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If you have a /index page, I assume it would be beneficial to 301 redirect this to the root domain?

Thanks Travis - I think your 100% correct in saying that for eCommerce websites it is imperative to ensure the website structure is setup correctly to ensure that product pages can benefit from as much exposure as possible.

Where you say breadcrumbs are important , do you mean introducing DoFollow breadcrumb links to the top of each category or product page?

Hi folks

I am responsible for an e-commerce website. Our website is doing very well but I believe that our product pages should be ranking more highly than they currently are.

When taking over my current role, it became clear that a number of changes would need to be made to try and boost the under performing product pages. Amongst other things I therefore implemented the following:

1. New Product content - we have placed a massive focus on reworking all product content so that it is unique and offers value to the reader. The new content includes videos, images and text that is all keyword rich but (I hope) not seen as overly spammy.
2. Duplicate content - the CMS was creating multiple versions of the same page - I addressed this by implementing 301 redirects and adding canonical links. This ensures there is now only 1 version of the page
3. Parameters - I instructed Google to not index certain URLs containing specific parameters
4. Internal links - I have tried to improve the number of links to the products from relevant key category pages

My question is, although some of the changes have only been in place for a month, what else can I do to ensure that the product pages rank as highly as possible. As an e-commerce website with so many products it is very difficult to link to these product pages directly, so any tips or suggestions would be welcome!

Here's an example of a product page link :

http://www.directheatingsupplies.co.uk/pid_37440/100180/Worcester-Greenstar-29CDi-Classic-Gas-Combi-Boiler-7738100216-29-Cdi.aspx

Hi there - I have just been told that it is a big "no no" to add authorship to a standard page and that it should only be used on blog posts. Is this true?

What are the negative effects of using authorship on a page?

I added the rel="author" tag to a page that talks about a member of our team and a few weeks ago his picture started showing next to the search results entry on Google - great for click through rate, however is this improper usage?

Any help welcome!

Thanks Mat - I obviously wouldn't want to recommend something that runs the risk of being blocked by the search engines, so the use of proxy servers would be essential if AWR was to be used.

Is the use of proxies integrated into AWR? Do you know how much this would roughly cost?

As an in-house SEO I personally use SEO Moz's rank checker on a daily basis to monitor website ranking movements (with my company shelling out the cash for it).

However I have a friend who is interested in investing in a ranking tool for use in her freelance activity. She doesnt have too many clients at this stage so cannot really afford a subscription service such as Moz, Raven's etc.

She is therefore after a tool that is does not require a monthly subscription. I recommended Advanced Web Ranking but I wondered if there were any alternatives to this?

The basic requirement is:

• Check rankings for multiple domains in UK for Google, Bing & Yahoo
• Basic ranking report (or the facility to export ranking data to spreadsheet)
• No monthly subscription, just a 1 off purchase
• Fairly cheap, I am talking around the £200 mark or less

Does anyone have any recommendations? I assured her that the Moz community would know doubt have some ideas (my experience is fairly limited outside of Moz & Raven)!

Hi all

I work for an e-commerce company and we have a website with around 20,000 products.

The CMS I inherited was a bit of a nightmare to be honest, creating upwards of 3-4 links for each product, causing me a duplicate content issue of almighty proportions.

I am just coming out of a piece of web development work that looks to tackle this. I have now added canonical links to each main product page and 301 redirected all the other versions through to this 1 'perfect' version.

This only happened last week so I'm waiting for the search engines to get hold of the changes and (touch wood) see an improvement in product page performance.

The only problem I now have with product pages is the fact that a lot of the less popular items all have generic descriptions. These arent manufacturer descriptions, but descriptions that were created and bulk uploaded across a large number of products (replacing product names, Ids, sizes etc. etc.).

In an ideal world these product descriptions would be 100% unique, but I thought that 1 solution would be to add a product review mechanism to each product page. This would allow me to increase the % of unique content on each page

Couple of questions:

1. What do you guys think of this idea as a possible solution for the duplicate content problem?

2. Can you recommend any software/plugins/widgets that I can use on my website? All I can find are Wordpress solutions and I don't think these will work for me

That's a No then?

