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I think you are correct about those back links and it is a source of concern. We never got any notification in Google webmaster tools about it, but I don't think that means it's not an issue. Outstanding point! Also great thinking about the bad links following us even if we switch domains. That would have been a disaster!!! We really love the beverlys.com domain name and have no intention to switch to something else unless it's going to be a benefit, which so far does not sound likely. The input has all been very much appreciated!

New site plus no content equals no ranking. You will need a lot of anchor text to help rank the site. Read chapter 4 http://www.seomoz.org/beginners-guide-to-seo

Dr. Pete wrote a post about this warning a while back at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-many-links-is-too-many that should also help you.

500 words seems pretty short, are you sure these are high quality articles? What are you doing to promoted these articles?  Are you sending out e-mails to other people in your niche that would be interested in your articles?  Contacting them on Twitter and other social media?  Posting your article to social bookmarking sites?  Submitting your articles to news sites for your niche? Like Donnie said, you can just build it and expect people to find it.  Make great stuff and do some outreach.  If that doesn't get you any traction, maybe your content isn't being received by your audience as well as you thought it would be.

Thanks for helping out, guys. The homepage took the biggest hit (54% drop), but most pages took  big hits from a year ago. So I'm assuming it was a site-wide drop in rankings. When I look at the OSE metrics, it looks like readprint.com should be crushing the competition, but they're now crushing us. That's why I'm so baffled. Perhaps the competition has more unique content, better layout, better pagespeed? I'll keep looking, but I'm hoping it's something reversible. Thanks! pmMPr.png

Meta keywords do not matter to search engines anymore.  Use meta keywords to tell your competitors exactly what keywords you are going for When I do a wordpress blog I use tags to describe whatever the post is about.  A category would be a broad category, whereas a tag could be 10 words you'd use to describe the post in detail (for example...a post about panama city in March you'd expect to see tags like...college, spring break, panama city, florida, beach, ocean, march).  Many times those tags will end up being the keywords you are focusing on for that page, if you developed your content well.

Unfortunately, I don't know Etsy well, but I think Thomas is right on track - you don't necessarily want to pre-emptively add them, especially if you're not clear on how they work. Typically, it's more for preventing duplicate content issues. We're re-evaluating how we grade the canonical tag, since this is a bit confusing. It's a good practice on some pages (like your home-page) that naturally tend to have more than one version, but adding it sitewide can be tricky.

1. Yes, the link juice will eventually be applied to the new page. This is part of the benefit behind 301 redirect.It sometimes just takes a little time for it to process and show up in reports. 2. The link juice or link equity will eventually pass through to new url once Google has established and indexed the new page. This could take weeks to months. 3. I would continue to optimized on a regular basis. Make sure that after each 301 redirect you also adjust all internal linking to the new page, especially in your sitemaps! Other wise it could get confusing for both visitors and bots. Hope this helps.

While it may affect your presence higher up in the search engines - to start with - it's a perfect opportunity to develop some exciting content for that section of your website, an excuse (not that you need one) to present something new, if you will. And I don't just mean static pages, I'm talking content people can share - interesting, educational, inspiring (insert other relevant word here) content that links well throughout your website (and sends your readers/audience on a buying journey, starting at information/education, ending at checkout). Sure, 301 the old pages to the new one to gain whatever benefit you can out of them - but make sure you don't spend all your time worrying about this... jump on the social side of things and look at how visitors are interacting with your content, then think about how they might be tempted to share it (special offers, for example...) - the opportunities are endless. That's just my take on it. Don't spend all your time worrying about the re-structure; that's something I've just learned!

First of all - no, this is not good for SEO. not sure that at the moment it is hurting your website but it is far from begin best practice and might cause problems in the future. I think that EGOL's solution is the best for this issue, Combining all the 3 versions into one page with "select your format" is the best solution for users and search engines. if you take this approach (although it means that you need to develop it into your website) the best thing will be to 301 redirect all the URL's into one for every product. If you rather leave the pages as they are and only deal with the duplication then Canonical tag, as Justin suggested, will be good practice. I would go with solution NO. 1 Good luck!

