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You need to show Google why the homepage is most important for that term. I haven't looked in depth, but here are a couple of things... Has Google added your brand name to the title tag here on the SERPs? "Store info : Football Shirts, Kits & Maglia - Calcio Italia Shop_" - _www.calcioitaliashop.com/store_info.htm I notice it's not the same within your coded title tag. If you've recently removed the brand from your About Us page that could help. See here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-solve-keyword-cannibalization I haven't checked your link profile but is it possible there are more links (or more powerful links) to your About Us page, rather than your home page? If so, getting this reversed will help, or as it's a new site, perhaps this hasn't happened yet. Setting up profiles with social networks and adding the link to your homepage will help show Google that that is the most important page. You could also create a Google Places profile with a link to the homepage, if you haven't already. Bolding "Calcio Italia Shop" on your About Us makes it look like that page is important for that term. You could remove that bolding or change it to "Calcio Italia Store" (there seems to be some confusion over what your brand name is?) and add "Calcio Italia Shop" to a H1 tag on your homepage. These little things will help send the right signals, but I don't think it's something you need to worry about long-term - I think Google will eventually figure out the homepage is best to rank for the brand name as that should naturally build up more page authority. Also, I'd make it readable and put your brand name in the meta description of your homepage. The meta description isn't there to stuff keywords into, it's there to encourage people to click through from the SERPs. It should be around 155 characters max, the search engines chop more off.

I would use the current posts as the blog area of the eCommerce website, I would then create new cats for the products you actually want to push. If you find one of your posts is relevant to a product I would then create an anchor text link back to the product, I would even keep that blog section running with the posts and keep linking out to products when relevant.

Yes and yes. Although for oak flooring on Google Shopping, we're listed on page 3 (should be second one, British Hardwoods). How can I improve our listing on Google Shopping? Or perhaps this is a question that I should scour/ask on a separate thread on seomoz.

Thanks, Ryan!

Exactly, that's sort of where I'm at - "...definitely worth a try." I'm hoping to hear from someone who's actually tested this all out.

Sit tight for a few days. If it still stays bad, compare your linking profile to competitors, maybe there is something shady in there (not accusing you of anything) that Google caught outside of a major update. They adjust their algorithm about 500 times a year according to a recent video, so chances are there are daily minor changes. Could be a fluke, too. We had rankings drop down from 5/6  to 10 for a week, and promptly bounce back up again without any interference.

Barry is spot on. You either have the meta robot line, or you do your robots.txt. I prefer to use the txt because it shows me all the rules I impose on the website at a glance and doesn't make me go and search each page individually if anything needs to be changed. Imagine having a website with 20000 pages where each is individually adjusted. If you suddenly need to change something it will take you forever. With a robots.txt it will literally take seconds.

Barry - If you are currently sitting at #2 for your keyword and refer to your existing sub-domain as 'very powerful', I would let this idea go. As Highland said, you stand to lose some rank in doing this, at least temporarily. In addition, the search engines are slowly but steadily losing favor of exact match domains. Your potential upside doesn't outweigh the risks of this move, in my opinion.

Hi Guys...sorry, one more question here. About the recovery of rankings for canonicalized page after removing canonical tag, the theories seem very true but are there any case studies or direct experiences which proves these theories?

I'm going to take the opposite perspective, because I don't think this is a one-size-fits-all situation. Building out unique, ccTLDs does have ranking advantages within those countries, but it also has a couple of disadvantages: (1) Your marketing efforts and link-building are now all split 3 ways, and your authority is split 3 ways. The again you get from international targeting may not offset what you lose by splitting your SEO efforts. If all 3 markets are mission critical, and you have a large budget, 3 domains has advantages. If one market is much bigger than the other two, though, and you don't have a lot of time and money, I think subfolders are a better choice. (2) You may have more complex duplicate content issues with similar English content across 3 domains. Google isn't always as good as they should be about isolating international content. Granted, though, this is a problem with subfolders, too. We can say "write unique copy", but you can only say the same thing in the same language so many ways. A few colloquial spellings and phrases aren't going to make for unique content.

So, basically, we are thinking of putting all content related to one keyword in a subdirectory. Currently all content is in one main subdirectory. For example, url.com/un-related-subdirectory/tons of content to url.com/keyword/content-related-to-this-keyword.

Yeah... I think that is the best approach as people search for the fruit first and fore-most then would probably decide on the refurbished or not.

In this case I would focus on usability first. You may find that you help SEO but your conversion rates go down. I would do A B testing with both formats and use the one that performs the best. Customer usability is more important in my opinion so find that out first and optimize the best performing layout.

You have covered the most important items. 1. If possible, keep the same URL structure. If that is not possible, be certain all the URLs are properly redirected (301) to the equivalent pages on the new site. 2. Ensure the new site's navigation is solid. Perform a crawl of the old and new site, or generate a sitemap for both sites. Compare the URLs and investigate any discrepancies. 3. You should investigate all the normal SEO factors to ensure they are in tact between sites. Header tags, meta descriptions, meta tags such as index and follow, robots.txt, alt tags, etc. should all be inspected. 4. You should check to ensure the new site uses valid HTML/CSS. While not directly SEO related, invalid code often causes issues where your site does not appear properly in various browser versions. Your pages can easily be checked with the W3C validation tool. 5. Minimize flash on the new site or, if you do use flash, ensure you have the proper HTML support. You can disable flash on your browser then view your site to verify. 6. You should check your site security after moving to the new CMS. 7. Ensure your daily backups are created on an automated process. TEST IT! Perform a site restore to a test site after your first day of being live. 8. Ensure you have a "friendly" 404 page. Offer a search box and your normal site's navigation so users are more likely to stay on your site. 9. Check your site's page load speed with PageSpeed or YSlow. 10. Make sure your client has a solid process in place to handle maintenance. A current client had an issue where after his software was originally installed he never updated. His site was hit by malware as a direct result. A plan should be established as to how software updates will occur.

Thanks, i stil dont see what they are using. It doesn't appear to be in the code? Is there a way to check what microformat they're using?