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WordPress SEO by Yoast allows you to add a "noindex, follow" to these pages. that will prevent the duplicate issues.  You can also remove the media pages from your sitemap.

You can even drill down to each individual image and determine whether you want that image to be indexed or not.

Another option is to remove the link from the image in the post.  I know you are dealing with quite a few images but unless you are wanting to promote that image, I would remove the link.

I use Standard Theme for all my blog sites. It integrates the core functions of WordPress SEO by Yoast with a really well coded theme.  As far as the duplicate content.  Wordpress SEO by Yoast lets you deal with what items to nofollow and noindex very easily on almost any theme.

I would be good to set up Site Search tracking and monitor the searches that are taking place.  Depending on the results it might be a good idea to create a "You were looking for 'this product' but 'this product' or "this product" might be a good fit." page.

Also, make sure to check back through the links to the site and try to reach out to the websites in regards to changing the link URL.  Watch GWT closely over the next few months.

That's great information and process.

According to Google Search Quality engineer, Uli Lutz, you only need to include the links in GWMT.  Here is an article with more information on that.

This is being caused by your "Related Post" plugin/module. To correct this problem simply add rel="nofollow"  to the links in that module.

I'm not a part of the SEOmoz staff or Dev team (I play one on tv though) but from the acquisition of GetListed.org and David Mihm saying over and over that the Web App is going to have some dramatic changes in the coming months I would say yes.  Check out the first paragraph in one of David's most recent blog posts. I'm really looking forward to the full integration of GetListed.org data and tools.

It's best to link them to location pages on the domain.  In local, domain authority wins over page authority.  User experience wins over bot experience.  This is the current trend of local and it doesn't appear to be changing.  Here is a great article by Nifty Marketing that illustrates a good local landing page.

Hey Murray,

I found this thread in the WP forums.  It should have the fix for you. It deals with adding some code to your htaccess file.

Just curious.  What diagnostics check are you running?

From what Google says (and they never go against their own word  ), they don't want to index search result pages.  See Matt Cutts explanation here.

If people are searching for that category, create a page for it and add a few of the most popular items from that search.  That would be the way I would go about handling this.  Don't hope to be the exception.

I have a client in Volusion as well.  You need to go into the link on the page for leaving a review and add a "rel="nofollow" " tag to the link.  This will solve your 302's.

I did the same thing to the "email a friend" option on the product pages and it solved that issue.

I have yet to find a good company for a price within my budget.  I head up the SEO for an ecommerce site as well and am about to embark on a link building campaign.  I'm excited about the recent updates in Google because I think it will allow us to stay competitive by gaining a few great links more naturally than unnatural useless links.

I know there are some incredibly creative link building companies out there, I just haven't found one that works in my small budget.

Not much to add except that I feel it has paid for itself every month for me as a freelance SEO.  I have started including it in my resume and have had several opportunities simply because I emphasize my membership so much.  I know that if I didn't have the membership I wouldn't be where I am now in my freelance career.

I'd been dabbling in SEO since 2007 when I finally buckled down about 2 years and jumped in head first.  The biggest influence on me was the Beginner's Guide To SEO that SEOmoz just updated.  Then I went through every White Board Friday and Pro Webinar I could.

Followed key people on Twitter and asked some of the dumbest questions.  SEO's (at least good ones) are so incredible helpful and willing to help you out.  I can remember getting my first big client and I called just to get more acquainted with the Pro Tools here.  Actually got to talk to Cyrus, before I knew who he was.

So basically: read, follow, and ask.  With every change in the SEOsphere you become that much more of an expert.

From the sounds of your explanation you are the business.  You may be "doing business as" a name but your customers and future customers are purchasing your services because of you.  I have seen a lot of people claiming their Google+ business page and using it in a tactical way but very personal as well.  It's going to be a different strategy but can still be very personal.

I don't know Google personally but... (a little joke there) I can only assume with the new rel="author" and rel="me" tags and all the connecting of Google's infrastructure that it understands people are becoming the face of their companies.

I would recommend claiming your social network identity for "branding" and creating a strategy around it.  Begin posting strictly business news to Google+ page and only referencing it.  Same thing with Facebook and Twitter.  Claim your brand identity, use the networks intentionally but keep your own personal pages so that you become the authority of your market AND your brand.

At least that's what I'm trying to do.

I was on a different hosting service and my sites slowed to a crawl when I began to grow my company. I moved to a hostgator reseller and have had great success but have heard of the situations where even they will kill your sites if they get too much traffic. Either way you go, always have a backup and a plan B. From my experience a really good hosting service runs anywhere from $20/month and up. A great Wordpress hosting service is WPEngine, but only if you have the budget and traffic to constitute the price. I love them, great group of people there.

I understand the need for fixing 404's but I have yet to have a serious walkthrough of how to set up a 301.  From all the talk on the forums and such I'm pretty sure this is easy but I've just never done it before and I could really use a walk through.

Thanks

I just went through this as I had a huge ecommerce site migration in January and then added a huge amount of 301's upfront with a regular dose of 301 updates as the 404's came in that I missed.

I didn't see any negative results from 301'ing the 500 pages and then the several hundred after that but that might be due to the fact that I redirected them to pages that were filled with the same content or associated with the same content (i.e. - category of a product instead of a list of the product variations page).

I've found my optimized pages were sticking a lot better and our new pages were being indexed quicker (90%-95% of sitemap urls are indexed).

A few things I was careful about when doing this was that I didn't just redirect to the home page.  If the page didin't exist anymore and there wasn't any associated content I would just let it die after making sure there weren't any inbound links or onsite links to that page.

I can imagine that if you redirect 1100 pages of your site to the homepage it is going to hurt some of your site architecture as Google sees it and could therefore reflect in how Google or and other SE sees your site.  Cleaning up your site is one thing but just redirecting to the homepage is another.

Try redirecting to a similar page, repurposing the old page (add a few links or a suggestion to the content "This event has ended and it was a huge success but check out our future events over here").

I have been working on an ecommerce site with probably 10% of the categories you have but I have seen incredible value from taking the time (no matter how much it it) in adding unique content to the pages.  This will not only help you rank well but it will (as I have seen) give your product pages and sub category pages much more credibility.

My advice after having taken the time and still taking the time to do the (non glorious) work of a ton of on page optimization is to keep at it. Just grab yourself a big cup of coffee, a pair of good headphones and get to work.  After a while you'll get a system down and be able to go through it much faster or you can outsource it to someone who can then follow your system.

Most of all with ecommerce, keep at it.  Just plow through the incredibly monotonous tasks that it requires.  Set up the system/method you need to go through for each on page area and then teach someone to do it.

I'm not a part of the SEOmoz staff or Dev team (I play one on tv though) but from the acquisition of GetListed.org and David Mihm saying over and over that the Web App is going to have some dramatic changes in the coming months I would say yes.  Check out the first paragraph in one of David's most recent blog posts. I'm really looking forward to the full integration of GetListed.org data and tools.