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Hi Patrick, Thanks for the advice. It's only that we have 500+ categories and 7.500+ products. Would it be a good option to start with the automated meta's > take our SEO profits > work our way up from top level and update them manualy daily? Our doesn't the automated way improve some quick wins for the timebeing? Thanks!

Hi Tarek, Thanks for the question. Where does your client currently rank for the franchise keyphrase? If you rank well on page 1, it shouldn't be too difficult to push yourself a bit further up once the established website has gone. However, it really depends on what happens to the domain of the franchise. It may be closed down by there still be some form of holding page / parked page which means it stays in the rankings for a while. Do you know what is going to happen to it? On a related note, is there any chance you could acquire the domain? In terms of what you can do. Here are a few suggestions: Make sure the brand name features prominently in your on-page SEO elements and internal links See if you can realign links that are pointing to the franchise site and see if they will point the links to you instead - if the franchise site is closing down, this could work very well and if you can make the anchor text the name of the brand, it should help your rankings Make sure your company name and citations / local links are all using the company name correctly I hope that helps! Paddy

Thanks Patrick! Very helpful

Hey Matt, I'm not sure without researching if Blogspot has this, but one thing you might want to consider is a cross-domain canonical tag. Dr Pete has done a few great posts on the different was to use rel="canonical" that might apply in your situation. See http://moz.com/blog/6-extreme-canonical-tricks and http://moz.com/blog/rel-confused-answers-to-your-rel-canonical-questions Hope that gets you started!

Create one crazy, amazing, awesome interactive infographic that nobody but a developer could implement. Create an MVP version of it within your 20 hours and then ship it. If it gets great traction or response, build upon it. Distilled has done some awesome examples with their client SimplyBusiness. Here's their case study list https://www.distilled.net/services/. Here's an example of one that did well -  The Small Business Guide to Twitter but there are other great examples on that page.

I am concerned that this 80% of my traffic that does not often convert and leaves the site quickly, is costing me in rankings on the pages that do perform well. I would not worry about this.  That blog is pulling in the traffic and Google knows that some types of pages satisfy a visitor and result in a short visit.  So, if visitors are staying long enough to read, then you are doing great. I am therefore considering taking the blog OFF our site and moving it elsewhere, linking back to the e-commerce site and allowing it to stand on its own two feet. Is this a bad idea? I would do the opposite.  I would move it into a folder on your main domain.   Like maindomain.com/blog/  (I would not name it blog because that makes it a target of hackers, give it a more relevant name) If that blog is attracting traffic, earning likes, links, mentions, etc. having it on your own domain will be better than having it in a subdomain or an outhouse.  If it is on your domain then your domain gets credit for the popularity.  The only reason that I would not put it on my main domain is if it was susceptible to Panda or Penguin problems. Thoughts? I would be showing Adsense to those 2 million visitors.   Will probably earn a five digit number annually and the first digit will not be a "1"..

Its utter garbage and snake oil. Their review system is flawed and I would not trust hiring anyone from their listing or the company itself.

Thank you for your answer. The idea is to help my customers to find the content they need more easily. There is enough content in my page and like that they don't need to go to the "big FAQ page" and search to the answer of their questions. Regards, Jonathan

Yeh, I checked that and it said no issues hence why I asked here.

Absolutely agree, they bloat your site with spam referrer traffic etc. I would suggest putting some blocks in your analytics solution of choice to filter out their traffic from your visitor numbers etc, but also add something like the following to your .htaccess to further try and block them. You could also add the other above mentioned spammy site. Block Referrer Spam RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://.semalt.com/ [NC,OR] RewriteRule ^(.)$ – [F,L]

Hi Ashish Sorry you didn't receive my reply last week. Here was my response: The crawlers are working as intended but it appears the issue is both sites have a re-direct setup our crawlers are not able to follow. JTV takes long time to load which will also prevent crawling. http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/#!/bYcyeD/JTCVALVESALES.com The site is re-directing our crawler to the same URL so we are stuck in a loop http://www.evergreenmidwest.com/?xid_12868=eb4522ee2cea11a1137f51dc830bb32b sends us back to http://www.evergreenmidwest.com/?xid_12868=eb4522ee2cea11a1137f51dc830bb32b and https://www.jtcvalvesales.com/?xid_157b9=0b27dce510fce9a3e20a01802dcde99d back to https://www.jtcvalvesales.com/?xid_157b9=0b27dce510fce9a3e20a01802dcde99d You will need to work with your web dev/hosting provider to investigate the re-directs for search crawlers. Hope this helps!

Perfect, glad it helped!

Hi again Harry Here's what I would do. I would take a look at the following resources: On-Page Factors (Moz) The Ultimate Guide to SEO for E-commerce Websites (KISSmetrics) 17 Essential SEO Strategies for E-Commerce Sites (Inc) Technical Site Audit Checklist: 2015 Edition (Moz) There are probably opportunities beyond your URL structure that you are missing - your URL structure and depth (you're not going that deep at all) alone won't hurt your PA and DA the way you think it will. Do a quick honest assessment of the layout and content of your website and see where you can enhance areas. Let me know if you have any questions! Good luck!

Bing does not use the rel=”alternate” hreflang=”x” markup. As written by Duane Forrester in this post, Bing relies over a series of signals, the most important being the meta equiv=”content-language” content=”x-X” tag. And, yes, you can use the meta equiv and hreflang in the same page

I would recommend **not**disavowing links that have a spam score of more than 3 in Webmaster Tools. In this video - http://moz.com/blog/understanding-and-applying-mozs-spam-score-metric-whiteboard-friday - Rand specifically says 'don't disavow links just because they have a spam score of 7 or 8'. He mentions a link disavowal issue that Cyrus Sheppard had that really hurt his site for a long time. Doing the disavowal for all links with a 3 could cause serious damage.

Yes - for the simple reason that from January 2017, Google Chrome will start marking all sites that do not have https active on sensitive pages as insecure - this is a very important step. As is the way with Google, this 'gentle' shepherding is surely a forewarning of a move to 'https is mandatory' before long... https://security.googleblog.com/2016/09/moving-towards-more-secure-web.html "Eventually, we plan to label all HTTP pages as non-secure, and change the HTTP security indicator to the red triangle that we use for broken HTTPS." So really, you have no choice, and honestly, it's not so bad. We just moved our entire site to https without any issues.

Hi Jonathan, I totally recognize your situation. Although I don’t really check the keyword amounts of the competition I do write articles and find myself using the keyword a LOT. This while I don’t really think about “using” it while I write the articles. I these cases I CRL + F and search for the keyword and try to change a few sentences. I normally don’t put more than 5 minutes of work in it and I only change stuff if it’s still understandable for the reader. Unfortunate I don’t have case studies in were this method actually pays off, so would love to see some more about this topic as well!