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No. We're actually not launching this initiative for SEO purposes. We just want to create value for our users and having their own stand-alone website is valuable to them. I just want to make sure we're structured properly from an SEO point of view so that we don't compromise the SEO of our marketplace, or their stand-alone site. Also, each site has unique content, but it is identical data to their marketplace store. So, every seller has a marketplace store (with items, a profile etc) AND a stand-alone website (with the same items, same profile etc, just designed differently and accessible via a sub-domain). Hope that makes sense.

Hi Alan, automation is generally bad. By linking through to other relevant pages using a variety of anchor text you give a google a warmer feeling about your site - avoiding over optimisation penalties. Cross linking between pages. There's a lot on site link structure and what is optimum. I tend to ignore this and thing of my customers buying behaviour. So in your case  If in real life you'd offer a couple of buildings to a client then link them on the website. If not, then don't. For me social media is a waste of time. We're a B2B industrial market. See what brings traffic and conversions. The end goal really is to produce something amazing - a labour of love.  think of it as investing a dollar a day in the website. To start with nithing is going to change much. After a while compound interest is going to start giving you momentum and there will suddenly be a crux point where you realise how much of an advantage you have over your competitors. It'll take a while though.

Best advice: Do it right the first time. What does that mean: 1. Having the sitemap.xml file accurate and ready to be submitted.  2. Not focusing just on Google. Submit your site and links links to all webmasters. 3. Making sure your site is complete, meaning all meta, titles, and urls are all unique and filled out with relevant information. Some of your titles are not specific, such as: http://www.sbat.com/livescores/ - Page title is Live scores...think of how users will search for your page. A More appropriate title would be "LIve Sports Scores | Live Soccer Scores from Around the World" or something similar. 4. Getting rid of duplicate URL's. If you are using a CMS, then you want to make sure you follow this rule: One url to one page of content. View more on this topic here: http://www.webdesignandcompany.com/5-htaccess-rules-to-avoid-duplicate-content 5. Making sure your images and alt text is properly filled out. For example: Dont label images image123.jpg, name them what you want to rank for, such as stl-cardinals-jersey.jpg or something like that. You never know how users will search for content or answers, so optimize as broad as possible. 6. Submit all pages in webmaster tools using "Fetch as google". This allows you to submit individual and sitewide crawls of your site. Helps in getting pages indexed/reindexed faster 7. Plan ahead. Launch of a website then hoping it will rank well is a fast way to not rank. Think of ways to gain additional validation and backlinks. Press releases can be a great way to do this when you are just starting out. That should get you started. Hope this helps!

Hi, I just run those with Screaming Frig - as a basic crawler - all is good. Source code also looks ok. There are no issues there - you should be safe. I see the issues on the seobook crwler - it's for sure an issue there not on your side. Cheers.

There was a Panda update that happened on September 5th. For reference: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-panda-update-19126.html http://www.hmtweb.com/marketing-blog/panda-update-september-5-2014/

I don't think you understood the question as it didn't have much to do with links. This is related to a content management system which has an ugly url which a developer then took to make it more user friendly. While a user browsing the site sees clean URLs, webmaster tools reported 500 errors which are essentially server errors. It doesn't seem those errors are in the console anymore. But, I was wondering if anyone has seen sites receive penalties because of a handful of 500 errors even though the site looks pretty good from a user perspective. (Note: the site is fairly large and a few 500 errors appeared).

Hi Sean In my experience there are always many differences in the crawl reports from Moz and Webmaster Tools. Bear in mind, they are all just computer programs running automatically to detect "issues" - and that a human eye is the best tool at the end of the day. To step back a little, your overall ranking will likely have very little to do with these sorts of things (titles, descriptions, etc). They can have a small effect but will usually not bump the needle way up. So just keep that in perspective when fixing things. In general, I would aim to have your titles and descriptions unique, within length guidelines, compelling for users and so on. Google has a great guide here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35624?hl=en There can sometimes be a delay in what Google shows you in WMT as well. They might not have crawled everything as recently as Moz. I do tend to find Moz will check everything whereas WMT will only alert you to the pages they find are problematic. (For example, you might have pages with duplicate titles, but Google has determined the pages not important - a quality check if you well - whereas Moz doesn't make this qualitative check, they just crawl and rate everything). In order of priority I would fix WMT issues first and then move to Moz issues. But again, your overall ranking is likely more due to site authority & trust as measured by links and usage.

