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The jury's really still out on these, all around. As Lesley said, it depends on if and when people adopt them (on the user side), and Google often plays new domain extensions by ear. If an extension gets very spammy, they may start to see it as low-value. My prediction is that keywords in the extension will carry some weight, but it's going to be a fairly weak signal. So "chicago-divorce.attorney" could give you a tiny boost toward ranking for "Chicago divorce attorney", but it's not going to be enough to make a difference for a competitive phrase. We're even seeing keywords in the root domain slowly losing traction as stand-alone signals. It's not enough to buy a keyword-matched domain in 2014. If you're in a position where there's a good name available under the new extensions that fits your brand, and your options with .com's are bad, then it may be worth a shot. I certainly wouldn't dissuade someone from locking down a name under the next extensions, if the cost is reasonable. I'm just not sure I'd bet anything on the new extensions being an SEO boon.

Thanks Sachin So basically on sites that use ECWID for their ecommerce, only the main pages on the actual website (not the product pages that ECWID generates which is the part from the hashtag on) get indexed? Essentially Google is NOT indexing any products because ECWID uses an existing page on a website and shows products there. Is that correct? For example if you look at an XML sitemap for the running boards site that we used as an example you will see there are only 10 pages on it. However there are over a 1000 different types of running boards sold on the site which have their own pages populate after a #tag in the url: http://www.runningboards4less.com/index.php?option=com_xmap&view=xml&tmpl=component&id=1

This is how I see it after some enlightenment.. Google doesn't really come right out and say this (if you do see that they do, please share). The actual term for the change from http to https is a rewrite.  We are instructing the rewrite via a 301 redirect. Once the 301 redirect is in place, we set the canonical to https://www.xxxx.com (or non www if you prefer)  Google then awards all kinds of SEO juice for the use of https... Right lol...

By masking are you talking about rewriting the url? If so, they will stay in the index. You can also send a canonical header with your image files too, Google will respect that as well.

I would suggest Prestashop, but I am not partial by any means. I develop exclusively with it and I am one of their moderators. Magento is also good too. I think one of the biggest considerations is what the store does in business, how many products, and what features do they need that are not in the default package of the e-commerce program. All platforms have good features, but everyone has features others do not.

I have the same frustrating issue it says the data is provided by other sources but I have no idea what that means exactly.

There's several different kids of SSL but it sounds like you're talking about a single domain. That narrows things down to the two most common kinds: domain validated and extended validation. Domain validation is the most common kind of certificate. The certification authority will send an email to the administrative contact listed on the WHOIS of the domain. Typically it's a link and you click it and that's all that's involved. These are relatively inexpensive but only work for one domain or subdomain (i.e. the certiciate will be issued for www.domain.com but won't show as valid for domain.com). In this same vein, but more expensive, is the wildcard certificate, which works for all subdomains (*.domain.com). Extended Validation is only available for corporations and you have to jump through a LOT of hoops to get one (birth certificate of one of your officers, letter of validity from your lawyer or accountant, etc.). They take some time to get but the advantage is that you get the coveted green bar (see PayPal's site for a good example). It doesn't matter who issues the certificate. Verisign used to be a huge name in this area but not so much in recent years. You'll pay more for their name and "warranty", but I doubt anyone outside the industry itself could tell you who Verisign is, let alone what the difference is. I have two Godaddy certificates and it hasn't slowed us down one bit. Many people simply resell for another authority (i.e. GeoTrust, Comodo, etc) The encryption itself doesn't differ between certificates. Your Private Key (the piece your server needs to decrypt the traffic) and Certificate Signing Request(CSR) will have to be at least 2048 bits in strength (industry-wide). The actual encryption between your server and your client's browser is something that is negotiated as part of the "handshake" when the connection is first made and is most likely 128 bits (although some browsers and servers can support 256 bits). One thing you will need to note is the difference between SHA1 and SHA2 (Godaddy directly asks you which you want and I'm sure the others do as well). When you look at a certificate's details in your browser you'll see who issued a certificate. If it says G2, they're using SHA2. SHA1 has some weaknesses and is being phased out. The only people who will notice the difference are people running Windows XP SP2 or earlier (running any browser, even Chrome or Firefox) and they'll get an invalid certificate warning. Be sure that your host has plugged the Heartbleed bug or you'll expose your private keys (anyone with your private key can decrypt your traffic).

Personally, it used to do great and it wasn't much of a big deal. But with the rest of the world improving, a lot of other easier platforms emerged. I've since moved over all clients to self hosted sites. In terms of SEO, you can edit the meta details of your pages so that's there. I just didn't like the url structure and it feels old to me (more of a personal preference) so I felt it was better to move out early rather than wait longer.

