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CFSSEO, Can you share the site so we can have a look at it to provide a better, more specific, answer for you? If not, I hope this general answer will help: You should only have one canonical page per product. Even if there are product variants (size, color, etc...) those should typically be handled with a drop-down selector or checkbox on the product page instead of creating an entire new product page for each variant. If this is a large affiliate or drop-shipping website where you are pulling in feeds from different merchants/distributors/stores the bitter pill you may have to swallow is that such sites are dying out in the SERPs because Google doesn't think they offer anything above and beyond their own search results. Someone wants to buy a Blue Widget and they go to Google and type "Cheap blue widget" and a bunch of merchants'/distributors' stores show up... why do they need to put another site in-between the searcher and their destination? The only way to work within this paradigm is to prune the site down and focus mostly on category-level searches, price comparison searches, etc... and by offering more useful features, including robust customer reviews for products and merchants, tools to help the shopper compare options, in-depth buying guides to educate shoppers on their choices... but thousands of product pages with default manufacturer content will no longer do the trick, and may actually harm the rest of your site. This may or may not apply to your situation. It is tough to give advise like this without knowing the site in question. However, I hope it has helped point you in the right direction.

Hi Andrew, Passing or not W3C won't mean your site is mobile friendly or not, there are other, far more meaningful criteria and validations you should do. Foe example: Your site is correctly shown and accessible through the most popular devices used by your users. You can use Opera Mobile Emulator to test it. Your site loads fast in mobile devices (that usually have also more speed restrictions). You can use PageSpeed Insights to test it. In dependance of what type of mobile site approach you have followed (parallel mobile web under a different URL structure, dynamic serving or responsive Web design) you also have good practices and additional recommendations that you should assess. Please take a look at this Moz post where I shared the answers to the most common questions during a Mobile SEO process, you will likely find the answers to your questions there. I hope this helps!

Hi , I am sorry for the late response. For some reason I did not get any notifications for your message. Please check my private message to you.

Even if you get everything right when undertaking a re-design, you can't get away from the fact that some things have changed and your search performance is likely to impacted. It can take weeks or months for the site to regain the lost traffic. From the analytics screenshot, it looks like you've done a pretty good job. As Jeff mentioned, you do need to take into account seasonal traffic fluctuation as well as any other external activity. One site I manage has experienced a significant change in traffic since the end of British Summer Time. Can you compare you traffic with the same period last year. Can you see any similar fluctuation when you look at Google Trends for some of your keywords? Have your rankings changed? What keywords and what was the landing page for each keyword. How has the landing page changed in the re-design. The problem with aggregate/average analytics metrics is that they don't provide you with much of an insight into what's happening. Can you segment your non-paid search traffic, and your direct traffic and see if both segments are affected in a similar way. If your non-search traffic is also affected then it might suggest an external factor. Take a look at your landing pages for your search traffic and compare them to the previous higher traffic period. Are all pages similarly affected or are there significant differences on particular pages. If there are you can compare the content of these pages to the previous incarnation of the site and see if you can explain why there might have been a drop. Of course, I'm assuming that the main goal of the re-design wasn't to "get more visitors", but to get more leads or sales. You say that the bounce rate is much lower and the time on site is better. What about conversions? Again, segment your non-paid search traffic and compare the number of conversions and the conversion rate before and after the update. It's perfectly possible to have less traffic and improve your conversions if the traffic is more relevant and with the right commercial intent. Hope this help.

You are welcome my friend. A good website navigation can really help in this regard. The more easier for the Google bot to crawl your site, the better for Google to show site links in SERPs. Wish you good luck. Best, Devanur Rafi

OP isn't using Wordpress, he said.

Thank you, Federico. The site does look nicer, more professional than before. The traffic is lower now so the conversions are low as well. However, I am optimistic that this is the right move for the long term.

Found it (thank you Screaming Frog custom filters) It's on this page - http://www.kempruge.com/bankruptcy-common-reasons/ -Dan

Wow! Thanks, Jeff. Can't tell you how much we appreciate your efforts here. It's great to have the wider based testing in addition to our own. Thanks also for your footer suggestion. We always used to have footer links and when we changed over to WordPress, because our menus are html now, we dropped them. But you offer a great reason to put them back in. We need to make a widget spot for that and I am considering some text changes for the Home page, so we won't be launching the Responsive site until those are completed. Thanks again!!!

Thank you for your inputs Jeff, I really like your ideas specially the professional photos idea. The client is big car dealership inventory should not be a problem

Ciaran, Starting from scratch to rank for a  term like "heart attack" would be quite an endeavor for a seasoned SEO with a client who had a fairly substantial budget, let alone for someone new to the discipline. Not that it can't be done, but knowing enough to inform the client what it will take and what might be more productive options for their practice is part of being and SEO.  It sounds like you're working on coming to grips with that knowledge at this very point. Starting out, I'd recommend a couple of things: Do an advanced Open Site Explorer report on your client's site and then do a comparative OSE report against some of the other sites that rank on page one for that term.  Then do another report comparing your client with other sites even further down in the results to get a sense of where the client might be starting from and what they would need to do to get to the top.  Installing the Mozbar can be helpful too. Moz has another tool that you might find handy--it the keyword difficulty tool  and be sure that you've read through their How To Do Keyword Research  guide, as well.

Ruben, Woo Commerce for Wordpress is a pretty good solution for a small eCommerce site. If you're going for a bigger site with more robust inventory needs, including integration of a Point of Sale (POS) system you might go for another solution, such as BigCommerce, Volusion, Magento... which will be more expensive but also more scaleable. I think Woo Commerce will work for you based on what you've stated so far.

Okay, we'll give it a whirl. Thanks so much for your help!

Thanks

Hi Robert, Sorry for the late response. I took at peek at your campaign and couldn't spot any issues. Hopefully you're not having trouble anymore, but if you spot any irregularities please let us know! Cheers, Cyrus

Can you describe the problems you're having?  Are your test variants getting indexed?  Google overall does not have a problem with A/B testing, they encourage it.  After all, the better your site converts, the higher CPC you can tolerate from your ads, and the more money they make.

Hi Nicholas, Option 2 is better because the hyphens actually separate words, and so robots (like Googlebot) read them as individual words rather than alloneword. Matt Cutts video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQcSFsQyct8 on underscores vs. hyphens (not quite your question, but it appears that underscores are 'read' by Google in the same way as your first example. All the best, Amelia

Can't believe you being an Interactive Marketing Manager fell for a cheap looking fake review affiliate site. Except A Small Orange, the others are crap. As horrible as you can get in the hosting industry.

Just edited it.

Okay. Shoot me an email at ruben@kempruge.com. We can schedule something soon. Thanks, Ruben