Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I'm sure you already did this but just to make sure, you did inform GWT of the move, right?

Best,
Christopher

Thanks, Sha.  It does not happen with other automated email from Moz such as ranking reports.  It's only the email from the Q&A responses.

Best,
Christopher

When I try and open an email message from a Moz Q&A response, it hangs Microsoft Outlook for more than 30 seconds.  Is anyone else having this problem?

I'm sure I can outrank the page with modest effort.  However, that won't solve the problem. The sale price on the page give value shoppers a false sense of the actual price, and the description that includes "discontinued" gives the impression the product is no longer in production.  I need to get the page removed from their database or de-indexed from the SERPs.

A large online retailer in Europe used to sell a product that we sell in the US.  They have not sold the product for more than a year but have not removed the item from their product listings.  The price is marked down and the description says the product has been discontinued.  They sell a very large number of items and have a high DA and this product listing ranks high in Google SERP.

As you can imagine, this causes significant problems for us.  Potential customers are given the wrong price and are also being told that the product has been discontinued. I have sent numerous requests to the retailer asking them to delete the product from their database with no success.  Is it possible to send a notice to Google requesting that this product page be de-indexed?  Any other suggestions?

Best,
Christopher

In addition to EGOL's excellent comments, you will also have to compete with all the Amazon affiliates that sell your product, and even worse, they will create crappy ads on the web and Youtube showing your product.  There are countless Youtube videos of Amazon products that are nothing more than a pan and zoom of an affiliate product set to elevator music.

I have a modest number of products that don't change often so I don't use a product data feed service, but I do use Volusion and some Volusion store owners with a large number of products do use these services.  Here is a recent discussion that may prove helpful.

http://tinyurl.com/c5gscyl

Best,
Christopher

Regarding 170 words, are you referring to the meta data description or the actual content in a product page?  If you are referring to the latter, you can (and should ) have much more content than 170 words.

Best,
Christopher

It's perfectly natural for each page on a site to have a different keyword.  Write good content for each page and both users and Google will give you two thumbs up.

Best,
Christopher

Is it OK to split a key phrase into a slug and file name, or should the entire key phrase be in the file name.  For example, consider the following articles:

How to wash your car.
How to change a tire.How to replace a windshield wiper.

Will search engines recognize the "how to" in the following taxonomy:

www.domain.com/how-to/wash-your-car/
www.domain.com/how-to/change-a-tire/
www.domain.com/how-to/replace-a-windshield-wiper/

Or, should the "how-to" be included in the file name?

Best,Christopher

I am finishing up a project to move a site that is two years old from HTML to WordPress and from an old domain to a new domain.  Although the URLs are not identical, there is pretty much a 1 to 1 mapping using 301 redirects in the .htaccess file.  I also informed GWT of the move.  It's a bit early, but so far, I have not noticed any drop in traffic.

But here's the best part.  The site looks much much better and it is also responsive (about 25% of our viewers are mobile and growing).  As a result, people are viewing more pages and spending more time on the site.  I expect Google will notice that.

If the rankings hold, I plan to update several sites that are 20 years old from HTML to WP.

Best
Christopher

When I signed up for an SEOmoz account I received several notices during the first month that explained the charges.  Here is an excerpt from one such email:

"Also, we wanted to let you know that you have one week left in your free trial, and when it expires, you will be charged $99/month. We hope you've enjoyed your membership, but if you wish to cancel, you can do so on your account settings page."

I'm guessing your notices are in a spam filter.

Best,
Christopher

How did you build the video sitemap?  Can you post a link to the video sitemap?

Best,
Christopher

Do you have an affiliate application process in place such that you can accept or reject applications?

Best,
Christopher

Thanks for the quick response.  Is SEO one of the reasons your companies are BBB members?  What are the PA for your BBB listings?

Best,
Christopher

Two questions about BBB.

1. The PA for some company listings is 0 and the PA for others is much higher.  Is this because some companies have a link back to their listing and others do not?

2.I checked a random sample of companies with links from BBB to their company site, but the links are not listed in the OSE.  Why is that?

Best,
Christopher

Excellent point on the anchor text.  I reviewed a number of high ranking sites with DA of 95+ that use these links in the footer and they only use the site name in the anchor text.

Best,
Christopher

What are your thoughts on SEOs and web designers putting their own links in the footers of client sites.

When considering actual number of links, this practice is perhaps even more common in online software suites (e.g. phpBB) and online services (e.g. Volusion eCommerce), neither of which use nofollow.  Regarding user experience, I'm fine with these links if they are in the footer because there are times when I really do want to know how a particular site was built.  In other words, that's what good links are for--taking the user where they want to go.

Best,
Christopher

Hi Dana,

" ... you are right, one of the fundamental questions I still have is how does a bot behave when it finds an orphaned page like one of these? Does it just revert back to the sitemap and move one? Does it automatically go back to the last non-dead end page and move on from there? What does it do?"

Bots are not really like a single spider that has to crawl around the web that can get trapped when entering an orphaned page with no back-button.  When a bot enters a site, it creates a list of all the internal pages that are linked from the home page.  Then it visits each page on that list and keeps adding more linked pages to that list.  Each time it adds more pages to the list, it only adds new unique pages and does not add duplicates.  It also keeps track of which pages it has already visited.  When all the pages have been visited once, and no new pages are discovered that are not already on the list, all of the pages have been crawled.

Best,
Christopher

Sweet!