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I am redoing a site and the URL's are changing structure. The client's site was in magento and in the store they would get two URLs, for example:

/store/categoryname/productname

and

/store/categoryname/productname?SID=dslkajsfdoiu947598whouieht983hg98

Do I have to 301 redirect both of these URL's to their new counterpart? Both go to the same content but magento seemed to add these SIDs into the navigation and Google has both versions in the index.

Cool I will look into that one. Do you know if any of the free plugins are comparable or are they mostly a waste of time?

Hey folks, quick question for WordPress lovers. I'm making my first e-commerce WordPress website. I've been looking through the shopping cart plugins and there are a ton to choose from. I don't want a solution that is going to give me URL's like &cat=000xh7&desc=4747fhfh because of the obvious SEO un-friendliness.

What is the best WordPress shopping cart plugin for an e-commerce site that will keep things SEO friendly and be easy enough to use? Any suggestions?

It's not so much about keyword frequency as it is about prominence and density. First and foremost, use your keywords in the most prominent locations on the page: title, alt tags, strong tags, H1 tag, URL. Then naturally use them in your content.

Density just means it should be the most used word across your site. In GWT, your keyword report shows you the words used most on your site. Your keywords should be at the top. Whether that takes 5 times per page or 50 times per page depends on how many other phrases you are using regularly, how long the page is, etc.

Key is just use it in the prominent locations and naturally incorporate them into your content. Don't use any other word or phrase more often than your keyword and you are fine as long as it is the most prominent phrase you use.

Hey guys, have a business partner prepping a new website and it is ready to go. He wants to do something similar to threadless.com which gives users the ability to upload things, vote on things and buy things. He asked me who could build the site and I frankly didn't have any recommendations for him.

Does anyone here have a positive experience with a web design/programming person or company that they trust? I would like to get a good recommendation to him of someone who can build this thing, built it well and build it in less than the usual 6-12 months. Does anyone like that even exist? If so, please respond with your answer, looking to get moving on this project soon.

Thanks!

A 301 redirect is done in the .htaccess file for the domain. There doesn't need to be a page present for a redirect, it is a server side thing. Look up info on writing a 301 redirect in the .htaccess file and you'll find what you need to set this up.

If the page that now 404's is indexed, redirect it with a 301 to the page you are keeping. If it is not indexed, no harm done.

It's an interesting article, what I don't get is why my rankings in Bing and Yahoo used to be completely or nearly identical, and then all of a sudden they aren't even close. Just seems odd to me.

I just went to my campaign to check on rankings, and my Bing rankings are wildly different from my Yahoo rankings. None of the keywords are even close, every one is very different. Anyone know what is happening here? Shouldn't they still be the same?

Pretty standard. Site redesigns, especially when new URL's are involved, see immediate drops in rankings and traffic. Going to be a little while until they come back. I personally would never have made the switch. It's rarely worth it for the lost traffic. Isn't there a media uploading plugin or some kind of ftp plugin for wordpress you could have used? Guess it's too late. Just make sure all of your URL's are redirected, not just your top 80, you should be fine in the long run, but it's going to hurt for a little while.

For indexing problems, wordpress automatically pings search engines with new posts, so you likely got indexed very quickly in the past. Try and share a link to your new content on Google+ and that should get it indexed quickly.

This may sound weird, but I think the answer to your question is no. Panda and its subsequent rollouts hit a few of my websites. But it seemed to me it was a page level thing, not a domain level thing. For example, Panda seemed to target some affiliate websites. I have lots of affiliate websites. Some of their rankings were untouched, while other pages suffered. Granted, any site that got hit by Panda got hit pretty hard. But oddly, several pages on those sites were completely unaffected.

To your point there, blogspot.com, wordpress.com and tumblr.com all have several sub-domains that were affected without the root domains getting affected, so what you are asking is if blog.mysite.com got hit, then did mysite.com get hit as well?

I think that just as pages rank and not domains, so were pages affected by Panda and not whole domains or sub-domains.

Hey all, I have a certain format I want to follow on my text ads across several ad groups. I deleted all the past ads and only three ad groups remain with ads that follow this format.

When I hit add new ad group, the ad come pre-populated with the text of a now deleted ad and I cannot for the life of me change it. I would love for one of my active ads to come up as I only have to change one name and one number in each ad.

How do I control what that default ad is? How can I make it stop being an ad I have deleted. Please help!

FYI, campaigns became available the following day, so if anyone else runs into this, just give it 24 hours and you should have your campaigns.

Hey all, anyone know how to add new campaigns in the pro dashboard after you upgrade? I went from pro to plus pro to get 12 campaigns, but it won't let me add anymore. It says I am a plus pro member and all, but there's no option to add more campaigns, anyone know what to do here?

Was going to ask the same thing, Rand tweeted an update about 16 hours ago I believe. I checked the seomoz toolbar and those numbers had not changes. I checked opensiteexplorer.org and those numbers had not changed. Nothing has actually updated yet as far as I can tell.

I suppose that is true, e-commerce and editorial sites will organize information differently. With e-commerce the last thing you want is to clutter a page with tons of products to make it difficult for users to find exactly what they are looking for. But with editorial sites like wikipedia it would make more sense to have the most comprehensive page you can create.

In your example, I believe a substantive page about lintels has a better chance to rank for the term lintel. However, if you want to rank for wooden lintel, steel lintel, etc. then you have a better chance with content targeted toward each keyword. Each of these pages would even link to each other.

That's my opinion though because I go after the long tail traffic. If you want to try and rank for lintels, then great, make a comprehensive page about them. But if you want to rank for something specific like wooden lintels, then you need a page about wooden lintels, not a comprehensive guide to lintels.

In your example, both Border's and Amazon have a page about the exact same subject. Amazon said more about the subject, so they won out in quality. This doesn't mean you have to spew all the information imaginable onto a page.

If you have 5 keywords, then 5 great pages of content are going to be much, much better than one huge page of content in achieving rankings for all 5.

Imagine I review fitness equipment. I want to rank for treadmills, ellipticals and exercise bikes. Is it better for me to clutter one page with as many reviews of every treadmill, elliptical and bike as I can? Of course not, I want my treadmills on one page, ellipticals on another, and exercise bikes on another.

But what I want to do is be as substantive and in depth as possible on each of those pages, not some superficial sentence or two. So while I believe you are right, large pages are good, you should not have large pages covering multiple topics and keywords. Go in depth on your one topic and rank for your keyword and its variations.

Back to my example, my treadmill page could rank for treadmills, treadmill reviews, treadmill ratings, best treadmills, home treadmills, etc. If my page covers treadmills, ellipticals and bikes it's definitely not rankings for all those treadmill terms. Targeted content wins, but like you and others are saying, it needs to contain substantial content.

What you don't want to do is have C redirect to A and then have A redirect to B. You can have a billion 301 redirects, but you don't want to send the crawlers on a wild goose chase. If an old URL currently goes to A and you want A to now go to B, I would change the 301 of your old URL to now go straight to B.

If I understand, you have home page A with old design and home page B with new design. A formerly had a 302 redirect to B. Now the redirect is removed, so you have A and B and they are essentially the same thing, right?

If this is correct, you want to use a 301 redirect from one to the other. If URL of A has all the link juice, I would suggest putting the home page you want on the URL of A and then redirect B with a 301 to A. This is the best way to handle it.