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If you used the rel canonical tag properly and only submitted sitemap yesterday, its just a waiting game. You will get crawled and indexed properly soon.

Comparing X-Cart and Magento, which do you think is better for SEO and why? I am leaning towards Magento and wanted to get some opinions?

I think I will go with canonical.

Just a thought why would I put all the fules in a subdirectory instead of just blocking products.php?printable=Y

I guess it would be the same thing I think?

What do you think is the best solution for preventing duplicate content issues on printable versions of product pages?  The printable versions are identical in content.

Disallow in Robots.txt?

Meta Robots No Index, Follow?

Meta Robots No Index No Follow?

Rel Canonical?

We have an existing e-commerce site built on x-cart. The default store location is www.site.com/store.

The domain root however is just a static HTML page (currently using mainly graphics) and a nav menu.

What would be a better option:

1. Move the install location to the root directory and get rid of the static HTML page. We would have to manually 301 redirect all the old pages to the new location. Not sure if there are negative implications with that.

2. Just optimize the HTML landing page? Seems like it is better to have products and categories as close to the root domain as possible...

3. 301 redirect the domain to www.site.com/store/ and optimize the homepage within the store. This option means we dont have to worry about 2000 redirects or the hassle of moving the store.

Anyone had any experience with this and suggestions?

Ok so I am trying to figure out the best way to add 50,000 links to the robots.txt file and future proof it so we dont have to keep adding manually to the file whenever a new product is added. I am not all that familar with x-cart.

Here is how the urls i want to block are formated...

website.com/store/product.php?mode=add_vote&productid=XXXXXX&vote=100"

Would adding "Disallow: /product.php" work?

Or should I "Disallow: /product.php?mode=add_vote&productid" <---will that work?

Would this have any consequences I am not thinking of?

I am working on an ecommerce site and my crawl report came back with 7000+ 302 redirects and maxed out at 10,000 pages because of all the redirects. The site really only has maybe 1500 pages (dynamic content aside).

After looking into it a little more I see it is because of the product rating system. They have a star rating system that kinda looks like amazons. The only problem is that each star is a link to a dynamic address that records the vote and then 302's back to the original page the vote was cast from.

So virtually every page on this site links out anywhere from 15 to 45 times and 302's back to itself, losing virtually all of its PR.  Am I correct in that assumption or am I missing something? I don't see the links being blocked by robots.txt or noindex, nofollowed. Also it is an anonymous rating system where a rating can be cast from any category page displaying a product or any product page. To make matters worse every page links to a printable version which duplicates the issue by repeating the whole thing over again.

So assuming I am correct that is site has a major PR leak on virtually every page, what is the best recommendation to fix this.

1. Block all of those links in robots.txt,

2. no index, nofollow these links or

3. put the rating system behind a submit button or disallow anon ratings

4. something else???

Looking at their product ratings on the site virtually everything is between 2-3 starts  out of 5 and has about the same number of votes except less votes on deeper pages. I dont believe this is real at all since this site gets almost no traffic and maybe 1 sale a week, there is no way that any product has been rated 50 times. I think the crawler is voting as it crawls and doing it 5 times for every product which is why everything is rated 2.5 out of 5.

This is an x-cart site in case anyone cares.

Any suggestions?

So I am working on a potential new client and they run several very well established and well ranking ecommerce sites. They have 1 site which is new and underperforming which they want me to "start" on as a trial. The idea being that if they like the progress I would take over SEO on the other sites. After a little research I am concerned that this site may be have a penalty. The site is www.discoverhookah.com

The MOZrank and MOZtrust are actually pretty good considering the site is 6 months old, but if you look at the links they are ALL junk. They seems to be some reciprocal linking as well. I believe this is something they have done on their other sites and been ok with because they are 10+ years old and very trusted, however for a new site this link profile worries me.

I do not have their analytics yet but looking at their traffic in compete.com shows a HUGE drop off shortly after the site went up (like from 2500 to under 100 visitors). I dont really trust compete.com's numbers outside of being and good indicator for trends, but it has me concerned.

The client did tell me they are getting virtually no traffic. I am waiting on the crawl report to confirm its not a crawl or onsite problem but i dont think it is.

I have 2 concerns:

1. I am taking this site on the cheap in order to establish a successful project, so I can work on their other sites, and I dont want to walk into a losing situation on the cheap!

2. I believe their webmaster is following some misguided SEO strategies but she has been with them for a long time. I dont think she wants to do theor SEO anyway, as she is very busy with maintenance and development, but if I could prove a penalty it would go a long way in helping me win the whole account from an SEO standpoint.