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Yes, I believe this is probably the best solution. Regarding the passing of rank, etc, nothing will really change from how it is now, except that one page will clearly be defined as the original content. This may help boost the page authority of the page with the canonical tag. Whatever authority that original content page has should pass to other pages the same as it is now.

Agreed. I think if we can change the Storefront to storefront without having to employ any kinds of redirects it would be great. Otherwise, the site is so old, that it may not matter.

Along those lines, we recently had the opportunity to remove /Storefront from the URL string. We chose not to because the site is 10 years old and didn't want to risk losing any page or domain authority by having a whole bunch of 301 redirects.

Certainly interested to know your take from the viewpoint of someone who knows code. Thanks George!

Thanks so very much George for your thorough answer. This is exactly what I needed know, and it makes it possible for me to explain it to the CEO. It appears we have a confusing mixture of absolute and relative URLs, that need to be sorted out. I think sticking with the absolutes will makes it much easier.

While we have this on the home page:

This is an example of a category page canonical tag:

Would I be correct is saying that there is a problem here because the actual URL of the page is

http://www.ccisolutions.com/StoreFront/category/wireless-microphones

So if we are going to use the relative URL in our canonical tag, it should be:

Is that correct?

Thanks George. Can you help me with what this means on a large site "

If your document specifies a base link, any relative links

will be relative to that base link."  ?  Does "document" refer to the entire site, or a single Web page?  Thanks!

I believe the proper syntax is like this [taken from the SEOMoz homepage]:

However,

one of the sites I am working on has all of their canonical tags set up like this:

I should clarify, not all of their canonicals are identical to this one, they simply use this naming convention, which appears to be relative URLs instead of absolute.

Doesn't the entire URL need to be in the tag?  If that is correct, can you also provide me with an explanation that I can give to management please? They hate it when I say "Because I said so!" LOL

Thanks Mike. Understood. I think your anchor text is fine. Have you considered adding the word "Find" or "Shop" or "Buy" to it? Like this:

Shop German Shepherd Figurines from MyDomain.com

I'd make the whole string one big hyperlink. You are clearly signaling to the user where they are going and what they can do there. I don't think there's anything spammy about that.

Then, I would link directly to the German Shepherd Figurines page.

I hope that's helpful!

Matthew, you are very welcome. I think putting those two ideas together would come across nicely. Best of luck to you!

I admire your pro-active ideas and ambition greatly. As someone who fields SEO sales calls every day, I'd just toss out a word of caution.

Most businesses have spent a lot of time getting very good at what they do. They understand their vendors, their products, their customers, their bottom line. There's no way a gung-ho SEO can look at a site for 30 minutes and pretend to waltz in as if they know the first thing about the business, its goals or its customers. I've had SEO's pitch me keyword lists that were completely wrong for the business because they had no idea who the customers really were (and most likely they didn't care).

I get so tired of people calling me and saying "Hey I took a look at your Web site and did you know you don't have any [insert select SEO term here] ?" The last one, just two weeks ago said "Hey, did you know you are missing all of your meta keywords tags on your Web page?." I should have hung up, but I played stupid and strung him along just to see how green he really was, poor chap! lol

I don't like it when people call me and say they've been looking at my Web site source code. It's almost like they've been lifting up my skirt to see what color my underwear is!

IMHO it's bad manners to offer an opinion unless asked for it. To me, the best approach is to give them a compelling reason to ask you for help. That way, they've invited you into their "space." Show some genuine interest in their business. 30 minutes of prep time just isn't going to do it, and they can see right through that.

The only SEOs who've ever gotten my attention were the ones who offered to fix something small for free just to show me that they were competent and could produce results. To me, that's the best hook in the world.

While I have found SEOMoz tools to be invaluable for tracking results and providing reports to my CEO, I don't rely solely on SEOMoz for everything I need to optimize the sites I manage. Google Analytics data, reports and tracking are a crucial part of the whole picture.

Have you been tracking your visitor engagement and looking at bounce rate, time on page, depth of site visits, etc? There may be an issue there.

I also use SEMRush, Google Webmaster Tools, Ahrefs, Rank Checker, and the SEOQuake Toolbar to help me look at many different things.

Every site is different. E-commerce sites will have specific problems that blog sites don't have, and vice versa.

I think SEOMoz tools are exceptional, but I think even Mozzers would agree that they are not meant as a stand alone, all-in-one, never need anything else kind of tool. It works best when used in combination with the other great tools that are out there.

Hope that's helpful!

In the context of this question and conversation, what about using rel=publisher for the brand voice and rel=author for specific individuals?

Katie, what happens if someone who has built up great Author Rank via their personal account leaves the company. It seems the company would lose out in that scenario. Very curious to know everyone's take. From personal experience I can tell you that connecting one's personal Google account to a specific brand can make for a big mess when someone moves to another company.

What is the context of the link and where will it appear? Is it on an internal page or an external page? If it's external, is this in a blog post,  a comment on a blog post, a business listing or a directory, or something else? Is there a lot of surrounding text? If so are there other keyword links, or none?