Ok great, sounds like we all seem to agree on the fact that syndicating content is not a great idea.

Away from this, is the idea of writing a guest post for them (1 that is clearly introduced as from ourselves) a bad one? Surely this would be a good opportunity to build some links to my website and (being a popular website) drive some traffic as part of the same process.

Thanks Alan - I was thinking it would be a better solution to propose that a unique article is written by us for them to use on their website (with deep links pointing back at my website).

What do you think?

I have been approached by a website (domain authority 65, homepage authority 70, linking domains 415) that syndicates other website's content.

They are keen to promote one of my existing articles on their website and are in a similar subject niche .

My immediate reaction was "No", as I am keen to avoid any negative impact on our SEO-efforts that may be created through having my content duplicated on another website.

I am just looking from the feedback from the rest of the community as to what their thoughts are - does the potential benefit of driving visitors from a popular website outweigh the fact that our own article may not rank very well organically as it has been duplicated.

I think the fact that we have been approached regarding the syndication suggests that the website in question is not a spammy "scraper" website that activity looks to employ black hat techniques, but I don't want to risk effecting my organic SERP ranking.

Thoughts?

I am building a new website and I plan to 301 Redirect my Old Domain (olddomain.com) to a brand new Domain (newdomain.com) in the upcoming months.

To do this I was planning to update the htaccess file on both the old and new domains.

The htaccess file on the old domain would look to 301 redirect all pages on the old domain to the new domain. The htaccess file on the new domain would detail any specific URL redirects I want to implement (ie. olddomain.com/EXAMPLE/TEST will redirect to newdomain/TEST) - this will ensure link equity is retained and bounce rates are kept at a lower level.

Does this sound like the right approach?

Also, what do I need to do with the old domain going forward? Do I need to keep this forever in order for the 301 redirect to work or can I eventually just forward the domain to the new one permanently?

I am aware that Google's Penguin 2.0 update is looking to tackle the increasing numbers of links from poor quality websites & blogs.

The advice since Penguin 1.0 has been to create a natural backlink profile, ensuring that there is a balance between keywords-rich anchor text and brand terms.

I tend to link using Branded anchor text to the homepage of my website and use keyword anchor text sparingly to link to subpages/categories elsewhere on my website.

My question is what exactly is too much in terms of anchor text? If for example I have 5 or 6 keyword-rich links inbound to a sub/category page, do I need to also get some brand anchor text into these sub/category pages too?

You probably want to talk to the SEO Moz Support Team directly rather than the Q&A forums - sadly no power here!

This is correct - you are only supposed to have 1 x h1 tag on your page as this stipulates what the main header for your page is.

You could however mix it up with some h2 and h3 tags as it is ok to use multiple versions of these on any page....but use them in a hierachical order i.e. dont use h3 if you havent used h2 on the page, dont use h4 if you havent used a h2 & h3 etc.

Hi EGOl thanks for your message.

To be honest I was actually looking to generate an open discussion and take away some broad ideas that I could apply to my industry (the heating & plumbing industry).

I was intrigued to find out what people currently spend their marketing budget on away from pure PPC advertising that helps set the website up better in the long run

The new financial year is now upon us and we have been lucky enough to see our marketing budget increase for 2013/14.

We have already planned to invest a large amount of this money in Paid advertising, but we are also keen to look more long-term and invest our time & money in channels that would benefit our website in the future.

Does anyone have any recommendations as to potential channels we could invest in to help increase our organic rankings or bring more visitors to the website?

Any ideas welcome! I do a lot of content creation and social media marketing already, but it would be good to know how I can use an increase in budget to drive a more focused approach

I would say that you just need to add rel="canonical" to the on each page - this will tell Google to affectivley ignore all other variations of that URL.

You could also considering using Web Master Tools to advise the search engines to refrain from indexing all of the URLs with those specific parameters - just be careful though as giving the wrong parameter instruction could result in pages you DO want to be indexed being ignored or dropped out of the SERPs.

Why don't you consider looking outside of Mexico for some company websites elsewhere that are in a similar industry or about a similar subject matter. As long as the content is relevant in some way to both websites and holds unique value then it should be worth exploring in my opinion.