Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks Ryan and Chris, I appreciate the feedback!

Thanks Andy, I appreciate the response.  I feel that my client is getting carried away and starting to write their content just for search engines. -Tom

Check out this post from Rand, where he goes over most everything you need to make sure to have done to optimize your page.

Maia, Here's your info on how to do the redirections: http://moz.com/learn/seo/redirection

Content that adds value to the user experience is never bad - more content, more reasons to rank, better information for the user to take action. Ecommerce websites are more difficult to handle though - the goal is usually to convert to a sale and sometimes content can get in the way of that happening. If you've A/B tested and found that conversions are greater without it, then good for you! You've identified a barrier to your visitors and eliminated it for better conversions. What needs to be weighed is the amount of conversions - does the content bring in more, new traffic and eventually converts? I.e. is the conversion volume greater with the content than without it. If no, then stick with the A/B test results. Putting content down the page may help you rank, but is it helping your visitors? You don't want to shove content onto a page just because you think it belongs there - is it beneficial to the user? If no, can you put that content somewhere else where it is beneficial to the user? Amazon is common SERP to beat, let's take a look at one of their category pages: http://www.amazon.com/Outlet/b/ref=sv_gb_3?ie=UTF8&node=517808 We see that they do include a small snippet of text at the top, to describe the category. Then they give the user what is expected, a lot of products to view; and at the bottom they have a longer category description (sometimes reviews and related category information). This is a common way to structure category pages. But, your market may be different so it may be worthwhile to brainstorm how your page structure would most benefit your users.

Hi Christian, Did you get a chance to read this over? If so, what do you think? Have any further questions? Hopefully hear from you soon. Thanks SilverDoor

There are some tips. for sure. I guess this is some kind of category page with a listing. I think the info about the specific category is not much at all. maybe you want to start with the h1 of the category name. also use the h2 and h3 about this category on not below so sum things up. Talk about 250 words about this category advokatai. Maybe under a read more (toggle) for usability a bit more about advokatai This will give the search engines more to grab on to. and gives you more control of the page instead of the listings. Also check out the page speed. https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/ here its a bit slowish. (Netherlands)

This technique is famously known as the toggle effect. According to Matt (in recent video- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EsW8E4dOtRY), It's pretty common on the web for people who want to be able to say okay click here and then show manufacturer details, show specifications, show reviews. That's a pretty normal indium at this point it's not deceptive, nobody's trying to be a manipulative. It's easy to see that this is text that's intended for users and so as long as you're doing that it should be not an issue. But certainly if you were using you know a tiny little on that users can see in there's like six pages of text area and there is not intended for users and there is keyword stuffing then that is something that Google possibly could consider hidden text. If you just doing it for users than you are in pretty good shape. Here is the ref link- http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-on-hidden-text-using-expandable-sections-youll-be-in-good-shape-167753 Hope this will help!

Ok - I was courageous and undid the changes from the last two days to a version where the ranking was pretty good.Within 1,5 hours the site ranked as good as before Thanks for your help guys. Cannot say exactly what it was. Sandbox-effect? Cheers Marc

Thanks, was able to get it done on most of them but a few I don't think I have the ability to add the no index with how my CMS is setup so will be working on trying to include unique content to those pages. Thanks for all the great advice.

Local SEO for big companies often is really bad. great answer

Thank you for your responses.

this might do it as well A flexible pattern URL mapping is a way of redirecting all URLs that match a particular pattern, to equivalent destination URLs, using a single mapping. It does this by allowing you to parse out and name portions of the requested URL to substitute into the destination URL. These types of URL mappings are useful when you are changing the structure or format of your URLs, but want to make sure you can redirect requests for pages under their old URL structure to their new URLs. An example of a flexible pattern URL is the following: /myblog/:post-year/:post-month/*rest-of-url?id=:post-id Each portion of the URL above that starts with a colon (:) creates a named component that is matched until the next delimiter character (./=&?), and any portion that starts with an asterisk (*) creates a named component that is matched until the end of the URL (up to the query string). The named components can then be used in the URL mapping's destination, with each name included inside of curly braces. For example, the named components defined in the flexible pattern URL above could be used to create the following destination: /newblog/{post-year}/{post-month}/post-{post-id}/{rest-of-url} To demonstrate how this flexible pattern URL mapping would work, let's consider the following example requested URL and where it would be redirected. The named components in the requested and destination URLs are highlighted. Requested URL: http://www.mydomain.com/myblog/2013/12/marketing/inbound-marketing-rocks?id=98765 Redirected to: http://www.mydomain.com/newblog/2013/12/post-98765/marketing/inbound-marketing-rocks With this pattern-based URL mapping we were able to retain all of the important, identifying parts of the original URL and insert them into the new URL structure. In addition, with this particular mapping, we were able to: capture the variable-length {rest-of-url} component (i.e. marketing/inbound-marketing-rocks) to be used in the destination url, by using an asterisk (*) at the beginning of that component's definition move the {post-id} component from the query string in the original URL into the middle of the URL in the destination

What Ray said is good for the content-side of optimization (which is important), but links are important too. If you want to start ranking higher you are going to need to start building links to your pages to increase your rankings. Moz has a ton of great resources in their Learn section or in the Blog to help. Start here: http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-link-building **The fire away: **http://moz.com/pages/search_results?q=link building

The sidebar widget will help the page rank, but it is at a disadvantage. Google's understanding of the sidebar makes the content in a sidebar less effective (my opinion, please do your due diligence). Most sidebars include links, content around advertisements, and generic information. This has resulted in the understanding that content in the sidebar should carry less weight for rankings. I suggest building up a strong intralinking website architecture. Build those landing pages with unique content, link back to the home page for your parent keyword phrases. Make the slideshow as HTML friendly as possible (can it be done completely in HTML/CSS?) and fill in your alt texts. Ideally, your home page would have content to help its rank. Can you show content through tabs, modals, or other interaction methods? This way the content is not a focus to the user, but does exist on page for those who want it.

Just keep it brief. Alt text should not be longer than 100 characters. You can follow this link to gain insight on what Google want from you regarding alt tags >>https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/114016?hl=en

Hi Frank A 301 would take care of the problem very well, but where that may not be possible, using a canonical tag would do the trick.  If you can make sure that the page, in either http or https form uses a consistent canonical (one version for both), that will protect you from any duplicate issues as well. For more information on canonicals you can read the Moz guide on them. Hope this helps.

It's a great question and as the article Andy mentioned points out, there are benefits to optimizing your titles and metas for mobile.  However if the site is responsive, then there is only one page and therefore only one title and description.  If you serve different versions then you can do it.  You'd need to host the mobile version on something like m.example.com or do what Google calls "Dynamically Serving Different HTML On The Same URL".  You can learn more here: https://developers.google.com/webmasters/smartphone-sites/details. -M

Thanks Tom, Have checked none of the paginated pages are driving traffic so i think No-index, follow will be the best choice. Regards, Anirban

Greenstone, How do your customers differentiate between stores? Use whatever language they use. So for example, you could name the pages sunshine-rd-ice-cream or a rte-13-ice-cream. That's how I'd do it. I'd also customize title and description tags, and include a keyword-named photo of each shop (with corresponding alt tags) and an embedded map showing it's location. That's another way to ensure the content of each page is unique b/c that will need to be the case. You could talk about the most popular flavors per location, or the busiest times (in case site visitors are trying to avoid crowds or alternatively, seeking them out). D