All so rember the canonicalization SEO advice: url canonicalization by MATT CUTTS on JANUARY 4, 2006 in GOOGLE/SEO (I got my power back!) Before I start collecting feedback on the Bigdaddy data center, I want to talk a little bit about canonicalization, www vs. non-www, redirects, duplicate urls, 302 “hijacking,” etc. so that we’re all on the same page. Q: What is a canonical url? Do you have to use such a weird word, anyway? A: Sorry that it’s a strange word; that’s what we call it around Google. Canonicalization is the process of picking the best url when there are several choices, and it usually refers to home pages. For example, most people would consider these the same urls: www.example.com example.com/ www.example.com/index.html example.com/home.asp But technically all of these urls are different. A web server could return completely different content for all the urls above. When Google “canonicalizes” a url, we try to pick the url that seems like the best representative from that set. Q: So how do I make sure that Google picks the url that I want? A: One thing that helps is to pick the url that you want and use that url consistently across your entire site. For example, don’t make half of your links go to http://example.com/ and the other half go to http://www.example.com/ . Instead, pick the url you prefer and always use that format for your internal links. Q: Is there anything else I can do? A: Yes. Suppose you want your default url to be http://www.example.com/ . You can make your webserver so that if someone requests http://example.com/, it does a 301 (permanent) redirect to http://www.example.com/ . That helps Google know which url you prefer to be canonical. Adding a 301 redirect can be an especially good idea if your site changes often (e.g. dynamic content, a blog, etc.). Q: If I want to get rid of domain.com but keep www.domain.com, should I use the url removal tool to remove domain.com? A: No, definitely don’t do this. If you remove one of the www vs. non-www hostnames, it can end up removing your whole domain for six months. Definitely don’t do this. If you did use the url removal tool to remove your entire domain when you actually only wanted to remove the www or non-www version of your domain, do a reinclusion request and mention that you removed your entire domain by accident using the url removal tool and that you’d like it reincluded. Q: I noticed that you don’t do a 301 redirect on your site from the non-www to the www version, Matt. Why not? Are you stupid in the head? A: Actually, it’s on purpose. I noticed that several months ago but decided not to change it on my end or ask anyone at Google to fix it. I may add a 301 eventually, but for now it’s a helpful test case. Q: So when you say www vs. non-www, you’re talking about a type of canonicalization. Are there other ways that urls get canonicalized? A: Yes, there can be a lot, but most people never notice (or need to notice) them. Search engines can do things like keeping or removing trailing slashes, trying to convert urls with upper case to lower case, or removing session IDs from bulletin board or other software (many bulletin board software packages will work fine if you omit the session ID). Q: Let’s talk about the inurl: operator. Why does everyone think that if inurl:mydomain.com shows results that aren’t from mydomain.com, it must be hijacked? A: Many months ago, if you saw someresult.com/search2.php?url=mydomain.com, that would sometimes have content from mydomain. That could happen when the someresult.com url was a 302 redirect to mydomain.com and we decided to show a result from someresult.com. Since then, we’ve changed our heuristics to make showing the source url for 302 redirects much more rare. We are moving to a framework for handling redirects in which we will almost always show the destination url. Yahoo handles 302 redirects by usually showing the destination url, and we are in the middle of transitioning to a similar set of heuristics. Note that Yahoo reserves the right to have exceptions on redirect handling, and Google does too. Based on our analysis, we will show the source url for a 302 redirect less than half a percent of the time (basically, when we have strong reason to think the source url is correct). Q: Okay, how about supplemental results. Do supplemental results cause a penalty in Google? A: Nope. Q: I have some pages in the supplemental results that are old now. What should I do? A: I wouldn’t spend much effort on them. If the pages have moved, I would make sure that there’s a 301 redirect to the new location of pages. If the pages are truly gone, I’d make sure that you serve a 404 on those pages. After that, I wouldn’t put any more effort in. When Google eventually recrawls those pages, it will pick up the changes, but because it can take longer for us to crawl supplemental results, you might not see that update for a while. That’s about all I can think of for now. I’ll try to talk about some examples of 302′s and inurl: soon, to help make some of this more concrete. http://www.ragepank.com/articles/3/preventing-duplicate-content/ Hope I was of help, Thomas Von Zickell

Glad I could offer some clarity from an SEO perspective.

Zack10 are you ranking on other terms still or is it just this kw?

It's always hard to speak in generalities, but my gut reaction is that Alan's right - if the canonical tags were implemented properly, having your rankings tank from this kind of implementation seems very unlikely. A couple of possibilities: (1) Are your canonical URLs being used in internal links? If you tell Google that one version is canonical but then act as if another version is canonical, it can cause problems. (2) Are you sending any other, conflicting cues, like 301-redirects or Webmaster Tools parameter handling? (3) Is it possible that your canonicalization was too broad? In other words, did you end up de-indexing some product variations that were driving long-tail traffic? For example, let's say you had a product in red, blue and green and you canonicalized them all to the "root" product page. In theory, that might be a good thing, but if people were searching for specifics and you had a lot of long-tail rankings ("buy product in red"), then it could be bad.

Copy and pasted what, exactly? If it's specifications, that's perfectly fine. If you are really worried about it (I would not be, I have clients that post specifications like this), you could always include the specifications in a PDF and offer a link to that. That's less helpful to visitors though, and they are really who you should be targeting first. If it's a product description, then yes, that's definitely no good. Write your own description. Include a staff review. This paired with the ability for users to review/comment on the product will give you enough unique content to shine. Look at big e-retailers if you want to see how others are doing content. Cabelas has a Q & A section, for example. Show widgets like Amazon does ('Customers Who Bought This Also Bought..) and provide short descriptions for each product tile. Include video content if you can, or relevant how-tos. MidwayUSA does a good job of having supporting content. Use microtags for everything you possibly can. That should be enough work to last you a year! Cheers.

Hello JH, The "100 links" rule doesn't really apply these days, and I'd personally remove that from the SEOmoz report if it were up to me, but some people still like to see it. I wouldn't worry about it, though you may want to focus on more important and higher ROI issues like getting a couple sentences of useful, static content on category pages.