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Unless I'm missing something, there doesn't seem to be a way to get Google to show more than 100 results on a page. Our site has about 8,000 pages, and I don't relish the idea of manually exporting 80 SERPs.

That's really interesting. I strongly believe that one page for each variation of a product, whether it's color or size, worsens user experience. But I'm working against a near-religious devotion to having as many pages as possible on the site, based on the idea that more pages definitely means better SEO. Any tips for overcoming that?

Load time was pretty long. How are your file sizes?

I noticed this issue, too, and asked the SEOmoz helpdesk what was going on. They said that on their tool, the threshold for duplicate content is 95% of the HTML. So if you have a lot of HTML that isn't actually your meaty content, the pages may be flagged as duplicate even if you have a couple hundred words of unique meaty content.

Google seems to be smarter about duplicate content on your own site. My guess is that it's checking the HTML other than the navigation and such. It might even be stripping the markup and just looking at words that are in headings and paragraphs. So it would only consider it a duplicate if the meaty content was extremely or exactly similar to other meaty content on your site.

Unfortunately, I had to do quite a bit of filtering to find the "true duplicate" content on my site -- pages that actually had the same meaty content, because someone threw in some boilerplate copy long ago to multiple category pages.

I've found this a little frustrating, too. The display on the web will show the number of duplicate URLs, but the exported spreadsheet does not. It does, however, list all of the duplicate URLs in one cell -- so you could calculate the character length of that cell and then sort by that column, and that would give you a rough ranking.

We don't know about the direct effects of social media participation on rankings. However, we do know about the indirect effects. White-hat link building is relationship building. Build relationships with influencers in your niche, get them to notice your stuff, and they might share your stuff to their followers or link to it on their websites. Their followers might also link to it on their websites. I know that I often blog about something I found on Twitter or Facebook.

Plus, so many searches are personalized now, showcasing results from the searcher's network. If you're in their network, your content is more likely to show up.

Social media can also be a simple form of reputation management. If you have active accounts on the major social networks, it's likely that they will appear on page 1 when someone searches your brand, possibly pushing down anything negative.

Accounting, at least, doesn't have to be boring. They could use social media to share their own content about small business tips, home budgeting tips, tax tips, etc. or to share and comment on news stories about the industry. Will you have a giant following? Probably not. But it's still worth a few minutes a day.

As for the other companies, those are very niche and not sexy. In that case, social media might be primarily about branding and relationship-building -- positioning yourself as a friendly, fun, family company by sharing stories about the workplace, the owner, etc. Then again, there might be a B2B network in those niches. You just have to expand a little. Who buys forklifts? Who hires surveyors? What would they find interesting?

The category pages definitely don't look clean and professional right now, and that will impact conversion rate. You have enough copy on the category pages to establish relevancy, so I would be extremely surprised if your rankings went down after you stopped showing the product descriptions on the category pages.

If you're hesitant, would it be possible to test it both ways? Choose a couple of categories and pull the product descriptions off them. See what happens to their rankings and traffic.

Correct. Here is an official blog post on the subject: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/06/duplicate-content-due-to-scrapers.html

The pages remain on the web, or the pages remain in Google search results?

When Google agrees that a page is infringing, it will de-index that page. If you want the page taken down, you have to send a takedown notice to the person who runs that website. Which can be rather difficult.

I think rel=canonical is a better solution than a 301.

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394

I'm not looking for a precise number, obviously. I'm more interested in a general range.

More text means more long-tail and synonym opportunities, but of course you don't want too much copy above the fold, pushing your products down. Maybe you can get away with a short paragraph or two at the top of the page.

You can always put more copy below the products, but in a recent SEOmoz e-commerce webinar, the presenter seemed to think that was silly and unnecessary. He even suggested that the algo might intentionally ignore text below products, since it's clearly not intended to be read.

What do you think?

I don't see your photo or the other the authorship stuff on the SERP.

Probably your best bet is to contact 3dcart support and tell them you need someone to help you.Give them these three links:

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1408986
http://searchengineland.com/the-definitive-guide-to-google-authorship-markup-123218
http://yoast.com/push-rel-author-head/

And ask them to help you decide which is the best way to implement it.

It's not something you add to your blog post, exactly. Can you say more about what blogging platform you're using?

Wikipedia can drive a lot of traffic, so while it won't help with rankings, it may help you accomplish the goal that rankings are supposed to be accomplishing.

Oh, okay, I definitely misunderstood. You're asking about the back-end rewriting process that makes a pretty URL point to the corresponding ugly URL which in turn points to the page. That's way back-end. Unlike a 301 redirect, it's invisible to the spider. The spider need never know that a URL like http://www.domain.com/?p=123 even exists. While it's crawling, it sees a link to http://www.domain.com/page1.html, follows the link, and sees the HTML for that page. That's all.

Thanks! That's what happens when a creative writing major learns php.

No. What "indexing" means is creating a database of URLs and the HTML that those URLs point to. If your site has been "indexed," it means Google has discovered your URLs and taken note of the HTML that can be found at those URLs.

I think you are misunderstanding something, yes.

On a website with a CMS, the URL is not "dynamically generated." The page is dynamically generated. Here's what that means. Whenever you type http://www.domain.com/page1.html into your browser, you are telling your browser to go to that website and pull up the HTML that corresponds to that URL.  URL stands for "uniform resource locator," meaning directions to the location of a resource. If you have an old-fashioned website, the URL points to an HTML file that you created, either by typing everything yourself of using a WYSIWYG editor. If you have a CMS, the URL essentially instructs your website to build the corresponding HTML page on the fly.

It's like ... okay, imagine that you walk into a bakery and ask for a chocolate chip cookie. They could either pull a pre-baked chocolate chip cookie off the shelf and hand it to you, or walk in the back and bake you one cookie from the ingredients in the kitchen. When we're talking about baked goods, option 1 is almost always better than option 2 because it's orders of magnitude faster and more efficient. The benefits that option 2 offers aren't worth the extra time and lost efficiency. But when we're talking about websites, that's no longer the case. The server can construct an HTML document almost instantaneously. Your browser gets the HTML just as fast as it would if it asked for a static HTML page.

In fact, your browser really has no idea that this is all happening. Here's another food metaphor. You walk into a fast food joint and order a hamburger. The cashier walks into the kitchen, and a minute later, walks out with your hamburger. Did the cashier pull the hamburger off a shelf of hamburgers that have been sitting under a hotlight for hours? Or did the cashier ask the cook to prepare a fresh hamburger just for you? Assuming the hamburger tastes great either way, you have no way of knowing. In this metaphor, the customer is the surfer, the cashier is the browser, and the kitchen is the server your website is hosted on. Either your server has a bunch of pre-made pages sitting around waiting for someone to "order" them, or your server has a clever program that makes the pages only when they're needed. That clever program, the CMS, is like the short-order cook.

The thing to remember is, the search engine spiders are customers, just like the surfer. They don't know what's going on in the kitchen. They don't care. They "typed in" a URL and got some HTML back. They now know that that URL produces that HTML. They remember that. When they see a link to that URL, they know it's pointing to that HTML.

Clear as mud?