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Having the redirects in place should not harm you in any way unless you are chaining them, just watch this Matt Cutts video about the limits on redirects.

Regards,

Chris Wilson

I would need to know more about the nature of the redirects to be able to say whether they would cause you any problems.  If they are chained, you will run into issues mentioned by Matt Cutts in this video.  Google has many signals to tell which sites are considered spam, and if you use the canonical references and have good quality content, I can't imagine redirects causing any red flags for your site.

Regards,

Chris

Hi Alison,

I'm not too familiar with osCommerce but there appear to be plugins allowing for canonical tags (http://addons.oscommerce.com/info/6578) that you might want to recommend to the designer.  Having the same product for different colors and sizes is a great use for the canonical tag, and my suggestion would be to designate the most popular color/size as the canonical version.  As for the duplicate content issues, I'm afraid my inexperience with osCommerce prevents me from giving any additional insight into that aspect of your problem.

For the redirects, if the pages being 302 redirected do not have many links pointing to them, the 302 redirects shouldn't be a problem.  You should focus on the canonical tags for now.

Regards,

Chris

The duplicate content is an issue if there are many versions of the same page on the site.  You may be able to mitigate some of the negative impact from this by designating one as the canonical version, but ideally you would want to 301 redirect the duplicate pages to the one that has built the highest pagerank.

As for the 302 redirects, I am under the impression that the redirects themselves will not hurt you, but any links to the pages that are being redirected will not pass link juice along to the redirect destination, whereas a 301 redirect would pass a large portion of that link juice (some still leaks even with a 301 redirect).

Hope that helps,

Chris Wilson

You will still be able to get search query information through Google Webmaster Tools, and you can link that to both Google Analytics and AdWords to see reports for organic query matches in either of those platforms.  I have found the Webmaster Tools query reports to be less accurate than the Google Analytics search term report, but if the Analytics report is only going to display "not provided", the Webmaster Tools query report is a working, albeit slightly inferior, alternative.

Google Webmaster Tools

I agree with what Schwaab said.  Alt tags alone are not going to significantly affect your rankings.  However, think of them from an accessibility standpoint.  If a user is using a screen scraper to view your page or browsing without images enabled, the alt text is the only piece of information they have to observe what would have been portrayed through the image.  Since search engines have always been about giving the users the best experience, there is reason to believe that having accurate alt tags for your images can help rankings in a way other than just keyword stuffing.

Hope this helps,

Chris Wilson

Hi Menno,

You should be fine from a duplicate content standpoint, as long as the old website does not currently contain the content.  That being said, you should look into any copyright violations before directly grabbing content from someone else's archived site.

Overall, I would recommend creating new and unique content just to be safe, and it will give you the opportunity to have a fresher perspective on the subject matter than the old copy from a site archive.

Hope this helps,

Chris Wilson

Hi Joseph,

This is definitely not the ideal scenario.  If the two brands are targeting separate markets, why would the copy need to be the same?  Your two options would be to change the copy on one of the sites, or just redirect one to the site that is currently performing better.

Hope this helps,

Chris Wilson

I don't believe that will be a problem, unless you're manipulating the tags so that the H1 or H2 tags do not contain actual visible headings.  Just out of curiosity what is the context of needing an H2 above an H1?

-Chris Wilson

Ok, for images that are the identical except for the angle, it would make sense to have the same alt text.  However, for the small wall image, it would make more sense to have an alt tag of "small wall with red bricks" or something to that extent.

Like I said in my original post, the best results without having to write alt tags for each product would be to identify some key products that your client wants to focus on and write alt tags for those pages and automate the other pages.

Regards,

Chris Wilson

Hi Scott,

It is my understanding that search volume within the Keyword Planner Tool is given by exact match only.  However, in the planner tool, the performance projections are given for each different match type.

Hope this helps,

Chris Wilson

Hi Roberts,

It is my understanding that Google will not "ban" a site for having duplicate alt text, but the purpose of the alt text is to describe each image.  Alt text is used for accessibility as well as SEO, so those with visual impairments or those browsing without images enabled will be given the alt text instead of the image.  It would not be a very good user experience to have an image label of "red bricks" appear 20 times on the same page, just as you wouldn't use the same image 20 times.

From a keyword perspective, by using accurate alt text to describe each image, you can actually open yourself up to some additional keywords whereas you would be restricted if they were all "red bricks" on a given page.  If you are extremely limited on time, I would recommend going in to the top 10 or so product pages and coming up with high quality alt tags, then automating the rest some how.

Hope this helps!

Chris Wilson

Hi Danny,

Depending on the budget for branded campaigns, we utilize a mix of broad modifier (ex. +example +brand) and phrase match (ex. "example brand").  Generic broad match can cause you to pay for queries that may not be as well targeted as you expect.  For example, a former client had a broad match for Delaware Secretary of State and ended up paying to appear for the query Delaware State Fair, which wasn't ideal in the financial services business.

I would recommend looking at your specific terms that you're paying a lot for keeping in mind your organic results.  If you are trying to cut costs without seriously hindering your exposure, I would recommend determining which search queries you are paying for AND organically showing up above the fold and possible cutting spending on those specific keywords.

This will allow you to cut down on the number of branded keywords that you need to pay for, and you will still have a result in view for those queries.

Hope that helps!

Chris Wilson