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It's not likely to be a penalty, but it's also not proper use of the tag. Personally, I'd want to change it.

Hi Anirban! I'm not entirely sure what you're asking here. Can you clarify at all?

You do have an empty meta description tag in the header of each page: But it is followed by a meta description tag with content. Perhaps the crawler is getting caught up on the first one and reporting that?

If the canonical page disappears when it's out of stock, the user will get a 404 error when they try to access that URL. You'll need to canonicalize duplicates to a generic product or category page that won't disappear when the product is out of stock.  Furthermore, if a product goes out of stock and you'll have more in stock later, it's best (for SEO purposes) to leave the page with an "out of stock" notice rather than remove it completely from the website.

Thanks for the information Verb - the reason we track those other keywords separately from traffic is because I normally find their rank a good marker around the primary keywords but I understand what you're saying so there is more clarity in the focus. I'll look for one of those tools and see if SEOprofiler works or similar. I've done the adwords method before but it's a bit laborious so I would prefer something automated if possible. Thanks for the reassurance! It appears that yesterday evenings tracking in moz has updated and a lot of keywords have gone back up again so fingers crossed there was just a glitch / settling in phase! Thanks

Yes it can definitely hurt your rankings as it will give a signal to Google that the page is indeed somewhere else and for a homepage that is usually not the case. I would to try to get rid of the canonical URL if that indeed is the way to go.

There is a first rate post on this subject here that could explain this far better than most of us could. https://moz.com/learn/seo/page-authority Hope this helps. Andy

Nah moz is smart enough to auto detect the changes and adjust accordingly. Make sure all your 301 redirect are in place and over a week or 2 moz should begin listing the https as google index's then and replaces your http.

Hi there. Usually as soon as link is indexed by a search engine, it has an effect on rankings. Don't confuse with appearance in GWT, since it takes longer and stays there longer than in reality. There are many-many examples of rankings go up dramatically after successful link building campaign (like skyscraping or something). Hope this helps.

Hi Sean, About products, I have read that there are two kinds of online business: business who sell products that they themselves produce and manufacture, and people who purchase products from manufacturers and be an intermediary to receive benefit from difference in price. When you start business, the first thing to do is choose products to sell. It depends on your customer's needs, your budget and even your relationship. For example, you have a friend, who can help you to import laptop with cheap cost, you are thinking about it. However, you don't have enough budget and need to borrow, be careful. In my country, there are many online stores about clothing. Because capital is not too big and need of customer is high, especially clothing imported from foreign country. About platforms, if you have less technical knowledge, you should choose some simple platform such as WooCommerce. It is quite to set up, design, add product and control. Moreover, it is cheap. On the other hand, you have monetary resources and technical knowledge, i suggest you to use Magento. It is really amazing with powerful features. Here is top 10 popular e-commerce platform in 2015, I think you should read to choose suitable platform for your business. Check it: http://blog.litextension.com/the-best-ecommerce-platform-of-2016/ About online marketing, it is quite difficult to say in some sentence.

Completely agree. I'd recommend writing blog posts that will be useful to your visitors, and _if _a link to a product or service page is justified organically, then go ahead. But I really wouldn't recommend shoehorning a link to a landing page into every blog post.

Here's an update fellows. After a couple of months of data it seems pretty clear that the unordered list content has really refreshed the majority of these old forum discussions. By including other resources in the unordered list, they also convert better. Thanks!

The url without a slash seems to be the default now, while url with a slash redirects to one without, only for homepage. all other subpages have slashes as preferred and no matter what result in trailing slash, which is a major thing I wanted. Thank you, am looking into things further via a Bigcommerce post on their forums, however I'm not holding my breath as some responses can take a good bit, since there is a ocean of users seeking responses as well.

The team from Giovatto is correct, you can click on the url and see where it is being linked from. gwtapi4.png

I'd also like to point out that I too have come across a new competitor who just popped in with a new url / site and started out ranking us on our major keywords. I mean page 2 right off the bat, when I audited their site, I saw: many 404s, bad link structure but good enough to function, a shoty backlink campaign that was using a SEO company's site 7 times for various keywords just to rank, and had one actual backlink that would be considered whitehat. The end result after watching them enjoy page 2 for 2 months, was one day while scanning the SERPs found them not on page 2 but on page 9, then they popped back to page 2 three days later. About 2 weeks later, they were page 10 and still are. Seems the got hit or google caught on to their backlink fun. Stay whitehat, stay busy / productive and always push forward! Slow and steady does win the race.

you can try any page editor plugin if you are using WordPress CMS.  It's easy to use them to make the product design. You can see here some samples of product design.

Hi, It sounds like you might need to implement hreflang tags. Have you done so already? Without being able to specify each country-level shop in Search Console via ccTLD, this is your best bet to ensure the right pages show in the right versions of Google. Here's Moz's guide to using hreflang tags. For each of your country-specific subdirectories, you'll need to add the appropriate tag which will specify the country and language of the page. This helps keep Swiss pages out of Google.de, etc, etc.