Hi, If you have a lot of images and you need to speed up the indexing process then yes, it's worth adding an image xml sitemap. It also helps with the " image index managmenet" of those files. More on: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/178636?hl=en Beside this though - there is no advantage - I mean you won't get any rankings boosts or anything like that. Cheers.

Thanks for your help guys - and also reassuring to confirm my initial recommendations were correct.

Also worth mentioning that if you have connections with some pro players who have influence in this area, it would be 100% worth pushing for a link or at very least a twitter shout-out to get some interaction going, Even if its a nofollowed link from a topic youtube channel, they are exactly the target audience you will be looking for and once you get some visits if they like your content and guides they may start sharing it with there friends/fellow players interacting and creating some buzz and traffic around your site, I would think you may get somewhere with your connections especially if they are contributing content to your site, Hope this helps James

Could be coincidence, sometimes they index XML sitemaps.

Thanks. Let us bask in the warm glow of Motorhead.

Matt Cutts stated in 2009 that if Google finds more that one link to the same page, that it counts only the first link, and ignores all other links. This info is several years old now, but we have not yet found information about this changing. You can hear it direct from Matt Cutts at http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-one-page-two-links-page-counted-first-link-192718\.  Having multiple internal links to the same web page on your website will not hurt your website, and there is no need or reason to craft the link as a no-follow. Many webmaster have good reasons to have multiple links to the same web page, and Google certainly would not punish a website for this.

Hi, It sounds like the setup should do what you want and not hurt visibility as such. It would be worth checking google webmaster tools for indexed pages to verify that the canonical urls are the ones that are indexed and there is not a large difference between total products/pages on the site and what google has in the index - which might indicate an issue. If the product range does not change much then it would be worth editing the sitemap to show the canonical urls. Having non canonical urls in the sitemap isn't ideal since it ads an extra step between the urls you are declaring and the urls you want in the index. That being said I have seen magento installs with similar issues with the sitemap urls and have not noted any major problems.

Agree with both reponces. What is the imperative to have SEO done now? If you are in a seasonal retail business makes sence, but if you are not, what is the reason for this need now? Bruce

Sandra, There's no outright way to compare google's cache of today with its cache of a date in the past that I know of.  If you had google analytics installed at that time, you could go about getting useful info from that source.  Since the primary matter is really which pages were bringing in search traffic  then that are not bringing in search traffic now, you could compare landing page stats from today vs. two years ago to see which pages are not bringing in traffic any longer. Any chance your website was redesigned in the mean time? Sometimes change of navigation, architecture, or URLs can be the culprit.

Thanks

What about this idea: We can flesh out profiles with Data, demographics, and contact info. No one cares about it, so we leave it off. We can also customize it by a list of names that are connected, for those that have registrants So 2 options: throw the demo info up on each, giving some unique content. and or Throw up member first names last init of those registered in them, then only index them if they have members? However, 80% of our traffic comes from these "duplicate" pages.

I certainly know the feeling.

Brian, I personally come from a slightly different stand point; relax. When changing themes these days I personally think that the Meta data is on the lower end of your concerns. Matt Cutts said even said in a video that if you have many pages that are missing H1, H2 etc. it isn't even worth your time to go back and add them. RobertFisher of DrumBeat marketing is an avid poster on this forum often says that SEO is a lot more than just ranking. I don't want to speak for him but from what I have gathered he uses a lot of the meta data has a hook, more than just a ranking feature. Combining the two pieces of information I stated, I try not to concern myself with H1,H2 as far as ranking, I view it like the text on a billboard or the marketing behind an advertisement. This is where the lines of SEO and Marketing begin to get blurred in my opinion. Use your meta data to sell your website and get the individual to click on the search result. Rankings will follow. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBTBEfd7z_Y <-- Matt Cutts video on meta Data