Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Theo's on the money here... it makes no difference to the engines.

If you need help deciding, check out which homepage (with or without www) has the higher rank and roll with that one!

I agree with Adam.  301 redirect the .net to your .com so you keep your link juice on your main site.

Many people use the .net versions as a safeguard to prevent competitors from using the namespace in the SERPs, especially on competitive keywords.

If you're talking about links on a page, 100 - 200 is the general guideline depending on your site.

If you're talking about incoming links, and they are quality links, then let 'em rip!  Seriously, for incoming links you primarily want to just stay ahead of your competition.  The general idea is to slowly build them over time, think of them as a natural linking progression rather than - BOOM - all at once.

Are you trying to rank your images in Google image search?  If so, make sure the full path for each component stays the same.

As for general SEO, you're right on track.  The performance boost from the parallel loading will be one more step to help you rank!

No, there are indeed over 100 <a>tags on the page.  I guess I wasn't very clear... sorry for the confusion.</a>

<a>You have 10 blog post summaries listed on the page.  Each post summary has a few links plus there are many other nav links on the page, bringing you up over the 100 mark.  If you keep adding posts that count should stay roughly the same....when you add more posts the older ones are automatically pushed through to Older Posts, keeping the 10 latest summaries on that page.</a>

<a>As I mentioned earlier, one method to reduce the</a> <a>tag count on the page would be to remove the category links.  They don't seem necessary since you are only using the one blog category.</a>

The "See what Cerritos Nissan customers...." anchor text is pretty lengthy.  If I understand correctly, the 6 - 8 word max or less than 55-60 character rule of thumb should apply to the anchor text.  Like most other things related, keeping it in check seems to make the most sense.  If the anchor text is more descriptive this will give the link more weight.

On the shorter side of things though... How many times have we seen "click here" to download.  Is the link value "click here"... or rather is it about the page or item we're clicking to get to?

-John

Google doesn't store cookies when it indexes your site, so it will "see" your page as someone who hasn't visited before.

Perhaps there's another way to look at this.  How about redirecting all user-agents except googlebot to achieve what you want?  Then you'd keep the redirect you want and your rankings!

Trust is a combination of several factors... age of the domain, quality of the links coming in, and the list goes on.  Who better to sum it up than Rand??...

http://seoaware.tv/2009/04/great-video-domain-trust-authority-rand-fishkin/

Check out this article under the Links and off-site Factors section:

http://www.spottedpanda.com/2011/seo-news/confirmed-seo-facts-matt-cutts/

Your best bet is to "noindex,follow" your tag pages.  There was a great article about this just a few days ago on the Moz blog:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/setup-wordpress-for-seo-success

The article covers tags, categories, author pages and more.  You're sure to find what you're looking for.

-John

You could try something like this:

RewriteRule ^overnight-toiletry-packs.html /toiletry-travel-bags [R=301,L]

You need to escape the hyphens and periods... and include the switches for the 301 and specify that it's the Last rule.

Let me know how that goes - certainly share some code if you still get stuck.

-John

You are right about the ecommerce layouts... typically product organization is by category then you can click in deeper for the product detail.  Categories are commonly nested as well... like your Shoes category branching to dress, casual, and athletic.

Most decent ecommerce platforms will allow a full description on the product detail page and a short description for display on the category page.  Furthermore, category pages themselves will often have a description/content field of some sort.  Obviously, you want to avoid duplicate content issues, but you can use the combination of the category descriptions and product short descriptions on your list pages for ranking on the category.  Then, you can use your product pages to rank as well.  Again, you can keep the content different between the short and long product descriptions.

I've seen sites handle the category pages without much content; however I don't think you can go wrong with the additionally ranked pages if you set them up correctly.

Also, check to see if you can get an ecommerce template that supports related products - this will help with your internal linking.  You can also check out up-sell/cross-sell areas of the product page as well.

Do you have a link we could check out for content suggestions?  That may give a better idea of why the product pages aren't ranking well for you.

John

Go the distance and request the link update - it's just cleaner that way!

Hi Neil-

How are you handling your canonical tags?  You'll want your regular domain to rank, not the mobile domain.  Be sure to include rel="canonical" on your mobile pages to point to the main domain.

John

You're in the right place for SEO help... most folks in here really want to be here, so no worries about ego bashing.

