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Actually, we did recover from the original Panda hit last December so "YEEEEHAAA!". We combined a bunch of similar categories and started writing descriptions for categories that were missing them. Unfortunately, we got smacked again by Panda 3.7 in June and haven't recovered yet.

The simple solution is to use a sitemap generator. There are many solutions of them. Just google it and find which one works best for you. Personally, I don't care for companies I use to tell me "no". I would take that as an indicator I need to look for another ecommerce platform. With the above noted, a sitemap is really not necessary for a well-designed site. Yes, I use one and submit it mainly because I use an easily automated process. As long as your content is well-linked, then Google will see all of it.

Thanks, Ryan.

For dynamic pages that contain a ? in the URL To specify a canonical link to the page http://www.example.com/product.php?item=apple-ipod, create a  element as follows: Copy this link into the  section of your site. Copy this link into the  section of all non-canonical versions of the page, such as http://www.example.com/product.php?item=apple-ipod&sort=price. For static pages To specify a canonical link to the page http://www.example.com/apple-ipod, create a  element as follows: Copy this link into the  section of your site. Here is a link to Webmaster Tools about rel=canonical - http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=139394

According to the FAQ's, No. http://www.seomoz.org/dp/webapp-faq

Just remember that the H1(and other header tags) should be descriptive for/of the content that follows them too Edit : typo

If the "SKI" is a category, than you can divide into subcategories, and each product of goggles would be: evo.com/shop/ski/goggles/ than under subfolder goggles are listed the products, and than for each product url would be: evo.com/ski/goggles/productID hope it helps

I agree that the answer lies in how many people take it up. I think that one of the biggest deciding factors is going to be how easy the most popular CMS's make integrating this. If WordPress can get this done natively, for instance, a way to write a post and, via dropdown, select what type of data each line/paragraph is? I think that'd be huge, and it would explode. Personally, I've always been interested in getting Google's rich snippets to appear. I think it can have a huge influence on clickthroughs. And, I think that schema.org indicates that such content will become more and more commonplace. I've managed to get it to happen for one site, which had the majority of its content focused on recipes. We definitely saw an uptick in traffic without a ranking change. I'll be continuing to keep my eye on it, at first glance it seems like a huge task. In the end, I think it will definitely be something that we add into our work. The big search engine's partnering on this is too hard to ignore.

Happy to help Daniel, good luck with the start up, you are on your way! Felicidades!

Unless the load balancing is causing your system to 404 or 500 I cannot see any SEO impact. We did have to change the way we handled session state when we switched to load balancing to ensure state was valid on our shopping cart calls but that is more a developer issue than SEO. Most major hosts now tend to use VM, Cloud or other resource load balancing behind the scenes to keep their costs down without impact to SEO of their clients.

That's the right idea. He may provide the best shrimp pizza or whatever product offering locally, but on a national level he is competing with everyone else in the country.

Since GoogleBots can't access the premium regardless, is it redundant to have on the robots.txt file? You are indeed correct the best practice is to minimize your robots.txt file. That is why the very first sentence in my initial response was the suggestion to NOT include your premium sections in the robots.txt file Will google and other bots will hurt you if you have premium sections that they try to crawl but can't? No.

Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but I would say this is something that's extremely low on the ranking factors totem pole. Ref new 2011 Search Engine Ranking Factors (love this report!!) - http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors#overview However, something that is high is the number of shares you get, likes you get, interactions with your facebook page that you get, so whichever method agrees more with the browsers your visitors are using, the software you are using to run your site, etc - would be my recommendation.

You may be correct about your sitemap. If you didn't include your category pages in there Google may not be seeing them. Something else to keep in mind is that your product pages have a much higher likelihood of being more targeted than just your category pages. Google aims to deliver very targeted results. I would analyze the SEO of a few of the pages in question to see how many backlinks you have to each page, what keywords they're ranking for, etc, and see if they are in fact better targeted than your category page. This could very well be a contributing factor. I would analyze more for you, but I'm at work right now and I don't really want to be on what looks to be a risqué site for work eyes

I can't see how you could beat MozCon.  While I am not in the business of SEO, I asked my wife if I could go to Mozcon for my birthday gift.  She laughed and said I have serious problems, but it would be a kick to listen to an meet the people who are so far ahead of the curve.