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I'm in a very similar position at my company. Duplicate content is going to hurt your SERP rankings, period. You need to write your own product descriptions. Even a really short original description is better than something copied directly from the manufacturer.

Adwords works on a bidding system, where AdWords users bid on specific keywords and the highest bidder gets the best placement. Costs differ on a keyword-by-keyword basis, and go up and down based on the market. Google itself doesn't charge any fees on top of the per-click payments.

I recently started a blog for my client. So far the response has been decent but, as should probably be expected, most of the commenters want to put a link to their own site in the comment. Do I have anything to gain by allowing these comments to stay on the page?

We changed hosting companies two weeks ago, and we had a number of configuration issues that caused the site to go on and offline over that weekend. We fixed the problem but our traffic took a noticeable hit. I am assuming this is because our rankings dropped due to the site being down. Now that we're stable again, how long will it take for the traffic to return? is there anything I can do to speed up the process?

I would recommend against developing a sister site, since you will most likely have lots of duplicate content across both sites and the two sites will compete with each other for SERP rankings. Best practice is to use 301 redirects to send traffic from .co.uk to .com or vice versa

You can use Alexa to get some rough traffic stats, but to get any real analytics you would need to install tracking code on the site.

In keyword research for an ecommerce site, I've found that widget, singular gets a lot more searches than widgets, plural AND is much less competitive. Is it better for SEO purposes to have the URLs (and matching title tags) in the catalog as /brass-widget.html, /steel-widget.html, etc., or /brass-widgets.html, etc.?

I'm worried that a) searches for widgets will pass by the singular urls but not vice versa, and b) the singular form will strike visitors as bad grammar. Any advice?

I lean towards the second response, especially if you have separate profiles for each site. Of course, having two very similar sites could cause you problems with duplicate content and by competing for the same keywords. For those reasons, I wouldn't recommend having two sites that sell the same things, but just having the same GA account won't make a difference.

It's not on SEOmoz, but I use Google's Keyword tool - https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal - and Google Insights to see which keywords get the most monthly searches. If your field isn't super competitive, go after the highest traffic keywords first. If there's a lot of competetion you may want to start with the more specialized, less competitive keywords first.

The problem is that, because we are a specialized store, the product names are very similar. Basically "No. 5 Blue Widget", "No. 5A Blue Widget," "No. 18 Red Widget," etc. I can't optimize all 2000 pages for "widget," but "5" isn't much of a keyword either.

The big difference between these two videos that I can see is that the 2nd video has a lot more views but a lot fewer likes, comments, and favorites per viewer. Video 2 has nearly 5 times the views of video 1 but around the same number of likes comments and favorites; this shows youtube that viewers like video 1, on average, 5 times as much as video 2, and youtube ranks them accordingly.

I'm not sure what you can do at this point to push this video to number one. The best way to outrank your competition is to make better videos that people like more. I'm sorry if it sounds oversimplified, but that's the way it is.

You'll be fine as long as your 301s redirect to the actual content and not to other 301s.

So 301 > homepage; 301 > homepage; 301 > homepage won't hurt you at all, but 301 > 301 > 301 > homepage will get you in trouble.

Other than on-site optimization, the main factors google uses for shopping results are things like bounce rate, conversion rate, time on page, etc. So basically if visitors are responding well to your products and making purchases, your shopping SERP will go up.

Adwords works on a bidding system, where AdWords users bid on specific keywords and the highest bidder gets the best placement. Costs differ on a keyword-by-keyword basis, and go up and down based on the market. Google itself doesn't charge any fees on top of the per-click payments.

I'm in a very similar position at my company. Duplicate content is going to hurt your SERP rankings, period. You need to write your own product descriptions. Even a really short original description is better than something copied directly from the manufacturer.

I don't know about your first question, but if Google does penalize/blacklist a domain, it will likely be toxic for a long time afterward. In my opinion, there isn't any value to associating yourself with a domain determined to be spam. It seems risky.

I would recommend against developing a sister site, since you will most likely have lots of duplicate content across both sites and the two sites will compete with each other for SERP rankings. Best practice is to use 301 redirects to send traffic from .co.uk to .com or vice versa

I recently started a blog for my client. So far the response has been decent but, as should probably be expected, most of the commenters want to put a link to their own site in the comment. Do I have anything to gain by allowing these comments to stay on the page?