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Don't think SEO, think User Experience...

My personal preference is for /category/product for the simple reason that the URL looks better and a visitor can establish their position within the site just by glancing at the URL.

get round the dupe product issue by being able to specify which Category is to be the primary category for a product and then set a canonical tag to reflect this.

Info on canonicals here http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/canonicalization

Regards

Aran

Agreed with everything said above.

Google are trying to make the web a better place. By occupying the top 5 SERPs your attempting to reduce the options available to consumers which ruins the customer experience and as such i think Google would take a dim view on it.

Although, my company sells on ebay and amazon, aswell as our own website. For many of our key terms we occupy 3 of the top 10 listings, one for our website, one for our ebay store/product page and again for amazon listings.

Our review centre lising is not far from top 10 when searching for a particular phrase too.

The change you made to the robots should be sufficient. You can also add the meta tag in there to be doubly sure, but its not needed

Though, your social buttons has the Email A Friend option built in so you are replicating the same functionality with the Email a Friend button.

No problem, happy to help.

Aran

• if your problem is solved, dont forget the Answered, and Good answer buttons

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Looking at your site I see that your Email a friend script is opening a brand new page and passing through the product ID. To stop the page being indexed you can add the following line to the robots.txt

Disallow: /EmailaFriend.asp

afte the line that looks something like

User-Agent: *

Heres some light reading on the robots.txt file

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/robotstxt

BE CAUTIOUS! if you dont know what your doing seek further assistance as you could do some bad things in the robots.txt.

Whilst the solution above will probably solve your duplicate page issue. I think there is room for improvement here.

Email a friend scripts needn't take the user away from the product they are viewing. You could open the email a friend script in a new window, or even better get rid of the Email a friend button altogether and make your social sharing buttons bigger and more prominent. Also, consider giving the users a Call to Action to sharing the product via the social buttons.

Hope this helps.

Aran

Heres another, I'm pretty sure i heard of a company in the UK (might have been US) that recycles shipping containers and uses them as pre-fabricated building blocks.

ooo...I found something similar on wiki..

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shipping_container_architecture

Have you done any social sharing of the website?

Getting your followers to RT links and the like is another great way to get noticed.

Thanks Marisa, nice cool to get good feedback fom other SEOs, after all we can be a very critical bunch

I'm going to do another you moz post soon as a follow up as I'm still getting some great traffic from my efforts. Though, I haven't yet heeded my own advice and put an hour aside to jump on another meme.

Great news. A win for the Good Guys.

This may help you tell your boss...

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_do_you_say_i_told_you_so_in_20_languages

First of all, welcome aboard. I always love to here of peoples first steps into SEO and the results they get.

My site has around 450 pages, thus its would be a major job for me to amend my page titles. Sites like SEOmoz have thousands of pages, and the vast majority of them are available in SERPs. Now as far as I know SEOmoz do not change their titles, again because it would be a massive job.

Saying that, if I run an offer or a sale on my website I will generally change my homepage title to reflect the fact I have a sale on, in the hope that the Sale text will be updated promptly in the SERPs and attarct a few extra click throughs.

In summary, no I dont think the freshness of your page titles has any positive effect on your SEO. But, It may impact your Click through rate (which I guess in turn could effect your SEO...now were going full circle).

Clear as mud?

Im with Goldilocks on this one. A blog post should not be too long, nor too short. It should be just right.

And as Moosa says, it should contain images and a touch of humour always breaks the monotony too.

On second look at some of my really short tail generic phrases, we have climbed to first and second from page 2. Awesome.

Number 2 for me, but wow, if thats all it takes to rank Im off to strip out all my content!!

You link profile contains alot of 'Catering Glasgow' anchor text also your homepage title , perhaps you have received a slap for 'over optimisation'.

Mine have improved very slightly. But all the same key players are in top ten in their usual order.

Our SERP for our main phrase Clothes Hangers has gone from third to second, which is nice, but I'm not seeing anything major that I could attribute to a massive algo change.

Can the SEO company in question produce any testimonials or can you speak with one of their existing customers?

Hi Rasmus,

I don't see how creating a new domain with a blog/forwarding traffic will benefit your visitors.

If you want to produce a blog, host it on your main site and spend the money on cool content to help draw in the crowds.

I don't think that owning a keyword rich domain nam is going to help you. Also, you may wish to vary your anchor texts too.

As the guys above have stated. Cards on the table and tell your potential clients what will happen if they switch and how you can help remedy the situation. Also its worth noting that in the long term they will be better off optimising their own sites.

if you do use one of the services mentioned, be sure to come back and let us know the impact!

I've used submit edge.com in the past, in particular one of their article submission tpe services, I forget which exactly. I used the service to help promote some PA and traffic to a guest blog post I had done.

I wasn't exactly impressed with the result. Most of the links came from completely unrelated niches, blog comments, spammy twitter accounts and really bad directories. I haven't been near a service like it since. Though my blog post did eventually gain some PA and my website got some traffic from the entry. Would it have got traffic and authority without the submit edge service? probably.

I won't be using the service again.