Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Jim-

Yes, your canonical usage is correct, though you should also consider using a meta robots tag with "noindex" so your filtered pages don't show in the search results.

-John

Hey Olga-

If you're in a competitive market then you should consider a more serious platform so you get the most out of your efforts.  Wordpress with Cart 66 is good; Magento is good too.  GoDaddy is really pretty slow, especially since it's a shared hosting situation.

Many different things may have happened in your switchover - content changes, image path changes, etc.  Have you set up Google Analytics or Webmaster Tools to dig in further to see what's going on?

I did try taking a look at your site ... it's loading slowly from here.  You could also try setting up a free account at GTMetrix.com and analyze some pages.  There are lots of tips on how to speed things up, but again you may only have so much control with your current hosting setup.

I speak from experience that the hosting makes a big difference.  I moved a client from Rackspace Cloud to a dedicated a few months ago.  After making the switch several of our key terms (moderately difficult) were seeing page 1 and 2 rankings.  Just my .02

-John

Hey Rich-

I looked over the domain.  You should get rid of the /index.htm reference in your code.  I'm seeing this in your footer nav.  Further, you should add a 301 redirect in your htaccess file so /index.htm just points to your root domain.  That will help clean it up in the engines and will be reflected in OSE.

The fact that /index.htm IS showing in OSE would explain why the internal link figure on the root is 0; it's just robbing your stats.

Once you redirect and educate OSE on the link you really want you'll be golden.  Plus... you won't keep losing link juice through that footer link.

Let me know how it works out!
John

Hey Pete-

Here is a link for more info on Social Media Dashboards:

http://www.socialbrite.org/2010/11/09/top-10-social-media-dashboard-tools/

Some of these are Facebook/Twitter only; some also include Google+, LinkedIn, Foursquare, and email.  Cool stuff

I've used HootSuite - did you try setting up an RSS feed?  What didn't you like about it?

-John

Would you share or message the domain - I'm happy to take a look.

Hey Rich-

Internal Links are links on your domain that point to other links on your domain.  For example:

yourdomain.com/contact.html -> yourdomain.com/about.html

This is different than External Links which are links from other domains that point to yours.

externaldomain.com/services.html -> yourdomain.com/about.html

Hope that helps!
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!

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!

I went to MozCon last year and a speaker presented info on just this sort of thing.... what to do when your niche category is relatively lame.  You might look at last year's presentations for some ideas.

This is a real opportunity!  Depending on your client reception to these ideas, you might want to take a look at a few things.  Decide on a social media tone that's appropriate and sales-worthy.

• Set them up as a leader in their field - authoritative tone and feel
• Offer up interesting material - who says it has to be business as usual?  As Ben mentioned about the pirates and creative posting - what if you inject some humor?  Laundry fails?  Cartoons/Comics?  Funny videos?
• Copper mining equipment ... sorry to say, that's pretty dry.  Wouldn't their potential contacts love some awesome humor interspersed with some helpful content.

Here's another perspective .... think about a big player like Pepsi.  Check out this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiP70pBUjuw&feature=related

Granted, big video, big budget ... but they were offering something memorable that really had little to do with drinking the product.

With a little creative thinking, that might be just the ticket for scoring decent returns in a tough category.

I agree with Ben - move it to a different platform that's in harmony with your workflow and tighten up the loose ends.  If it's breaking daily then that seems to suggest your output code may not be working to its best potential.  Once you clean up the design and make it easier for your visitors you should see some traffic results too.  People stay longer on sites that are simple to navigate.

Do you have someone to handle the upgrade duties?

Happy spring cleaning!

It's my understanding that the overall spirit of the guideline is to limit or prevent influencing the reviews.  We all know it happens anyway, but we should keep it reasonable.

I think of it this way: if you were looking for a safe car seat for you child would you want other parents' perspectives on this or just reviews from the company's SEO?

Google certainly does change things from time to time - I wouldn't want to thread the needle to closely on this one.

I agree with Arthur on this.  I have Magento experience and it's certainly not for beginners; however, it is quite powerful and there are great modules available for SEO!

-John

You could try setting up a 301 redirect in htaccess.

Hey Justin-

Check out this article right here on SEOmoz: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection

You are correct ... no juice passed

-John

I also agree with the over-optimization ... the nav structure seems a bit heavy right at the top.

If you can, follow up either way - happy to help you get it debugged!

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?

I agree with Jim.  Update your sitemap.xml files with Google Webmaster Tools.  That will also help you identify problems you might be missing.

You could try an A/B test.  On some pages, place the form below your #container div and absolute position the contact form back up to the top with CSS.  After that, monitor for a bit and see if it helps.  Perhaps it's the making of a future YOUmoz blog post?

Hey Robin-

I agree with Nakul - no worry about the link juice not flowing.  If you have rel="nofollow" then the juice stops.  The neat thing is you can combine the two attribute values as long as you put a space between them like rel="external nofollow".

Hope that helps!
John