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Thanks everyone for the help. This should def. help clean up some of the problems that I've been having with the website.

My firm uses several websites. When I first came in house there were a lot of sites, but I took them down because of the content quality at the time. I am slowly building them back up.  I find that specific area websites can be very useful for pointing ads or specific campaigns, since many people want to know just about X concept I am very careful not to reproduce content and not to try to hide that the sites are owned by the same company. I hesitated to bring the sites back up until I got some confirmation from Matt Cutts that having more than one site is fine, as long as you follow good content and other SEO standards. http://www.brafton.com/news/cutts-on-similar-website-content-multiple-domains-duplicate-or-safe I link between the sites, but in an organic way. I.e. if I have an article on one site that naturally links to another site, I link it.  I also don't have a huge number of sites and don't expect to do so.

1. 'Will this get me into trouble creating duplicate content with the main category page? Should I only have  the main category indexed and "no-index, follow" all the product attribute pages? ' I don't feel that you have anything to worry about here, however having an extra element of descriptive text would help on the sub category pages ie. on chainsofgold.co.uk/earrings/studs/   etc.. 2. 'Can I link to those product attribute pages without the risk of getting accused of creating duplicate content?' Linking is fine however to ensure the search engines do not consider those extra parameters you should filter them via robots.txt ie Disallow: /?filter_gold-type OR Disallow: /?filter_* (if all your filters begin with '?filter_') You should also link your sitemap from your robots.txt file

Yeah, we need to ramp up our social media engagement. We've had accidental success with a few small bloggers, But we find it very difficult to identify whether a blogger will influential or not. Any tips or tools to help?

Hi David, Thanks for your response. That makes perfect sense. I assumed that to be the case but thought it was worth checking before making any changes. I suppose by adding appropriate hreflang="x" mark-up combined with the geo-targeting of root domain and subfolders - that should be enough to inform search engines of our intended geographical targets. Strangely there wasn't a lot of information out there about this specific question - so thanks again. Yusuf

Hi Arta, Sorry, I was out for most of yesterday. And not quite sure what happened to the link. This is the tool I was referring to: http://www.webconfs.com/search-engine-spider-simulator.php If you break your page up, you have basic information and cost at the top left with the image to the right - nothing wrong with that, but the buy button should also be in the Product Details up there at the top. As it stands, you have a price match and accessories before you get to it. Then you have a big block of Special Offers. It is important to say if it comes with something free, but this doesn't look right at all. The heading for that (included free with this stove) is smaller than the product headings below. You need to box this off somehow and make it stand out. Then you come to the drop downs and additional information. There is so much going on here - the use of the collapsable ones and horizontal tabs don't really work well together. Why not use all horizontal tabs? And I would get rid of any duplication you have in the Additional Information. -Andy

The Google quality guidelines say that "excessive" creation of partner pages for the purpose of cross linking is against the guidelines.  But, they don't tell us what constitutes excessive. This is not always a bad idea.  Here are some criteria I would use to make this decision: -Would having a page like this actually be good for your readers/clients to use?  Or does it just exist for search engines.  For example, if you are a realtor, having a resource page to list local home inspectors, mortgage brokers, etc. is a good idea and being listed on their resource pages is probably ok. But, if that page contained mostly links to realtors in other cities and unrelated businesses like local casinos or payday loans companies or car insurance businesses then you'd start to think that this page was created just for links. -What is the quality like on the pages that are linking to you?  Do they look like they were set up just for links? -Avoid using exact match anchor text.  If your resource page contains links to Realtor in Seattle and Best Home Inspector in New York then that's a sign that it's set up for SEO purposes.

Hi Martijn, Thanks for the real quick response, I thought they were fishing there, I have been reading about SEO practices for the past 2 years and haven't heard of this issue at all, but wanted to be 100% before jumping to conclusions. Thanks very much for the response I appreciate it.

Hi Jane, Thank you for you advise. Regards Mark

All of these are great answers. Below are a few more resources you might want to check out prior to launching: The 2014 SEO Checklist by ClickMinded: I can't endorse 100% of everything on there (we all have our own opinions, tools and methods) but it is a fairly comprehensive checklist. The 2013 SEO Ranking Factors Study by Moz: This is from last year, but still relevant and mostly accurate. The Periodic Table of SEO Success Factors by SEL: I find this visual format very confusing and convoluted, but others find it very logical and easy to interpret. I think it depends on the person. I'm more data-oriented rather than visually oriented. Either way it's a good resource. The biggest mistakes I see on eCommerce sites are as follows: Non-Unique Product Copy (e.g. Content taken from manufacturer or distributor descriptions, or product feeds) Internal Duplicate Product Copy (e.g. product variants with their own canonical URLs using the same copy, non-canonical URLs created by query strings, from products in multiple categories, etc...) Thin or Useless Product Copy Indexable URLs for Filtered/Faceted/Layered navigation Indexable URLs for internal search results Indexable shopping cart URLs Good luck!

I wonder if that's it. I forgot about that text, wrote it like two years ago. I'll scour through the site, see if I find any others like that. I still wonder how this got on Google's radar. I just did a search for the offending phrase there "SEO improves" and I see a bunch of advertisers who are violating this rule on their home pages AND in the ad itself. That is, how is it that I'm in trouble for two words on an inside page and another guy can advertise: "Guaranteed Page One SEO‎" and get the second ad spot?

Good advice. When there's a potentially large impact (organic makes up such a large percentage of your traffic) you really do need to tread carefully. I've seen more than one site that rolled out sweeping changes in, shall we say an overly enthusiastic manner, and accidentally remove themselves from search completely! I would recommend doing some research and identifying the real low hanging fruit. What queries/topics/categories is there the greatest search opportunity. If you're already doing well for particular terms then there's not much scope for improvement and the impact of getting things wrong is worse. Can you look at particular pages that are performing badly. Look for landing pages for organic search traffic that have poor engagement metrics. This can identify poorly targeted keywords, or missing/poor content, miss-understood search intent etc. Make sure you document everything (with dates!). Don't try to do too much too fast. Small steady tests are safest and make sure you give your changes long-enough to see any impact. Make sure you have some kind of QA. Run checks before and after you make your changes. It's great if you can have some kind of check list. Watch out for unintended consequences. Are you tinkering with the live site or is there a development/deployment process you need to follow are there other people involved? If there is - stick to the process.

Excellent answer. Thanks so much Doug. I really appreciate it! Adding a "nofollow" attribute to the Checkout button is a good suggestion and should be fairly easy to implement. I realize that internal nofollows are not normally recommended, but in this instance, may not be a bad idea.