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If they are new products with unique descriptions and content I could not see it being flagged as spammy however thin content could be an issue. I think it would also depend on if you handle product variants properly too. I could see it being an issue if you build a separate page for each product variant though.

Hi Tom, I am interested in how your project turned out with the redirect from the defunct site.  I am in the exact position now and would love to know if you have any wisdom to impart...? Cheers, Brett

HI, Magento can have a bit of a steep learning curve so unless you want the developer learning on the job I would say you will want to see either a solid portfolio of sites already developed in Magento and/or Magento certification. There are quite a few individual Magento certified developers out there now, so it is worth looking to see if there are some in your area.

The canonical should pass link equity similar to a 301 redirect.

Hi DHStorm, Doug is correct. The business model you are describing would not be deemed local by Google and would not qualify for inclusion, as stated in the guidelines. In order to qualify for local inclusion, the business must: Make in-person contact with customers either at the place of business (like a bakery) or at the customers' locations (like a plumber). Have a unique physical address that is staffed. No virtual offices, P.O. boxes, etc. Have a unique local area code phone number. If a business can't say yes to all three points, then it doesn't qualify. Your efforts will likely be better spent developing an organic optimization strategy for this client rather than a local one.

Thanks guys - I'll keep persevering. Hopefully I'll sort this out shortly!

Yep, I mean a trail of category page links on product pages, like this - http://screencast.com/t/YSlLeuXeG Personally I have noticed this not only reinforces the site structure, but helps more pages of my site get crawled because it makes it easier for Google's spiders to navigate my site.

Right now there is not penalization for using the rel="author" markup in pages that are not posts, articles, white-papers... tl;dr all kind of authored content with a visible by line. But I confirm you that using authorship other than those kind of contents is deprecated by Google, and I won't be surprised that will be penalized or simply not shown. In those pages, if you really need to use structured data, and it may be useful for Entity Recognition, I suggest you to use the Schema.org Person.

It's very easy to set them up. Cost is dependent on how many IPs you use.  How many you need is dependent on how hard you are going to be hitting the search results.  However you can get 5 proxies from someone like trusted proxies for about £20/month. That's probably enough for a small agency running weekly rank checking or a freelancer running daily on a limited number of terms.  It all depends on how many searches you do.

Hello DHStom, In my experience I'd expect it to be easier to write unique copy for a product than to get reviews for it. With that said, I think reviews on product pages are a good idea either way - though you should rewrite the product descriptions for usability and conversion improvement if nothing else. Try these: http://www.powerreviews.com/ http://www.gigya.com/social-plugins/ratings-reviews/ http://www.pluck.com/ http://www.reevoo.com/ http://www.bazaarvoice.com/

Have you read this? http://www.hiswebmarketing.com/yes-high-quality-guest-posts-can-get-you-penalized/ I agree with the author, Marie Haynes, that you can get in trouble through guest posting. One topic that she did not cover in this article (because it focused on the Penguin problems), is that giving guest posts to other websites that are relevant to the content of your website is that it feeds your competitors and creates new ones. I will say that a lot of people disagree with my ideas about guest posting.  I think that they view it as a necessary way to gain links.  I think that it is like gladly allowing someone to take over your business because you think it will bring a little traffic to your website.

A page to page redirect from the old site to the new site is the ideal but you might cut corners by just redirecting those pages that are bringing you in search traffic and those that have external links to them.  You don't need to put any redirects on the new site's .htaccess file, though.  The traffic from the old site will already knows which page to request based on your changes to the old site's .htaccess file. Best practice is to leave your 301 redirect in place is 180 days. More info on redirects

The best advice is, as you say, to be 'natural'. Hard to 'emulate' a natural backlink profile? - Then I hate to say it, but try to earn some natural backlinks Add UGC to product pages (reviews etc), try to make product pages (assuming this is an eCommerce site!) more interesting (soem great stuff on MOZ about this - including a whiteboard Friday from a while back, I think!). If you ARE 'building' links, I would recommend avoiding exact match anchors. In terms of what anchor text % to use for each type, and what would look natural, I very strongly suspect that this is different in each industry/niche. Google is pretty good at spotting what other websites any given site is 'related' to, and so would also be able to calculate what, on average, looks dodgy and what looks natural. I would be very surprised if this data didn't at least influence it's algorithm's a little. Who ranks at the top in your industry? What sort of anchor text do they have pointing to similar sub-pages? - Check this for 3 or 4 top-ranking sites in your sector. Link like a Journo or blogger Consider using a mix of brand, url, and natural anchors such as in-sentence links (read a few New York Times blogs to see how they handle citation links (or follow the example i just made! hahaha). Whilst on the NYT blog, why not follow the links from the NYT blogs to their destination URL, and then run an OSE check on those URLs? That will likely show you other examples of natural linking The long term goal should be to earn links, not build them - I accept this can be a tough call though!

I'm with EGOL, focus on content.  Where my opinion differs, is that it could take you some time to organically build the traffic you (or your manager) wants to see from spending money.  I would put a little money into the PPC to act as a feedback loop to see what keywords are successful from a paid stand point, and then start creating content to get quality scores up and build organic rank. We're in a similar industry (electrical contracting) on a local basis.  That budget might be well spent sponsoring local events where you can build your brand and make network connections that could lead to more organic linking.

Thanks for the response Mark. Yes this particular website does not use a Wordpress or Joomla CMS, it is a custom built CMS (don't get me started!). I was hoping that there was some fancy bit of software out there that would allow me to enter a load of questions & answers and plug this into the website using some simple code. As things stand the only way I can seem to do it is as you state, by using standard pages and interlinking them manually. I was hoping that a plug-in would allow me to create a searchable hub of questions that almost exist outside of the main website (although does provide SEO benefits in the form of new unique content).

If you're hoping to appear there, you'd better be good and active on Google+, and a good number of sites, have authorship set up correctly and an awful lot of authority. It's not as simple as having a huge following on Google+, or good authority on several known sites, so as Philipp suggests I'd not be the least surprised to find it is manual.

Ah cool! I am glad it has worked out.

You should only seek links from quality sites.  Quality sites typically wont link to your site for money, but they do want quality content, and you can pay a well-known expert in that field to write quality content for that site and the article can include a link to your site.  Everything should be relevant to your site (e.g. both the other site and the article).  So, if you find a site you would like to link to your site, rather than asking them for a link, ask them if they would post an article written by an expert in that field. Best, Christopher