What are you planning on using for a platform to develop the site?

Tricky areas to watch out for on e-commerce sites include handling of duplicate content on category (list) type pages vs. actual product pages, particularly if they are nested and search result pages.  You will definitely want to use your rel="canonical" tags.

As for the domain name, it's certainly helpful to include keywords, but it's not the end of the world if you don't.  You're really developing a brand.  Think of ebay or twitter even.  Clearly, no keywords to be found.

If you're talking about the rest of the URL, then yes, make sure you work with a platform that has good SEO support: search-engine friendly URLs, meta title & meta description support, and a place to enter descriptions for your images at the very least.

That's a start... certainly ask if you have other questions!

Well, it sounds like you'll need to find it or create it.

First, you could offer up your own reviews.  You could also open up the pages to allow comments.  Go ahead and push those heavily on your social networks to pull in traffic to gather up those reviews.

Ahhh, you will definitely run into duplicate content issues!

You want to include a rel="canonical" to point to the domain & path without the variables.  You don't want this sort of URL to be indexed (use robots: noindex,follow); it's much better to show the clean URL in Google.

And so the questions begin....

What about the quality of your incoming links?  What are your "spray booth" competitors doing?  Any changes there?  Have you been steadily building links and content or did you post it all up at once?

You should have a meta tag for the page language (adjust language code as needed):

As far as the URLs go... many sites are converting these to non-escaped variants on save.  Magento, for example, treats e, é, and ê as e in the url.  Check out Lemonde.fr, french news source.  They are just stripping the accents as well.

To adjust for the accents, you would need to transliterate them.  First, find the function that is generating the URL.  Next, if your system allows has the iconv() function:

$new_url = iconv('utf-8', 'us-ascii//IGNORE//TRANSLIT', $old_url);

If not... then you could go this sort of route:

$table = array(

'Š'=>'S', 'š'=>'s', 'Đ'=>'Dj', 'đ'=>'dj', 'Ž'=>'Z',

'ž'=>'z', 'Č'=>'C', 'č'=>'c', 'Ć'=>'C', 'ć'=>'c',

'À'=>'A', 'Á'=>'A', 'Â'=>'A', 'Ã'=>'A', 'Ä'=>'Ae',

'Å'=>'A', 'Æ'=>'A', 'Ç'=>'C', 'È'=>'E', 'É'=>'E',

'Ê'=>'E', 'Ë'=>'E', 'Ì'=>'I', 'Í'=>'I', 'Î'=>'I',

'Ï'=>'I', 'Ñ'=>'N', 'Ò'=>'O', 'Ó'=>'O', 'Ô'=>'O',

'Õ'=>'O', 'Ö'=>'Oe', 'Ø'=>'O', 'Ù'=>'U', 'Ú'=>'U',

'Û'=>'U', 'Ü'=>'Ue', 'Ý'=>'Y', 'Þ'=>'B', 'ß'=>'ss',

'à'=>'a', 'á'=>'a', 'â'=>'a', 'ã'=>'a', 'ä'=>'ae',

'å'=>'a', 'æ'=>'ae', 'ç'=>'c', 'è'=>'e', 'é'=>'e',

'ê'=>'e', 'ë'=>'e', 'ì'=>'i', 'í'=>'i', 'î'=>'i',

'ï'=>'i', 'ð'=>'o', 'ñ'=>'n', 'ò'=>'o', 'ó'=>'o',

'ô'=>'o', 'õ'=>'o', 'ö'=>'oe', 'ø'=>'o', 'ù'=>'u',

'ú'=>'u', 'û'=>'u', 'ü'=>'ue', 'ý'=>'y', 'ý'=>'y',

'þ'=>'b', 'ÿ'=>'y', 'Ŕ'=>'R', 'ŕ'=>'r', 'Ā'=>'A',

'ā'=>'a', 'Ē'=>'E', 'ē'=>'e', 'Ī'=>'I', 'ī'=>'i',

'Ō'=>'O', 'ō'=>'o', 'Ū'=>'U', 'ū'=>'u', 'œ'=>'oe',

'ß'=>'ss', 'ij'=>'ij'

); $new_url = strtr($old_url, $table);

I'm not sure about Korean handling - perhaps someone else knows how these are being handled?

-John

Google doesn't follow javascript so if you want the links followed on that page you'll need to somehow include them in your code.