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Anybody have some good advice as to how to handle customer accounts when merging eCommerce sites?

These include email accounts and store accounts. We're trying to limit customer concerns when people discover the sites are merging.

Thanks.

Also, don't forget to have a look at your links in Webmaster tools.

Thanks Kane. I'm reluctant to post the url. I'm assuming the 301's have value as they have reasonable page authority.

Can Google "interpret" the content of a 301 source page or only the number of links?

"We are planning to offer an incentive to all our customers who interact with us on social media websites"

Echo1 - I'm not knocking what you (or anyone else does regarding this) but this begs the question: How come Google doesn't like paid links, but lends credibility to solicited and incentivised "likes" and "pluses?"

Will lobbying take over SEO and SERP's? Just like Washington politics, will the bigger and deeper pockets wield the influence?

Google is inviting us to play by these rules (sorry for the soapbox moment).

Todd Malicoat teaches the SEO course at marketmotive.com. He and Rand share teaching love on some videos too!

I know its effective practice cuz we're getting our arse kicked. I'm curious if its best practice (white, gray or black hat).

I'm checking a competitors link profile on its landing page that is hitting the top of page 1 for several keywords.

This competitor (national chain) has a strong domain authority (69). The particular landing page I'm checking in OSE has two 301 redirects from its own site among some other directory links to the page.

The page shows 15 external links and half of them are very strong including it's own 301's.

Aren't they essentially sending their own juice to the landing page to bolster page/domain authority to rank higher in the SERPS for those keywords?

Is this a common practice using the 301's to a landing page? Is it white, gray or black hat?

They are appearing suddenly appearing on the first page for several category keywords, so we're doing some snooping.

Thanks.

Hi Mike. I've sent you a couple of personal messages. Give me a shout back when you can.

Hi Erica. I think what we will do (and weigh in on it please) is keep the homepage up with a notice to customers that some of the site content is moving to our parent site. We won't allow folks to buy anything, but we'll let them access their account to change/delete information if they would like.

Our parent site only sells a smattering of the products on the closing site and we'll 301 those. The two sites are so different I think people would be startled to be redirected to the parent site. What are thoughts of "when not to 301?"

I'm thinking we should put a date on the move so they can change account information by a specific time.

I thought I would put links on the home page to the parent product categories ( about 5 categories), so they can check out the parent site if they want.

Let's say we leave the homepage up for 30 days (60 or whatever) and take it down. If I don't put a 301 on it (and I wasn't going to), I should probably customize the 404 correct?

How long are 301's valid in Google? At some point does Google stop indexing the 301?

Thanks for any input you've got.

We embed the videos right on the product and category pages of our ecommerce site. We like keeping them on the page so the customer stays on the page. If they want to pause or stop the video they can and they don't have to close a window.

Hi Mike. Now we're getting into robots.txt, noindex, nofollow, follow tags etc. There's a lot of information regarding these tags and what they mean.

Use the search tool above and search robots, nofollow, noidex etc. You'll find a lot of posts and links that describe what they mean to Google and how they they should be used.

If you haven't already, you might load the mozbar and use the highlighter tool to quickly check links, view source code etc.

There's a lot to explore and understand.

Check out this from Rand: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/determining-whether-a-page-site-passes-link-juice

Google "dr oz videos" and you will go to the page preceding Lauri's book page you referenced. The link that goes to Lauri's site is at this Oz page: http://www.doctoroz.com/book/dream-it.

I got to the page selling your wife's book by Googling: dr oz lauri loewenberg.

They want the page before it seen on search.

Hi Mike. Right click on Dr. Oz page with your link on it. In the popup, select "view page source." It will open up a page with a bunch of code on it. On line 9 you will see the no index tag.

When checking links, I typically check the profile in open site explorer and Webmaster tools in Analytics.

We're closing down one of our eCommerce sites. What is the best approach to do this? The site has a modest link profile (a young site). It does have a run of site link to the parent site. It also has a couple hundred email subscribers and established accounts.

Is there a gradual way to do this? How do I treat the subscribers and account holders? The impact won't be great, but I want to minimize collateral damage as much as possible.

Thanks.

Suppose its an html sitemap page. Same hold true?

• Also, I'm not redirecting any pages. I'm creating them and when they are created there is no page name in the url.

Our ecommerce sites are on CMS platforms. When we generate articles we get the following: www.example.com/Articles.asp?ID=134 in the url. There is no page name (keyword) in the url as opposed to product and category pages which generate them.

Does the absence of keywords in the url significantly impact the page rank of an article?

If it does, I'm going to submit a feature request. If not, I'm going to leave it alone.

Thanks.

Here is a brief hint from Matt Cutts on social links flowing rank (for what its worth): http://youtu.be/UxTmZulcQZ0

Mike, after going down this road ourselves I suggest you spend abundant time learning about AdWords. It is very involved and a discipline of its own. Yes, you can create the ad yourself and include the content you want. Understand this: you may think it looks inexpensive based on CPC info in AdWords, but how you set up your campaign will influence how much you pay and you may wind up spending (and losing) more than you think.

Ultimately, we wound up hiring out a company to manage our PPC. SEO and PPC go hand-in-hand but it is very labor/time intensive and we chose to do our SEO in house and hire out the PPC (at least for now).

This content blew up a server with 80,000+ hits: http://noahsdad.com/target-down-syndrome/