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To add the domain name would help for analytics. Does it show google that users aren't leaving the site?

I'm not so sure what you mean, are you saying that it is counted as a bounce to the site if google analytics doesn't treat this this subdomain as part of the site?

Hi,

We have a search engine on our website. Whenever a user searches on our site it goes to subdomain - search.mysite.com. This domain is not hosted by us, is this negatively affecting our SEO?

Does google interpret this as a bounce since a user is technically leaving our site to search for something?

Are there any other ramifications this would have on our site?

Thanks!

I don't think you are understanding my question, I am creating descriptions for different categories that only have one different keyword.  I want to make sure this isn't considered duplicate content, and if it is, what should I do?

Hi Everyone,

I have a few category pages within a category for my eCommerce store and I've recently started writing a short description for each. However a lot of these paragraphs can be replicated for the same category. For  instance '1 Inch thickness' I'll show all the information, and it'll be very similar to '2 inch thickness' but obviously one is 1 inch and one is 2 inch so I would only be changing one keyword and that is the thickness.

I feel that this is helping customers because it has all the information in each category e.g. how to filter your choices. But it might be duplicate content.

What would you recommend?

I have a very similar situation. This time it's not a complete article it's just a few sentences describing the category. Because we sell one product that comes in many thickness, sizes and colors there is only a limited amount of information I can put on the category pages for thicknesses. For example there would be a landing page for one inch thickness and another 15 different landing pages for different inch thicknesses.

What do you recommend?

Thanks Tom for the detailed answer.

Is there a reason why it can only be two forward slashes deep?

What's the best way to set up a url structure? When a user goes through the funnel should it show it in the url?

Like this:

domain.com/thickness/high-density/1-mil-plastic-bags (1 mil plastic bags is a subcategory - when the user is at this page they will see many products. When they select one - it brings them to a product detail page which I think should be done like this: domain.com/product-name regardless of the funnel that brought them there. Does this make sense?)

or

**domain.com/1-mil-plastic-bags **

Also, is there a limit of how many "/" could be used?

I am updating our product descriptions site-wide. I wanted to also update our amazon listings for those same products. Is that considered duplicate content if it would be on amazon and our site? Is there any reason why I wouldn't want to do that? Is google product ads also a problem?

Is it very important not to share the same IP address for SEO reasons?

Thanks for that screenshot, you definitely put me at ease to know that our anchor phrase is fine.

Thanks for the response.

Here is the site I am trying to optimize: http://www.plasticplace.net. I'm not sure you noticed on the screenshot, but the blank spot after the past week's ranking shows that the keyword is more than 50 positions away in Google.  We are targeting a lot of different keywords and long tail keywords as well. The other keywords are more or less stable. This keyword seems to be the ticket for more visits as the monthly searches are the highest.

My question is really why is it so unstable if the only changes I have made were positive. (It used to be at position 20)

I asked a question a few weeks ago about a main keyword that we are targeting that is fluctuating up and down. The keyword is "trash bags" and that is what my company sells. All different colors, thicknesses and sizes. This isn't just a random keyword we are trying to optimize for, this is our business.

Before I started optimizing the website for "trash bags" we used the term "garbage bags", now that we started we have been off the charts and on the charts, but we have never regained rankings. The trend finally looked like it was going upwards... but now I see I dropped off of google again. Is this normal? Should I be worried that google is penalizing me for this keyword (There is many links that have trash bags in the anchor text - but we do sell that!)?

Here is a screenshot of our ranking history for trash bags:  https://www.diigo.com/item/image/3vpdp/no01

Wow! That sounds like a huge job! Thanks for the detailed response.

Do you think that's it's almost inevitable that I will get penalized?

.

Before I started doing SEO for the company I am currently working in, they had an Indian company doing loads of spammy SEO work for their site.

My question is as follows; should i try to remove the links that were inserted there. I am doing link building now in a natural way, which obviously takes days to get a link - not minutes.  I'm worried that the link profile is full of years of spammy links and I can't dilute it as fast as I would like.

Here are a few links to different sites that the company created links on: http://youdoze.com/  http://www.video-bookmark.com/   http://mylinkvault.com/  http://www.puplinks.com/  http://huzoo.com/

How do I go about this?

Part of a site I am working on, features many different bags in all thicknesses colors and sizes. I'm getting an error when some pages have different content like different thicknesses. The only differences between the pages are a single digit - but in trash bags that makes it a whole different product! I can't do a canonical because it's not the same.

For example: http://www.plasticplace.net/index.php?file=productdetail&iprod_id=274 and  http://www.plasticplace.net/index.php?file=productdetail&iprod_id=268

Any ideas?

Thanks Tom for your reply. I forgot to mention one point in my question - I used to rank for 'trash bags' somewhere by #13 and after I optimized the website to rank for that term it hasn't seen the daylight.

Does that change the question a bit?

I am trying to rank for the keyword "trash bags" I did  a lot of on-page optimization and link building. We started ranking #2 on bing and yahoo but google seems to be stubbornly fluctuating between being as high as 20 and as low as 45 and even dropped our rankings for a couple of weeks. Is there any need for concern if google is acting so different from bing/yahoo?

I found many duplicate title tags and I'm in the process of changing it  Do I need 301 redirects in place when I switch it? I am only changing the title tag.

Also, we are switching over to a new site very soon, I am worried that we might be using too many 301 redirect "hops" because we are doing a lot of optimization as well. (video from matt cutts describing 301 redirects and hops: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1lVPrYoBkA.

Does anyone have any experience in doing too many redirect hops that it affected your rankings? Any good ideas to avoid this?

Your dead right on that! We are basically switching everything. We currently use a custom php shopping cart and we are switching to magento. Like I replied to EGOL we are creating an entire new navigation with many new urls and and entirely new funnel from entry  through checkout.

This is our current site http://www.plasticplace.net/

This is our future home page: http://i.imgur.com/zK0lUEq.jpg