Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I think the feedback form is a great idea because what folks want in a dashboard is subjective. I bypass the dashboard and go straight to the order page. When I want to look at stats and trends I go to those respective pages. If I could make a styling suggestion, allow the users to decide the default page (go to page upon opening) if possible.

Yes, this can cause a problem as the links will be classed as unnatural.  The best way to get round this is to make sure those links have the rel="nofollow" tag. The penalty you should be worried about is Penguin, as this will hit pages with overoptimised anchor text links, and a menu link to an external site could generate hundreds, if not thousands of backlinks to another site, so the site you are linking to in that menu could have problems. There are many instances being posted here of people being hit by penguin because they got featured sidebar links on other sites, resulting in 1000's of backlinks appearing in opensiteexplorer, all with the same optimized anchor text.  I liken the menu links to be similar in result. But like I said, just ensure that the mass menu links to the other site are nofollowed and you should be ok.

Fully agree with Ron. #1 reason = user experience. However breadcrumbs are internal links and are useful because internal links help crawlers get around your site.  Also it helps crawlers understand your sites structure and hierarchy/priority.  Also sometimes Google chooses to display breadcrumbs as a rich snippet type link/benefit. To read more: http://moz.com/community/q/do-we-need-breadcrumbs http://moz.com/community/q/how-important-are-breadcrumbs http://www.searchenginejournal.com/breadcrumbs/15022/

Most would say no slider at all.  Due to website load time increases -> slower load of a webpage. But if you insist Slider Revolution and  Layer Slider are among the most popular. Edit: I didnt finish fully reading Jonathans comment, but realized he choose the same too. #confirmation

Bounce rate is determined by a wide variety of factors....   the quality of your traffic, the attractiveness of your site, the speed with which it loads, the quality of merchandise, the variety of merchandise, many other things.  The software measuring the bounce rate can also be a factor because different programs calculate bounce rate in different ways. I work on two retail sites in very different niches (one hobby supplies and one close to the office supplies niche).  In the past month they had bounce rates of 22% (average 3 pageviews per visit) and 23% (average 3.5 pageviews per visit). These are just observations of how your site differs from mine... Home page... You have 12 CATEGORIES displayed with a lot of wasted space... the 12 categories is close to duplicating your top navigation.   We have about 12 categories like you and they are all shown as a large image and sentence on the homepage but we also include lots of individual, best-selling items and new stuff.    You have about 180 pixels of empty space on the right....  We have a  300 wide column on the right that is completely dedicated to informative content.  Nothing for sale in that column, just links to articles about how to use the products, how to selection them, videos of product use. Lots of people come into the site and go straight to the free information.  This free information is our credibility and it does really well in the search results.  Lots of people enter these free information pages and then purchase the items that we explained how to use or how to select.    These free info pages attract links, likes, shares, email referrals.  In my opinion they drive the rankings of the website. Category/Product Pages...    As an example... http://www.vrtack.com/riding-apparel-c-34.html       ...   This page does not render well for me... The top row of three items comes in fine but the second row only has one item.  If a person has a tablet or a small monitor they will see four items and think that is all you have.  Also some of the photos have been resized impropery - stretched or scrunched.  This looks very unprofessional - especially if you are selling clothing! If you want people to click through or buy something get fantastic images on the site. We really value high quality photos.  We invested in a very good camera, professional lights, light box, etc. to have the equipment.  I have also allowed my webmaster to spend lots of time experimenting to get great shots of each item.  Over time his images have become better and better and the amount of time required for each has dropped.   He  spends 10% to 20% of his time taking photos to improve over what manufacturers provide or photos that illustrate fine details about the product and how they are used or compared.   I don't sweat labor hours spent on images.  Never.   In my opinion, kickass photos are one of the most important characteristics of a retail site. On your product pages you have a 300x300 image on the left side.  I would allow that to be 300 wide and an unlimited height.  Lots of your clothing products would present better there if a taller image were allowed.   Where you have multiple images of a product, I would show ALL of them in on that left side at full resolution.  Bandwidth is cheap, visual impact is priceless. I see that you have some links going out to wikipedia.  If this was my site I would be monitoring how many people use those links and writing custom content for my own  site to receive the traffic from those links.  Each of those pages will have related sales items on them, they will pull traffic from search and they will be customized to make the exact point that I want to make. Some of your product descriptions are quite short and are used verbatim on other websites.  I would spend the time needed to beef them up, make them unique, and include links in them to informative content about that product cateogry that I would create for on my own site. I see that you have visibility in Google for quite a few of your products.  Nice work.  Improving the content and making it more substantive could improve your rankings, pull in longer tail keywords and make visitors regard your site and your staff as an "expert" place to buy. Good luck.

No problem, happy to help

Wow, thanks so much everyone.  Sorry, emails didn't come through indicating that there were responses or I would have gotten back sooner. I do not have a URL yet - site is still in development by another agency.  The structure is pretty set, but I do want to be able to manage expectations.  We will work on creating a blog that we can use for additional pages (possibly part blog, part full pages to target keywords). So, it looks like it's not going to kill us, but it's not going to do us any favors either.  thanks so much for your help.