This is a great question that shows something I am sure we are all spending a lot more time thinking about post-Penguin and Panda!

I have seen this happen before. Yes, wait a few days before panicking. It takes time when something changes for the index to update. It could be a few hours or a few days. If you don't reappear in a week, then it might be worth investigating further. I wouldn't make any more significant changes right now. Wait it out first.

This is a great question. I just read a blog post by Tom Critchlow about how Distilled uses Google+ for all internal communications and that they had to deal with the same issue. Here's a link to the post http://tomcritchlow.com/private-google-plus-engagement

I would set up AuthorRank on the blog from the business account, have everyone use their personal accounts for internal communications and just make sure that everyone's circles are set up accordingly. In other words, you want blog readers circling the business account circle for the blog, not necessarily individual's circles.

I'd love to hear what other people think because I think there is mass confusion over this specific issue.

I have seen the same scenario in many of the e-commerce sites I have managed too. I never saw any adverse effects as far as SEO went. I think it depends on what the perceived purpose of those links is. If you are really just helping your visitors find additional content or products that are relevant to what they are looking for, I think you should be okay.

In this particular case, I don't think it's a problem.

However, I am always willing to admit that I could be wrong and am very interested to hear what others might have to say. There might be some folks here who've had completely different experiences.

I'm not a fan of stop words in titles. How about

Nightlife Forum | UK Clubbing Guide | Talk Nightlife

What do you think? I basically just got rid of the "and, for, the" - But it remains very readable.

I too have seen this kind of change make a big difference, but sometimes it;s short term and the page sinks back down to where it was before. I think a new page title makes Google bot temporarily "curious" and it thinks "Oh I've found a new page!" Remember, bots aren't as smart as humans, so it takes them a while to catch on.

It's great that your page moved up. Watch it for a month and see what happens. If it retains its position, then maybe it's a good tactic to try on other pages

It could be that the change you made was a better "title" for the actual page. Finding better, more accurate, concise and descriptive titles that really hone in on what your page is about is always a good thing.

Hope that helps!

Hi EGOL. You make some good points. But, wouldn't you agree that testing is the only way to know for sure? I think making big changes to pages and structure based only on a hypothesis is not the best way to proceed. While long pages might impress visitors to some kinds of sites, they could be a huge turn-off to visitors on other kinds of sites. If you have an assumption that one way would be better than another, then the best thing to do is to test that assumption and find out if what you believe is really true or not.

If you are pleasing the search engines at the expense of your audience, what have you gained? You might end up getting more traffic, but what if they bail because the page isn't what they were hoping to find or it's too much for them to digest?

Can you tell I'm on my testing soap box? LOL, OK, I'll come down now.

There's really only one way to find out if one page structure/design is better than another and that's to split test your ideas. Optimizely.com is a great resource that has a one month free trial.

That being said, I personally don't think there's anything wrong with the page with the steps listed linking out to each step. Visitors generally will keep following a trail as long as they feel they are on the right track. I would be concerned that adding more content to the page might distract visitors from proceeding through the funnel, which is ultimately what you want them to do, yes?

Again, you won't really know that for sure unless you test one way versus the other. If you do test, look at your bounce rates in addition to funnel conversion rates. If one version has an excessively high bounce rate, this could be bad for SEO and would be something to consider when making any changes.

I can give you all kinds of personal opinion, but that's not really going to help you. I think you need to test test test. Hope that helps!

Dana

You are definitely headed down the right path. I know from experience with 3DCart that they have just started offering SEO services. I would advise to steer clear  of them. If you've had any experience with their customer service, it's, well, marginal.

I attended their kick-off webinar for their SEO services and they were still talking about populating meta keywords tags. I posted a question asking them when they were going to make it possible to do SEO on their .asp pages [which you currently cannot access at all] and they did not respond. There are similar built-in problems with SEO for their blog.

I would advise hiring an SEO that specializes in E-commerce who has had a lot of experience with 3DCart. I'll still take a look at the site on Monday. There may be a lot of things you can do yourself without the expense of hiring someone.

Excellent comments Ryan. I believe part of the challenge here will be working within the confines of 3DCart. I had the same problems with Volusion. These E-Commerce solutions are not necessarily coded with SEO in mind at all. I liked the way Volusion's back end was organized much better than 3DCart's. In 3DCart everything is broken into pieces and not organized very well. Trying to put in javascript for certain additional features can be difficult or impossible because one cannot access the right parts of certain pages (i.e. one cannot directly access the whole code of a product page to place snippets in the ). I've also had several times where javascripts from PowerReviws, Bizrate and AddShopper broke the shopping cart altogether.

If I'd had a choice I would have built my newest e-commerce site in Volusion. However,, Volusion does not have sophistacted enough taxation capabilities and the company had nexus in California, Washington and Idaho. We were forced to choose 3DCart because it was the least expensive option that integrated with Avalara, a 3rd party tax calculation service.