking the link from this page will allow you to create a business listing.

In my opinion, it depends if we're talking external linkage here or internal linkage.

Sitewide linking out externally to sites with keyword rich anchor text can contribute massively to making the domain being linked to's link profile looking largely unnatural (if all followed links).

However, with internal linkage, I agree that it's advisable not to link back to your homepage with keywords as the anchor text, but other footer navigation with the appropriately labelled anchor text for each link is pretty acceptable in my view - as long as the reason behind this is for usability rather than for SEO.

No, it won't be of that much use no. Homepage PageRank ought not to be focused on too much, I've seen domains with homepage PR that are just complete garbage anyhow.

Again, the same with 'dofollow' links, there's far more 'weightier' metrics to be attracted to than whether a link is followed or not.

At the end of the day, it's just yet another business directory probably serving little purpose...

Is anyone going to use it? Probably not.

Will you get any traffic via the link? Probably not.

Will you see a return on the cost? Probably not.

In my view, definitely not worth looking into. Ask yourself this, what would make this website a good link prospect - if all you come up with homepage PR4 and dofollow. Then you're going about it all wrong.

Based on the URL's you provided above, it's more than just a duplicate page title issue as the contents on the page are almost identical too.

Normally, 'default.asp' is used as a true path to the homepage, similar to how 'index.php' works. If this is the case, you need to 301 redirect (Apache) or IIS redirect (ASP) default.asp to the homepage (/).

If these variations of essentially the same page are not handled, they are seen by search engines as duplicate pages. Please learn how to implement the above here.

If all the URL's for your pages remain the same, there is no requirement for 301 redirects at all no.

Any tools that are worth their weight in gold will be those that typically balance out the elements of optimising a page and reflect this in the grade it offers. Such as SEOmoz for example, their tools aren't going to advise to optimise everything as much as possible to the extent it is over-done, if this looks the case, then the grade is highly unlikely to be an A.

I think the term over-optimisation is largely misperceived. Delivering a well structured, compliant and semantically coded, unique website which provides original content, caters for its intended audience and takes into consideration usability measured via onsite behavior is naturally going to perform well anyhow. There are hundreds of factors granted, but generally only need to be addressed once (such as templating, internal linkage structure, URL formatting and content hierarchy) (with the website elements that is) - after this, as long as content is researched, offers value and is what people want to see, then the grade of any given page will be pretty good whilst not 'over-optimised'.

Any cheap and basic web based tool that basically just gives a grade based on title, metadata, keyword frequency, blog, social profiles is close to useless (take Hubspots free website grader for example) anyhow and wouldn't contain a formula to distinguish between whether (for example) a page has more than 500 words on a page or whether the same keyword appears 450 times within that same 500 words.

If you can rely on any set of tools online that are in touch with the latest algorithm updates from Google then SEOmoz is the safest bet.

Hi Todd,

If the blog contained valuable content but was instructed to 301 redirect to a new location, then you are correct, the crawl would not go as far as crawling the content and subsequently indexing/caching or analysing value therefore any weight the actual content possesses will not transfer via the redirect however domain/page/URL authority / link juice / PageRank and other link metrics will, not 100% of this, but most of it.

301 redirecting is not designed to directly improve rank although other benefits of 301 redirecting can lead to this. Such as usability, traffic, relevancy.

You'll have to rewrite the URL's rather than just remove reference to the path generally unless your CMS can cater for the required alterations.

Potentially an issue with 3dCart's canonical URL feature?

I think there is potentially a bigger issue with your site / URL structure causing this maybe. Have you recently changed whether your website makes use of www / non www in the URL's? Instances of both versions are indexed in Google currently - did you enter the canonical URL in 3dCart with the www or without. And if you use Google Webmaster Tools, is this set to display URL's with or without the www?

There is currently a www redirect from non www to www however, so one would presume www is preferred - so just ensure any settings in 3dCart's admin panel that include your domain, are inserted with the www included.

Maybe on this page.

Hope this helps initially.

It sounds obvious but in each account, are the Google localisation settings the same and the geo-targeting in the AdWords tool the same?

Remove if you can but certainly start building new natural and genuine links to counterweight any previous negative signals on your website's link profile.

Those links in 'Related Categories' are not required, not from an optimisation point of view nor a usability point of view - they carry no styling to make it obvious that they are links which can also flag elements when Google crawls your pages.

