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I don't believe that there are any "accredited" courses.

Agree, keep the .html

I second that idea. Guaranteed re-tweet on that video.

Cheap wine?

Per Google's recommendations, I'd change the links to the new website.

Wp e-Comm is "okay" out of the box, but is missing stuff. Just make sure you install  the Yoast Wordpress SEO plugin and that will fix the rest and give you specific control over the category/product page titles, meta, etc. It's a great plugin to use in combination with WP eCom.

One cautionary note: If the products are going to live in multiple categories (which a lot of times they do in eCom), I'd go with /product/product-detail. Avoid duplicate pages and having to canonical and get into that whole mess.

You're not going to lose a lot (or probably anything) by not having the category names in the product urls. Just my opinion though...

Magento has some great options for that if you're going in that direction.

There's probably a number of ways to do it, some more manual than others.

Get a developer to export a list of product numbers (if they are unique) and urls from the DB of the old and new CMS. Use excel and match em up (vlookup is a good function for that), create the htaccess redirects (=CONCATENATE is a good function for that) and whaaalaaa.

If programming resources are short, you may need to use a scraper (ie. mozenda) to get the info. Or, just pick the most valuable revenue entreating pages (export from Google Analytics if you have that setup) and manually write redirects. Not recommended but better than nothing!

Err, so many options, lol. And definitely switch to Magento. It rocks!

Hola,

We've moved a number of sites for similar political reasons. It's always frustrating as an SEO!

We almost always have seen some drop-off for obvious reasons. Sometimes that drop-off has been less 5%, other times closer to 30% depending on the precautions that business owners were willing to take. Sounds like you're going to do redirects and do the webmaster tools request. 2 tips:

• Plan to hold on to the .net domain for a long time and keep the redirects in place. Our worst results were situations where for some reason, the business owner would not (refused to/could not/whatever reason) hold on to the old domain name.
• Try to find a feasible/scalble way to get your top-linkers to move to the new domain. In a perfect world, you'd get most your inbound links updated. This can take some time but seems to help minimize the impact and be better in the long-run. This is an absolute waste of times in some cases (way too inefficient) but if you have or can establish solid relationships, get those links updated!

Best of luck. It's not an ideal situation but usually isn't the end of the world if you're in it for the long haul (unless your in a crazy competitive market)!

For volume, I stopped using wordtracker because I thought it made more sense to get the data straight from the source, so-to-speak. I use google to get that estimate. Google doesn't really show keywords without decent volume so that may not be the best tool for long tail. We typically only do keyword research to identify 'themes', as opposed to specific long tail.

For competition, there are many other tools to guesstimate. I personally just use google search operators (intitle: and intext:). It's not perfect or precise but I think you could poke holes in the methodologies of any other tool as well. My goal is to get a rough comparison between keywords.

Hope that helps!

http://www.internetofficer.com/seo-tool/redirect-check/ and http://www.seomastering.com/url-redirect-checker.php both say 'not search friendly'.

Kind of weird, some other tools are showing a 301. Even more weird, when i visit the url, it looks masked and i see http://www.bookbyte.com/productv3.aspx?isbn=9780321676672 (note the "productv3.aspx") which is different from what any of the tools bring back. I'm not a dev so i cant help much more. Something weird going on and i assume that's what google is seeing too.

best of luck!

Hi Thomas,

I'm seeing a 302 redirect on http://www.bookbyte.com/product.aspx?isbn=032167667X.

Maybe try this: http://www.webtoolhub.com/tn561352-url-redirection-checker.aspx

Ahh, I better understand your initial comment. Your concern makes complete sense.

I'd still go with the form technique and apply it to title tags as well (see EGOL's comment). It will help you better target longer tail which may be your best bet anyway (unless you're already a link powerhouse and can compete for the more general search phrases).

I wouldn't go an hide/canonical/disallow anything until i knew G was having a problem with it. But that's just me.

Is this site replacing an old one? What's that structure like and is anything working there?

Hey Leigh,

First off, I'd say that your #2 concern would be a great problem to have! I'd rather own 2 of the top listings than just 1!

In scenarios where product-level optimization is not feasible/efficient/etc, I'd try to get as many data points on each product as possible and do 'form optimization'. I see that your initial descriptions are going to be similar. You should enhance them a bit using product attribute info. It takes a bit of programming but worth it in the long run!

Do you have other product attributes which can be worked into each product page template?

Maybe stuff like:

• Size availability (2,3,4,etc.)
• Color/style options (white, gold, pink, etc.)
• Seasonal availability (winter, spring, year-round, etc.)
• Parent category names (wedding ring, anniversary necklace, etc.)
• Material (gold, sterling, etc)
• Fulfillment time [1 week, immediately, etc.)
• Weight

In this case, you can enhance your descriptions with that data. For example, your product page template would look like:

The [Insert Ring Name] is a [Insert material] [Insert parent category name] available in a variety of sizes including [insert size options, comma separated]. The [insert product name] is available [insert availability attribute] and usually ships [insert fulfillment time].

Would yield something like this on a specific product page:

The 14k yellow gold ring is a yellow gold wedding ring available in a variety of sizes including 1,2.3 and 4. The 14k yellow gold is available year round and usually ships in 1-week.

We're still seeing form optimization work pretty well as long as:

• The content is pretty useful and not just a bunch of keywords and attributes stuffed onto each page (aka, provide value, especially to the customer!)
• You have at least a few different data points for each product which can be utilized to hide the appearance of 'form optimization'

O yeah, not sure of your sales volume but push the h*ll out of getting customers to write reviews and make sure the reviews appear in a SE friendly way on the product pages themselves for added uniqueness.

See where I'm going with this? Hope this helps and good luck!

We're not seeing it anywhere...

I'd 301 it. I haven't tested it but it makes the most logical sense.

Honestly, I take everything from the dahsboard as a suggestion. Just cause the dashboard says something is a 'warning' or 'error', doesn't mean that the same logic isn't driving traffic, sales, leads, etc. Look at the suggestions, but make sure you're not shooting yourself in the foot by 'fixing' something.

I guess the value is that you have an unbiased set of eyes (even if they are artificial!) keeping a watch on your site, especially when you implement changes which may send crawlers for a loop.

Just my take on it. We don't really use it much but when we do, we have found issues that we otherwise would not have.

Try TripAdvisor (http://www.tripadvisor.com/WidgetEmbed). Their hotel widgets have been hugely successful (and evil!).

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