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Where to begin for eComerce... Here a re a couple of issues I often see in eCommerce sites: Well written original content - this is an area where eCommerce sites often fall short, especially those that have been thrown together quickly or have multiple versions with keyword rich domains. I often get requests for SEO help from stores that have no real titles and descriptions for their products - just item numbers. Or they just use the descriptions from the manufacturer without editing them. Keep in mind that unless you are the only site selling those items, someone else already has those descriptions on their site so you might have duplicate content issues.  And make the descriptions as complete as possible. If you are selling men's pants, say more than just "Men's pants". Technically correct code - seems like most eCommerce platforms are a total mess when it comes to code. Totally xhtml valid code can be difficult to achieve but at least try to get close. Make sure everything works! Ecommerce site owners and web masters often don't consider file size of product photos - make them big enough to look good, but be sure not to use them fresh off the camera as they will often be too large and slow down the site's loading time. Scale them down in PhotoShop or another photo editor, and use some compression Google Merchant - Assuming that you've got the basics of a quality site and on page SEO taken care of, be sure to set up a Google Merchant/Base feed and provide all the information Google merchant asks for.

Done! You nailed the 5% pretty good. Thank you very much EGOL! I've just reverted back the URLs.

I am using results from a variety of "location-neutral" keyword position trackers like Rank Tracker, SEObook, and of course SEOMoz among others, and comparing them to multiple non-logged in browsers on multiple devices that area actually in the Anytown area. The discrepancies between the various trackers are minor and I would attribute those to datacenter differences. I considered the personalization possibility, but usually that works in the other direction, unless Google is now using a "you already looked at this enough and we are showing you something else to broaden your horizons" calculation. I used "500 miles" kind of generically. I tried entering all sort of different locations into the Google settings and it seems the closer I got to Anytown, the lower the ranking went. I am thinking it is something that recently changed in the way Google handles local search. My theory is that within a certain radius of the specified location, the algorithm is a little different.  Once outside of a certain radius, traditional non-localized algorithms kick in so a site optimized for Anytown Widgets might rank a little better than it would when google sees that the searcher is actually in Anytown.  I am going to take a closer look at some other local SEO projects and see if anything similar is happening, then see if I can find some common traits. Not a huge issue as it is a relatively minor drop for some keywords that aren't high volume. But I am a little obsessive and curious.  I was hoping someone would chime in with some info about a documented change in Google's local search.  I know Places has been evolving a little more lately. Every time I look a my own listing it looks different. Thanks again.

You want to use a 301 because 302 is only temporally. Does that make since? A case where you can use a 302 is when a site is under construction and you just redirect all traffic temporally to /under-constriction/ for maintaance or something. Not the ideal solution but to answer your question: 301 that. 301 = permanent move.

As Alan said, you have a ton of old 404 pages with no one linking to them and they're not being indexed in the SERPs, just let them 404 because that's what Google recommends to get rid of them. If you are getting links and traffic for your 404's pages, you definitely want to make it a priority to 301 redirect them. The grunt work is looking at each URL and determining its value. Two best responses on this issue that I have found so far. From the Google Webmaster Central Blog: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/search?q=%22404+week%22 Rand Fishkin himself: http://www.seomoz.orgwww.seomoz.org/blog/are-404-pages-always-bad-for-seo

Clcik start capture, then when youload page it will list all requests and their status codes

Sure, one thing I forgot to mention. Look at your XML sitemap. It doesn't seem to be correctly formatted at all, and it caused my window to freeze loading it. I'd look into that. As far as the backlinks, yes I would start to build up some positive and natural backlinks.  Start with all the social profiles, like linkedin, youtube, facebook, twitter - make sure they all have links pointing to your site. Put unique, useful content on them. Try knowem to find more relevant social media sites to register with. Then I would read over this guide to linking building and try putting it into practice to build new links. A full off-site review is obviously out f the scope of this Q&A, but you can run your site through open site explorer and take a look - see if there's any sites that stick out like a sore thumb with a lot of links that provide no value (low quality domain, spammy or tons of exact match anchor text). Pick the worst sites and contact them and see if you can get them removed. Hope that helps! -Dan

afew days, but there is no garentee that they will be included.

Per Google's recommendations, I'd change the links to the new website.

Unless I'm missing something here I thought that you have code to detect browser/user agent and then show the right 'version' of your site based on that result? I'm pretty sure that the search engines are smart enough to see what's going on and that it's not a duplicate site but another version for specific devices.  They would index both sites.

Hi Ian, It's great to hear that Q&A is working for you. I have to confess that a large share of the "warm fuzzies" in my life emanate from this forum. Seeing so many people sharing and working together here every day always puts a smile on my face. Thank you too for posting this - as EGOL mentioned, it's great to know what has worked and what the outcome was for your site. Feedback like this is as valuable for the rest of us as the answers were to you. I would most definitely agree - Q&A alone can make the subscription cost worthwhile Sha

One static URL that can be found by your users from within any of the categories that the product is in would probably be best. That way there is no chance of duplicate content issues if the search engines were to find both and not resolve the canonical tag. Really, I think it could go either way. Whichever one is easiest to implement in your particular situation, unless there are a lot of inbound links to your products. If that is the case, changing the URLs would require 301 redirects from the old URLs.

Hey Sam, by using noindex you wont show up in the serps at all, so this might not be the best idea. Assuming that there aren't any duplicate pages on your domain I'd say try it with a few pages and see if they rank. Worst thing happening is that google attributes the text to amazon and thus not rank you very high. What you could do is wirte a small unique text (300 words) for each page and use the amazon product data. use a SEO plugin and set archives / categories / tags pages to noindex though..

Thank you very much friend! Yes it is an Ecommerce site, and I did not actually have a hand in creating it. It was kind of put in my lap after it had been out for a few months and I was told to make it look pretty. Thank you for the tips I truly appreciate it.

Hey Alex, Hit the "oak furniture" analogy on the head there. I could go through our core pages disabling the canalizing link. So the Oak furniture didn't work on the oak page because the user is already there. The CMS is reliable and a little FUGLY I can't get a nice font to work and align how I want so resorted to images. How much of an edge do you think we are missing because of this issue? can you quantify it?Essentially this is not going to boost usability massively, just sculpt link juice hopefully.

I don't think area sub nav is that prohibitive, especially with listing 8 cities.