The 'Browse for more products in this category' section at the bottom of the page is also not required. There is uneccessary excessive use of internal linking which is likely to be considered 'over optimisation' by Google as per the latest algorithm updates.

Effective navigation is key in ecommerce websites, the main navigation and sidebar sub / layered navigation with necessary filters should be adequate in most cases. If you're only including additional linkage to try and rank pages higher for particular terms, then Google will detect this.

If your category structure goes quite deep or is relatively complex, consider including a module to display related categories in the same way you would display related products. In its current form though, it's not required, doesn't do your website any favours and will likely do more harm than good in the long run.

Consider checking our a click through overlay (Google Analytics provide one) where you can see just how many of your visitors are clicking through those links mentioned above.

Hope that helps.

Use a tool such as SEOmoz' Crawl Test or Xenu's Link Sleuth to determine any crawling issues. There are a number of free online tools for this too.

Just block /premium-content from your robots.txt page then (or include a meta noindex on the page if you can). There's no reason for it to be indexed I presume if it only redirects to your registration page and can't be access without authentication?

Disallow: /premium-content/

View the source code when on the splash page and you will see that their entire site is there, this is what a search bot is seeing. View in browser and this triggers a splash screen overlay - really, the full website is there, you just can't see it.

Perfectly safe, perfectly legit.

What makes you think you have too many on page links? Internal linkage is classed differently as external linkage, linking just dilutes the authority from the page (amongst other crawlability and usability factors), but if it's internal linkage, at least the authority is kept on your domain.

Simple, effective and easy to use navigation is critical to website usability and will have an affect on performance in search engines. In your example, I wouldn't expect any negative ranking affects to occur as a result of the style of navigation menu your website utilises. If that is deemed most useful for your customers, then that's the best approach.

Thanks for the information you provided...

I believe the shift in rankings will be primarily due to a weak link profile for your domain but also a stronger backlink profile from some of your competitors which has seen them rise above you in the organic rankings. These changes coming since the additional Penguin algorithm updates rolled out by Google. (Incidentally, have you seen a decline in Yahoo/Bing if you monitor positions at these search engines too)?

When seeking link opportunities, it's not advisable to chase PR - if 95% of your backlinks all come from pages with a PR3+, then this in itself looks unnatural and will have been a signal flagged.

It is also possible, that those domains you have previously sourced backlinks from via building content relationships could also have suffered as a result of the latest algorithm updates - if they look to sell/provide backlinks using their page PR as selling point, and subsequently link out to various websites from sidebar placements (which they do looking at some of the pages containing your backlinks), this could also have made your domain suffer as less weight/authority is being passed through your links.

I would recommend acquiring some new backlinks, don't worry about the PR of a page and don't focus on using keywords in your anchor text. Perhaps consider some guest content at a few blogs, writing a few pieces of content at each related to your products/services using an author byline with branded backlinkS - for example:-

<name>is the marketing manager at RentalInsurance.org for a leading provider of renters insurance in New York.</name>

Perhaps also consider contributing via comments to some blogs, doesn't matter whether backlinks are nofollow or otherwise, just ensure your brand and where possible,link back to your site (using your name for commenting instead of keywords) via making some relevant and genuine comments to other blogs.

Build a few handfuls of backlinks such as these which will counterweight the links in your existing backlink profile and ensure there are some more genuine and natural links being built.

I would expect this to prove a step in the right direction however there is also the possibility Google could also be looking at onsite elements and the practically exact match domain name too which have also seen changes from recent algorithm updates.

Hope that helps for now.

There are number of ways of potentially handling this depending on what kind of website you have, what platform it uses and how you want to serve your business both on desktop and mobile devices.

Typically though, the correct procedure would be to implement user-agent detection on your website so that when Googlebot (desktop search) and Googlebot-Mobile (supports both feature phone and smartphone now) both visit your website, you can serve different pages/stylesheets based on their browsing capabilities.

For pages on your mobile sub domain, use canonical links pointing to the regular versions of your content which will instruct search engines that those versions are the originals but with user-agent detection in place, both web and mobile versions of your content can safely perform in the same index and Google will rank your mobile content better for mobile device users.

Read further on this:-

7 Real Mobile Duplicate Content SEO Issues

SEO Considerations For Google Mobile Search In 2012

5 Tips For Optimal Mobile Site Indexing

Mobile SERPs & Usability

In the sense that a report is alerting that there are too many links on a page though is going to be because it is warning of authority leakage more than anything else though.