Thanks for your help... I will let you know if I find something good for markup. Maybe someone will respond with that info as well?

I think perhaps the intention was that they didn't want these pages to be indexed. This makes sense for certain things/links from a homepage, like "My Shopping Cart." But honestly it looks like a lame attempt at Pagerank sculpting, which Google has been wise to for many years. The two "nofollow" links that concern me the most are the "Site Map" link and the link to their blog. Why in God's good name wouldn't you want a bot to follow links leading to your sitemap and blog. That's nonsensical. Regarding the other "nofollow" attributes, those aren't necessary either. Get rid of them all. Matt Cutts has said on several occasions that he sees no practical reason why any Web site would want to "nofollow" any internal page. Here's a video where he says that:   http://youtu.be/86GHCVRReJs So, bottom line, "If it's a link within your site to another page within your site, I would leave the 'nofollow' off." There you have it. I hope that helps! Dana

Glad it's working for you now, Jimmy! So sorry you had to deal with this. Thanks for hanging in there, and for the thumbs up

Aside from pointing out the things Egol mentions (like the fact that a lousy product selection or bad pricing will mean no sales regardless of how good the SEO is) I always start out these conversations by reminding the client that web businesses are subject to exactly the same business challenges as brick 'n mortar businesses. If you start a brand new store, with no existing customers and no existing word of mouth (brand new social media) on a street a long way from the centre of town and with little traffic(brand new website and domain) and in a town where there are several already-well-established competitors located right in the main shopping district, it's going to take at least a year to 18 months of a rock solid, full-press (expensive) marketing campaign in order for that new store to become profitable. And that's assuming the competition doesn't open expanded stores with more products and reduced prices right in the middle of your launch. Exactly the same challenges apply to the online store. There's no special exemption to this process just because the "store" is on the web. (Though the timeline can be compressed a little, as the marketing can be targeted better online). Too many potential business people have been mislead by the idea that it's somehow easier to make money quick on the web. That's no longer true, if it ever was (unless you're a scammer). Same rules of supply, demand, marketing, exposure, customer service, product selection/pricing etc apply, regardless of business channel. The problem is, this is usually news the client really doesn't want to be true, so they don't want to hear it. But it's critical to get their expectations in line to avoid them jumping ship to a "get results quick" seo scammer who will happily make ridiculous promises to get a few bucks out of them before screwing their site/business and then disappearing. Hopefully that gives you something to include in the conversation? Paul

I have always used Bing's and see the benefit. I will give Google Webmaster Tools another shot. I generally regard the Moz community and participants as more of an authority regarding questions on related topics... thanks "Mashed Up Website Development"

I know of no valid reason not to use Google Webmaster Tools - there's way too much paranoia on this subject, IMO. If you're knowingly doing something extremely black-hat, then maybe, but Google can detect most of that without GWT. GWT isn't adding any kind of tracking to your site - it's just revealing to you what they already know, for the most part. The nice thing about GWT is that it can help validate the XML sitemap and, once validated, help you figure out what's getting indexed. I suspect these other tools are just looking for some default name for the file, and you're using a non-default one. You can map it, as Thomas said, or you can just tell Google what the filename is. Beyond the SEs, I'm not sure who really needs to process your XML sitemap.

"this guy might not be a good client.  In that case refer him to your competitor." ^THIS!! Haha Egol you crack me up. I would do everything these guys are saying. Explain to him EXACTLY what you are going to do. Draw up a plan and provide the intended/potential results. If he wants to do it, great. If he doesn't, great. If you get a month into this and he isn't seeing results (which he probably won't be in that short of time) and this frustrates him, refer him back to the write-up you presented which explained this all carefully. If he wants to fire you, refer him to your competitors. Damn I love that.

Hi Jimmy, Thanks for the really fun question (note: negative SEO isn't fun, but trying to figure it the algorithm is Couple of reasons why I think this would be difficult: 1. We have very limited working knowledge of both co-citation and co-occurance. What we do know at this point is little more than theory. So working them into an actionable strategy for positive rankings would be hard enough I imagine, let alone negative SEO. 2. The signals produced by these measurements are likely to be weaker than traditional link signals, thus reducing the incentive to use them. 3. One of the reasons we believe search engines may use co-citation and co-occurance is that they are harder to game (especially when combined with authority and trust metrics) so it follows that they would also be harder to game in the negative. That said, it's so new I barely know what I'm talking about. Really interesting area

But the best solution is the SH404sef?  We will try this tomorrow and I will report back on how it works.  Do you have any other advice you can give?

It could be a footer widget.  If you go to the Appearance| Widgets section, you may a footer widget section--look in there for your code.  It may also be in the settings section of your theme's options--be sure to look through that section too.