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Ecommerce marketplace for local classes here. We have over 3K SKUs on the site and I'd agree with what Dimitrii suggested. As an add-on to what he said, I'd also strongly suggest that you ensure the site's overall SEO architecture is well positioned to rank on a variety of keywords (depending on what your keyword research says of course). For example, Our home page targets the broadest keywords (local classes etc.) Category pages targets 2nd tier keywords (baking classes, cooking classes etc) Product pages targets long-long-tail keywords (macaron baking class in the east) I find that this approach works very well for ecommerce sites with a broad range of categories. In your case, Evening Dresses might be a category of it's own, with each SKU page ranking for its own long-tail keywords. As Dimitrii mentioned as well, image search does contribute a fair amount of traffic on it's own, and we've even received backlinks from site-owners who found our image via image search, and credited our site with a backlink It's best to optimize the images you post up to be as descriptive as possible. Being an ecommerce site owner, I personally know your pain with hundreds if not thousands of SKUs, but cumulatively, it does make an impact and will help!

Thanks for the hint Dirk! I've used the tool and it works great. I even found a handy chrome extension ("WebMaster Tools - Bulk URL removal") that made the removal of my 3,000 subdirectories very smooth and saved me about 25 hours of manual work! WebMaster Tools - Bulk URL removal

Lori, Thanks for letting us know. About to click the link to learn more about the brand now. RS

Thanks for double checking that Dirk, I didn't know that the inspect element tool and source code would show different code, but it makes sense.

Thanks Matt

Hi, This won't give you any issues as long as there is not two different visions of the same page e.g https and http. Some sites have different parts of their site in https and other parts in http. You just need to see if there is two different visions showing up. If there is than you need to look at cleaning this up. I won't lie it is hard doing this in bigcommerce because it's a closed system not like wordpress or another open source system. In saying that I personally like having it one way or the other but to go back to your question. It is fine as long as there is only one vision.

Hi Dirk, Thanks for the response! After performing several crawls for tracking code, we did find numerous duplicate URLs existing with tracking codes. As of September, they started showing up in GA with low traffic, but by end of October, it was evident that they were splitting organic traffic from root url. We are in process now of cleaning up. We are hoping this will resolve it.  However, we think the damage might have been slightly done and we may have to kiss some panda butt to get back into good favor. We are just now starting to see drops in page rank due to this.

Thanks for the response Ruth, that was very helpful.

Hey At the very least, if you're removing links to try and revoke a manual penalty, showing evidence that you have directly contacted webmasters and had some links manually removed is essential. Google wants to see you repent attempt to take action against your action.  I have not seen one manual penalty removed just by disavowing links straight away.  They want to see a documentation of your work, which includes manual outreach. There is also the possible argument that physically removing a link will be 'quicker' at getting the link out of your backlink profile, with it being reported that a disavow file can take between 3-9 months to be processed.  Wouldn't surprise me if Google are trying to speed this up dramatically - but we know that Google crawls, caches and indexes links relatively quickly - and by that same notion it would also process removed/broken links quickly as well.  So there could be an advantage there too. Hope this helps.

HI Thomas First of all thanks so much for taking the time to respond in so much detail i really appreciate it For your info we are not deploying hreflang for this project/client since one of the country sub sites is actually on its own ccTLD and the foreign language site on a sub folder - we don't have a problem with the various languages ranking in other countries, in fact consider it better that way since some will use English in Turkey and Turkish in Turkey etc etc. However this clients developer has added hreflang fields so can add in the future if want or need to depending how things work out with it but internatinal seo strategist on this project advised not to use it in our particular circumstance. Re Yoast Social Accounts: The main English .com site does have all these socials entered into the Accounts tab/page of Yoast , i presumed it made sense to add the foreign language socials to the Accounts tab/page in the foreign language sub sites too BUT have been told by someone who had done similar that it screwed everything up. So just wanting to check if you agree here and they should be left empty since when they say **MAIN social accounts **they do mean just the English in the .com Yoast Accounts section and leave the Accounts tab in foreign language sub sites Yoast empty. The articles you provided such as Yoast etc are all very good and i did look at these but none seem to address this specific question which is what im look to clarify, any ideas ? Many Thanks Dan

No problem and good luck with your endeavours.

One thing that might help is our own Fresh Web Explorer tool. With the right combination of search operators you can identify those blogs (and bloggers) who are influencers in your industry, and reach out accordingly. I'd recommend watching these two videos on the tool: Basic Operators in Fresh Web Explorer Advanced Operators in Fresh Web Explorer The Help Hub article on FWE should be useful too, and I'd check out this Whiteboard Friday. Bio search in Followerwonk could be very useful, too, as you can search every Twitter users for folks who have your industry keywords on their profiles. Add the word "blogger" and it could be even more useful!

No your brand name will always be your brand name.  If they search for that your brand name should come up no 1. So do not waste a H1/SEO opportunity unless the boss demands it. The searcher is looking for you, you should rank no 1 for your brand name so in that instance the H1 brand name has no impact. The exceptions could be where the brand name is or includes the keyword target etc.  So may need to think a little more laterally. So if the company is called "Health Insurance Inc" & and is chasing the word Health Insurance. In that instance making your H1 your brand name... or part thereof is a good idea!. The H1 should be helpful to both google and the customer - so frame your H1 in that light for each page. Hope that assists. ,

Hi Thomas, This is interesting and great advice thank you. I think the hard sell may be internal, but it's something I'll look at proposing to the company. I'll do my research and put a case together. Thank you

Hi Peter, Both really good answers to your questions above but maybe it would be good to give you some further pointing in the right direction. Perhaps you could answer the questions below and I can give you my personal opinion on which method would be best: will you be putting an equal amount of marketing (content, PR, etc.) into the Spanish version for example compared with English? are you able to offer  fully localised service eg, Spanish customer service, Spanish sales team etc.? is your company well-known globally? It's important not to also forget that another option is using ccTLDs (eg, .co.uk, .com.au). These give the highest signal to search engines about the country being targeted and also importantly make you look more "local" which can do wonders for increasing conversion rate in countries where your company is not well-known.

Prerender.io is great and I highly recommend it, although it doesn't necessarily guarantee that your site will get indexed. What it allows you to do is make certain JS technologies like AngularJS or BackboneJS to play more nicely with bots.

Hey David, I'm sorry your question hasn't received a reply yet. I'm not actually familiar with this product. Is it this: https://www.google.com/partners/?channel=ha&sourceid=awo&subid=us-en-ha-g_prt-hasearch&gclid=CMHsgbmo2cgCFYhefgod_ncP6A#a_home

Ha, site: got me there eventually. http://4.1m.yt/dP0WCRhks.jpg