I guess it might depend a bit on what are the most important features of each product. Are the differences most important or the generic (but important) features across all products more important? If the first then separate pages makes sense, if the second then maybe consolidating onto one page makes more sense. You could also try giving a full feature rundown on your most important/visible product page and then give a shortened version on the other two referencing the first one with a "for a complete rundown of all features" type link.

Yes, you would most probably give them your IP, except that if they are an agency you would not want them to still have domain control - So just personally, I would get registrar access and get it switched to network solutions or some host like that. Then, once the registrar transfer is complete, then you have control to point the domain where-ever you want.

Hi Alexander, The hreflang link in the header is probably the best way to do it. As to if it is impacting you, it depends on how much duplicate content there is to some degree. If you have set up both sites in GWT with separate sitemaps you can keep an eye on how well both sites are being indexed, a lot of unindexed pages on one or the other might indicate a problem. Best practice would be to put in the hreflag as you mention if in doubt.

One of us is having a senior moment. You wrote: "If this was my site we would get rid of the product pages and display all of the color choices on one page." You sent a link to a product page. I was expecting a link to a psychedelic category page saturated with pictures, colors, content and "buy now" buttons with no links to products. The Target bread crumbs show a hierarchy and presentation as proposed by Allen. I get it. And agree. With both of you.

Thanks for your insight! we're trying to get all of our pages rank A, according to Moz's on-page analyis, optimised for different keywords.

ryanryan, In our experiences, building dedicated mobile sites is still something a lot of companies still want. Yes, responsive is the new trend and will continue to evolve, but when it comes to mobile... people want their info fast. Who you are, what you do and how to get in touch asap. We have mobile sites on both subdomains (m.domain.com) and also in folders from the root domain (www.domain.com/m) and all sites optimized. We haven't seen much of a difference to be honest, however, we aren't optimizing huge, national websites on those set ups either. More local companies, dentists, contractors, etc. Go with what is easiest for you to setup for your clients/yourself, BUT, when you talk anything SEO with your clients, your content all needs to be unique. Can't stress that enough. Google sees all. Quickly rewrite whatever is on your main mobile site to be different from your main website, yet provides the same message. Target your keywords as you would normally with on-page best practices in the mobile site. Integrate social media into, especially Google+ and install a separate Google Analytics tracking ID into your mobile sites too for more Google points and measuring! Implement, test, analyze and modify as needed to meet your expectations. Hope this was insightful.  Patrick

The .eu domain termination is a generic, hence it is not bound to geo-targeting on Google Webmaster Tool. In that sense, it is an alternative to the .com domain termination, if the .com is not available. It was created by the European Union has a way to "communicate" that the business owning the domain has an European nature and that it is based on a nation of E(uropean) U(nion) and that is primary market is the EU. From an SEO point of view, it doesn't offer any really advantage with respect any other generic domain name: you can't geo-target more countries with a single domain name you can't geo-target political regions (or continents). Hence, it is good to have it for defending your brand, and to use it if .com (or .net) have been already taken. But if you have a .com, then it is better to redirect the .eu to it.

Hi guys, it looks like our developers have figured it out... I don't know how it happened but for some reason it was doing it on this url: http://www.segafredo.com.au/Disclaimer/ Our site is run on Umbraco (ASP) but the shopping part is a custom plugin for SAP which doesn't play nice with friendly urls. Somehow they solved that issue but created an other one... duplicate content :S Ciao, Immanuel.

You rock Dan!  Thumbs up!

Glad it shed some insight on the topic for you! Best of luck, Luke!

Thanks, everyone!  I appreciate the help!

Hey There, Without diving too deep into your particular situation I can say: I'd redirect and relevant pages to new relevant pages if applicable.  Beyond that I'd either redirect to corresponding categories, or just to the home page with possibly some sort of explanation on the change.  As I said I'm not totally familiar with the change from cabinets to bathrooms so it'd be up to you to decide how to explain that to your customers. Honestly, I personally wouldn't let old URLs with links and traffic 404 on the old domain.  I'd redirect them somewhere hopefully relevant.  If not, the homepage works but I wouldn't expect a lot of value there anyway if the traffic/links aren't relevant. As far as the Moz errors I can see why the crawler is confused with all of this jumping around.  That will continue until you decide on a single domain. I guess I'm just not understanding what your plan is.  If you're redeveloping this old URL then just leave the URLs for now and build them out later.  If you're consolidating onto a new domain and abandoning the old then redirect relevant pages to new pages and/or the homepage if nothing else.  If there are no links or traffic then I wouldn't worry about it much at all anyway. Hope that helps and GL! Jacob

I was able to redirect all the links to the new site, so we shouldn't have lost anything that way.  However, I did ask the webmasters/managers of many pages who were linking to us if they could please change the url they were linking to, to the new one.