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"Therefore what weighs more - a domain name with a lot of years behind it or a domain name with the no. 1 keyword included in the domain name." I'd go for the domain name with lots of years behind it every time. Put your site under this. _ "writing thousands of unique product descriptions, and I was actually wondering if it is really worth the effort?"_ How many other companies are selling the same product, using the stock description? IMO it's worth spending time creating unique product descriptions along with your other SEO activities - the more ways you differentiate yourself, your site and your products the better. There are no short cuts, all areas need attention however long it takes.

Hi Ben Thanks for your thoughts. Makes sense to use rel=next/previous. Im just not certain if I should also indicate the view-all page. We do have one, but I think it's a better user experience to display just the first 30 products (since that page loads faster).

I'm a huge fan of http://www.rei.com/, check them out.

I am not positive I understand the question - so let me repeat what I think you are asking: You want to remove links from your homepage that link to inner pages of your site, and move these to another page on your site - I am assuming the intent is to create a kind of "resource" list of links? Because you are just moving the links themselves and not moving them around in the site hierarchy - the URL is staying the same.  Right? If I am understanding correctly, then the answer is...it depends Do the pages that you are moving have a lot of authority because there are a good amount of backlinks to those specific pages, or do they have a lot of authority because of their proximity to the homepage (1 click away). I suggest running each page you are considering moving through Open Site Explorer and checking the incoming links and # of linking domains. If it is the latter, then these should continue to rank well, but over time may begin to degrade in authority as they are now more clicks away from the homepage, and the PR of those will now spread to deeper pages of the site. If it is the first, then there shouldn't be much of an issue, though you still may see a slight degradation over time because they are not as close to the homepage. Overall, you shouldn't see too much of a loss.  You can try to mitigate any losses by building quality links to these pages directly.

If you're using Yoast, it will set up rel=canonical automatically.  That's not a bad thing, it's just letting you know just to give you a heads up.  Don't worry about that. I think it's fine to promote.  One thing I would do, just to make sure your 404 errors are taken care of, it install webmaster tools (if you haven't already) and make sure no other 404 errors come up. Looks good though!

I would go with the date option and have it stand out but I think you need to think this through to avoid duplicate and low content pages. Many offer sites keep all the offers for a store or a product on a single page. That strategy avoids duplicate pages.

From my experience as an SEO for a large eCommerce site (our own products), I tend to think that Google has a way of recognizing eCommerce site from purely informational ones and takes that into consideration when analyzing content. As you say Chris, many producers will distribute their catalogs to all their dealers and they in turn will put those online. The same happens with our products here. Our dealers use the very description we provide them with and no one has ever been penalized for that. As said, I personally think that Google takes the intent of your site (eCommerce, informational etc. ) into consideration when slapping duplicate content penalties. Having said that, i have no data to back up that claim so go easy on me, it's only based on my gut feeling and practical observations.

Hi Priti, If your website is CMS driven, then can take help of your programmers to automatically fetch title and description from the content for each page. But make sure to have unique meta data for each page, as each page will have different information so would have different headings as well. Meta data plays a major role in asking people to click on your website while they are searching for product/services you offer. You title/Description must be manually crafted and appealing enough to force people to click on your website Besides, if you think that those pages are not important or less important and would really not help you in generating traffic/ qualified traffic so you may choose to block those pages with the help of Robots.txt. Besides, in case case of static HTML site you don't have much scope you will have manually update all the pages or block with robots.txt. Hope it helps

Anthony There's a few ways to do this, and it does depend a little on the specifics of how the site is set up but the best (and easiest) may be to use the URL parameter settings in Webmaster Tools. You're going to log into webmaster tools, go to configuration->URL Parameters - set it to NOT index things beyond the ? (this may be numbers 2 and beyond or it may be everything) How is this set up though? Does the calendar "start" and "end" somewhere or is it going off infinitely in either direction? The robots.txt file won't keep the page out of the index. If you can let us know some more specifics that would be great! -Dan

Interesting. Thanks!

I second all the responses from Ryan, Marie and Martin. As a simple answer, I'll say if you are spending considerable amount of time, money and resources in the business, it can't hurt to have it renewed/registered for 5/10 years. It can't hurt right other then the extra $100 expense. If it bothers you, just renew it and move on

Thanks Mat! I will install Google webmaster once i get the log in information from web designer. I used the SEOmoz campaign and validator.w3.org to figure out if there are any crawl errors. The only crawl errors I found was duplicated page title and content. On the validator i found 24 HTML errors. I did not see any any no follow or blocked spiders or no index. The URL structure has a "shop.domainname.com" instead of a "www.domainname.com".  I could switch hosting services and fix this issue could this be the problem? I have seen similar scenarios before I think this is the issue. Thanks again!

Cesar, I do not believe the way you list will matter in terms of the way the bot reads the page. Assuming all are in the body, the bot goes left to right and top to bottom. So, unless there is a specific trigger that says terms with links separated by a comma are a negative, I do not see a problem. I assume your links are internal or if not are going to something explaining the term. But, as a dictionary site, I would be driven by what works for the reader. So, with Scrabble players looking for words with a Q, a Z, a J, an X and three A's, how would they find it? (Please hurry as I need to make a play!) Hope this helps a bit.

CleverPHD.  We do link to the originating domain by way of the copyright footer as well as a link back to the original story. Glad to know we're on the same page.

I assume that you have an admin section in the CMS where you are editing and entering these articles before they go live. You need to get a developer to simply write a search algo that when you create a new article and before it goes live, it takes sections of your content and looks for matches/duplicates.  You can set a requirement that it has to match on a minimum of a 4 to 5 word string and other such limitations to make sure you are not matching too many items.  It will take a few tests to find a sweet spot of too many matches vs not enough. With 17K pages, this is the only way you can really do this in an efficient way, you need some IT support/development. They may have to create a reporting layer as well to help you sift through the results. Good luck.

Thank you very much. As I said I use this guide for several years and for me it apears to work well but for SEO it's always important to stay on the top of things.

Check out http://www.seomoz.org/blog/smarter-internal-linking-whiteboard-friday and http://www.seomoz.org/blog/internal-linking-strategies-for-2012-and-beyond Those deal with footer links across multiple domains/regions.

Hi Inhouseseo, Yes, I have made similar things happen for clients. Most typically, this type of results stemmed from overhauling a bad website. In one case, the client's sales (the real test, right?) shot up 125% in one year. I've had similar results with other clients. My take on all SEO is this: the strength of your efforts must be based on the competitiveness of your target industry. If my client is a quilt shop competing against 2 other quilt shops in a 50 mile radius, chances are, I just need to put up a really good website for them to beat out the other two, who probably aren't going to have hired someone like me because the industry isn't very tech-oriented. If I put a blog in the site and client uses it once a week, she will probably be going way beyond the efforts of her competitors. I'll get her Local SEM firmly in place and she will dominate the whole local scene on the web. No way am I going to have to do linkbuilding. It's just not necessary. However, if my client is a personal injury lawyer in San Francisco, that's a very different story. I can write content for him all day, and it will help, but if his competitors are all spending $3000+ a month on linkbuilding with hotshot linkbuilders, he's going to have to match and exceed their efforts if he wants to outrank them. There could be exceptions to this, but I would call this pretty typical. So, my experience with this is that the efforts one has to make for each client are unique. It all depends upon what efforts their competitors are making. In some cases, all you need is good on-page SEO. In others, it will be a combination on on-page plus Local SEM. And, in others, you will have to bring out every weapon in the arsenal, from linkbuilding, to SM, to video marketing in order to gain the visibility the client seeks.