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You can place a general description at the top of the page under a large detail photo.  Then down below - beside each color photo example you can talk about the pretty turquoise blue color of this item and how it is great paired with tan slacks (don't give a specific item there because it be discontinued, but you can link to search results or a color category page).

The price increase had very little impact upon sales or conversion rate.  I did not see a change in bounce rate.

It is definitely a ranking criteria BUT if you do your homework right by focussing on other ranking factors, you do not need to consider it. To make it perfect: if you can, always use the right ccTLD. Concentrate on keyword domains, with the right ccTLD but if you can`t use keyword domains despite their CC Take a look at the actual list of ranking factors here

Mmmhhh, We're seeing a similar effect in competitive search in Sydney, the term 'website designers' brings up relatively weak sites, few if any of which appear to be optimised for that particular query though they are for closely related searches. Has G vastly reduced the influence of backlinks and turned up the over-optimisation filters?

Many thanks Nathan - that's good to know!

Unfortunately Google doesn't tell you why you dropped some SERP pos. or why - though we would all like to know. They are constantly altering their algorithms and as long as you're keeping your site fresh you should roughly stay on top of the game You can always compare back links etc. and content of their site to see why and compare it to your own site, as I said Google doesn't release any info - sorry Good luck

Thanks for your input guys. In addition to this, say a keyword has a national search volume of 1,000 exact match searches per month, as my client has. The client ranks, nationally, at position number one. However, the traffic the website receives no-where near matches the available search volume, we are talking less than 50 visits from a keyword that Google says has a search volume of 1,000. So, is this a direct result of localized results? IE a user types in the search query and contributes to the 1,000 monthly search volume Google says it has, but is then served a local result so the clients site doesn't appear. This would mean that any given website, would never achieve the expected volume of traffic from Google's estimated monthly search volumes?

Thanks Takeshi.

yes sir, i did write text description for each image

There may be a plug in to place rel=canonical tags on the page.  Sometimes, when the plug in field is left blank, a self referencing rel=canonical tag is placed on the page.  I wouldn't worry about it too much, it shouldn't harm your site. From: http://moz.com/blog/dispelling-a-persistent-rel-canonical-myth "Looking through Google's blog post on the subject, this isn't explicitly stated. However, you can see that even the example website, Wikia, employs this practice on the page Google points out. You can also see Googler Maile Ohyeanswering a comment on this: @Wade: Yes, it's absolutely okay to have a self-referential rel="canonical". It won't harm the system and additionally, by including a self-reference you better ensure that your mirrors have a rel=”canonical” to you."

BJS1976 The Fetch as Google tool allows you to see what Google sees. Yes, it can help you get the page indexed more quickly, but first take a look in WMT and see how the indexing is now. If your site is being indexed regularly, look at crawl errors. Do you see a problem there? etc. When you fix the problem, mark it as fixed and it will be removed from the list. The next time G crawls it, if the problem still exists it will reappear. But, you will know it was crawled. This allows you to dig deeper. NOTE: Fetch as Google will not follow a redirect. If you feel you are still not getting the page reindexed, I would resubmit the sitemap. I hope this helps a bit. Robert

It can even take months to update, if you're looking at a page that has low authority.

Look at all these tips! Thanks for taking so much time to very clearly outline a plan of attack. Some items have been completed above like local listings and Facebook we updated weekly, but your other points are great. Like you said, time to roll up the sleeves! This is an ultra-competitive market. Thanks so much!

Wow. Definitely a hard lesson in checking the obvious, eh? Thanks everybody. Total oversight not to even bother checking what I never considered to be an issue. Now to go talk to our dev team to figure out how this even got in... Thanks again everybody!

Loan, It seems like you're asking two different questions here: Do multiple 301's pointing to a single page create duplicate content--and Is it better to point 301's to your home page or a more relevant internal page.  Is that right?  The answer to the first question is no, you don't have to worry about duplicate content being caused by your 301 redirects.  As far as the second question, it's usually best to point a 301 redirect to a page on a site that is the most relevant to the one being redirected.  However, if the page you're thinking about redirecting isn't getting any search traffic and/or doesn't have any external links gong to it, your redirect won't really have an impact on your SEO

This indirectly answered why my Bing and Yahoo dipped significantly. New website - so submitted a new sitemap to Bing. Was wondering why my rankings all took a huge dip in a single week. Looking at it now the previous rankings were from the old site. Now for the building up again

So, the short answer is "no". It's possible that something else changed on the page, or something happened to boost CTR (a seasonal change, an outside event that increased product interest, etc.). In GWT, you can drill down and look at CTR on a keyword basis. Take it with a grain of salt, but essentially you need to segment. What pages are the new clicks landing on? What specific keywords are driving traffic to those pages? Have the rankings for those keywords changed? Actually load up those queries - did something else on the SERP change (a new feature, a competitor's site changing, etc.)? Also, why are impressions down 17%? It's possible you lost ranking on some keywords, and those particular keywords just happened to have low CTR, while you gained ranking on some higher CTR keywords. Odds are, this is a more complex picture than just a movement in one or two keywords.

Well said as usual, Takeshi. Hell I'm thinkin' about skipping the PR all together now and just sending this article out to some online publications instead... we'll see.

+1 to Davanur.  We use the same frameworks and core blocks of code across several sites.  When the functionality is identical it clearly makes development a little easier because you don't have to reinvent the wheel each and every time.  However, it is only the content that matters in SE eyes.  Otherwise, everyone other person on here with the wordpress or joomla theme would get crushed by penalties because of a lot of the themes use the same frameworks like Gantry, Warp, Zend, etc.

Typically updates are not confirmed for a few days after the event but Google is always making minor tweak to the algorithm... As well as Mozcast I find the Panguin Tool (<cite>www.barracuda-digital.co.uk/panguin-tool/</cite>‎) really useful as this allows you to overlay Google updates with your organic traffic to align any dramatic changes... Steve