Granted, the insertion of 'just' in my previous statement probably misleads...

I agree though that if you were to link every page to every page, it would just cause a royal headache to crawlers - why one would do that though is beyond me.

Not at all, it's more natural for a domain's external link profile to consist mainly of backlinks containing the nofollow link relationship than not. The 67% ratio would be about right and this would not, in itself flag any problems at all.

Its important for a link profile to look natural, a healthy balance of nofollow links with followed links along with a nice mix of variety with the types of pages linking back to a domain.

Rich Snippet Markup should be implemented on the page containing the information not on links pointing to the pages.

Difficult to really advise on which approach would be best because from what I can gather, it doesn't sound like you're implementing the markup correctly.

Better to mark up the content on the location pages themselves with the address, locality, city/town etc as per my example above.

Might be worth reading up on exactly how Schema data works.

There is literally tons of factors to consider. Primarily, how much will the website be changing, one would only presume considerate research has been carried out and the changes are for the better (both from a usability and optimisation perspective).

Some questions to ask...

1. Will the URL's / URL structure change at all or will all URL paths be kept intact?
2. Will the actual content on each page be changing at all?
3. Is any content being removed or added?

These three questions will pose the biggest ranking changes...

All three should be addressed for the better which should then see a positive climb in rankings (if anything at all). If any URL's are changed, as Erik points out, 301 redirecting these is essential, however this won't pass 100% weight through to the new destinations so it's possible the authority leakage on these alone could cause a drop in rankings (temporary of otherwise).

Hope that helps for now.

It doesn't sound like they are a developer at all if they can't apply a basic rewrite which is included in the Magento core.

Switch URL rewriting on from the admin panel and add this in .htaccess

RewriteCond %{http_host} ^yourdomain.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [R=301,NC]

(replacing yourdomain.com with the domain).

May vary depending on the version of Magento although if its a new build, I would expect it to be 1.6 or 1.7.

No, assigning multiple tags to multiple pages on your website is good practice. (Providing they are of relevance of course).

What you should think about doing is only displaying excerpts for tag / search result pages so that it doesn't flag as duplicate content. You don't need to be displaying the entire post(s) for a tag page, a small snippet with a 'Read More' or similar link will ensure the full original is only ever at one location, it's specific URI.

Joomla has all those features included in its core but if you want greater flexibility over what content you want public and what you want private (requires visitors to sign-up/login to view), you may want to check out this extension.

There are a few Wordpress plugins that cater for what you're after - but again, included in the core is memberships, sign-up/login functions so not really sure exactly what you're after but here are some resources that will likely come in useful for you.

http://buddypress.org/

http://ntt.cc/2009/10/13/25-excellent-social-networking-plugins-for-wordpress.html

Recommendations need to be based purely on your specific requirements (and budget)...

Undoubtedly, opting for a cheap solution, will sacrifice on quality - as with many things in life.

Are you planning on using a website design / development agency to build and design your store or are you just looking for an off the shelf platform with pre-built templates?

What is the $150 per month for? Hosting? Monthly transaction commissions on self hosted solutions or just monthly fee for usage of the ecommerce solution?

First identify whether an open source platform or a self hosted platform is best for you. If you want everything taken care for you and aren't worried about the endless limitations you will face, then a self hosted solution such as Shopify or Big Commerce may be best.

We've got many years experience in ecommerce having worked with lots of ecommerce providers and there really isn't any case of one size fits all nor are there many that we recommend as the majority have flaws.

Generally we'll recommend Magento as it's open source, extendible, flexible, robust, powerful - but it is also bulky so needs experts to fine tune and configure server, site and a decent hosting package - preferably in a dedicated environment - but this won't always be the best or cheap option for some etailers.

Some questions you may want to be asking before going with a recommendation include:-

• What is the reasons for upgrading / switching if you already have an ecommerce website?
• How many products do you need to upload and will the filters/options be complex at all?
• Can you design, code or work around PHP, MySQL databases, HTML and CSS (typically)?
• What ecommerce features do you require?
• How extendible does your solution need to be?

Other noteworthy subjects to consider:-

• Support & Service
• Themes & Extensions
• Maintenance & Updates
• SEO / Core Optimisation

You may also find this article on Killer eCommerce Tips for Online Retailers useful too. Whether before you have chosen an ecommerce solution or after...