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Hello Rachel, I had a look at each of these and probably wouldn't recommend MSemantic based on the user reviews. Google Rich Snippets for Magento only had 2 reviews, which is too little for my taste. If you want to go with an extension I would start with either of these two, one of which you've already mentioned: http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/rich-snippets-suite.html http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/seo-rich-snippets-google-bing-yahoo-schema-org.html You could also take the DIY approach: http://www.creare.co.uk/magento-product-schema http://gotgroove.com/ecommerce-blog/developers-toolbox-adding-rich-snippets-to-magento-products-with-schema-org-tags/

We had a similar problem we thought with duplicates after placing canonical tags on all our pages. Moz took about a week as did Woorank to update and decide the canonicals were in place and showing no duplicate content. We have a fairly small site with a little under 100 pages but this was a significant amount of work inserting the canonical tags and we were a little worried initially that they continued to show as duplicates for a short time. Gary

Yes your short robots.txt idea would create a huge problem. In your Magento admin if you click in the menu Catalog > URL Rewrite Management You will see the magento feature  that creates all the "pretty urls", in that page you will see a table. If get value from  Target path column and copy and paste after your site domain, for example domain.com/value_in_target_path... You'll see that the page loads fine, you don't want Google to rank those pages with the "messy" URL so that's why you need all those stuff in your robots.txt

Thanks Federico for the quick response!

Hi Rachel. Before you spend money hiring a Magento Expert (the good ones aren't cheap) you can try do the follow: Move your site for a Magento optimize server. I use and recommend Simple Helix.  (they will even move your site for free). Use cloud flare pro as your CDN, they have very nice options that will optimize your website code in the fly. https://www.cloudflare.com/features-optimizer Install the GT Metrix Magento Extension. (they have a very nice feature to optimize all the images in your site). Those steps should be enough to bring your load time to 2-3 seconds, I did myself in many magento sites with speed issues however if after that you still having problem you might need hire a magento expert. Felipe

Hi Mitchell, Thanks for your response. I do work with a developer but one of the main things I am trying to figure out is; what type of tags can I put there. I know the obvious ones, but what about my chat widget and search code - is that a tag? Thanks!

I agree that doing all you can to find contact details is the best way to go. Another way to find people is via social media accounts.

From - http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/?nodeId=508088 COPYRIGHT All content included in or made available through any Amazon Service, such as text, graphics, logos, button icons, images, audio clips, digital downloads, and data compilations is the property of Amazon or its content suppliers and protected by United States and international copyright laws. The compilation of all content included in or made available through any Amazon Service is the exclusive property of Amazon and protected by U.S. and international copyright laws. In short, you don't own those reviews even though they are about your product. The reviews were left on Amazon.com, and are therefore the property of Amazon.com.

Hi Rachel, Could mean one of several things: You lost high-trust links (or the sites linking to you lost trust) You gained low-trust links The algorithm is a comparative metric (based against all the other sites on the web) so it's possible you simply experienced a readjustment of a relative measurement, and nothing really happened with your links It's probably not much to worry about, unless you notice a drop in rankings, been hit by a penalty, or suspect a rash of negative links. In these cases further investigation may be warranted, but otherwise you'll probably be okay as long as you notice your traffic remaining steady. Cheers.

Hi Remus, I have read all the articles besides for this one: Web Site Migration Guide - Tips For SEOs and it's really great. I'm in middle of devouring it now!

I believe so. I did notice a small upward trend for long tails of product categories on our site that we had on MacRae's. I can't say for so, but it definitely did not hurt.

Hi Rachel, If you're planning to put an About Us description with relevant links, with the aim of driving visitors to your product pages, I would recommend you putting it somewhere above the fold instead of putting it in the footer. The footer is the last thing the user will see when visiting your website, and is probably a better place to put links which are less important. An exception to this I can think of is if you are running a blog where the latest posts play a more important role. In that case, putting an About Us description in the footer (e.g. Copyblogger) will be wise.

I just checked this morning and it looks fine for me. Hope the same for you!

The anchor text is for the whole site. The home page is not the only page I am seeing crazy rankings for. The site name is http://plasticplace.net. Thanks so much for taking a look!

Firstly, I'm unclear as to where the subdomain lives - you say it's hosted by someone else, but then use "mysite.com" as the example. If I understand you, it's hosted by someone else, but lives on your domain - is that right? If you don't have the same Google analytics code on the search pages, it will look like a user disappears, leaving the site, then potentially coming back. You can check this by viewing the source and looking for your GA code on any search page. This is purely a data and analytics issue, not a search optimization issue. As far as SEO is concerned, I wouldn't worry too much about it unless the functionality of your site depends heavily on searching. You should probably block any search pages in robots.txt anyway, as for most sites they add no value. If your site works exclusively with search, you might need to find a new solution.

Hi Rachel, Thank you for clarifying that for me. If you are creating multiple categories and they only have one keyword to separate them would be considered duplicate content by Google my answer would yes it would. That's why you have to make your descriptions much different than the existing descriptions for any other categories. I know it is hard using a different description when one might be the perfect fit. However Google does care about this thing and it would lead to duplicate content issues. I hope this has been of help sincerely, Thomas

Hi Rachel, There is no reason, rather than just personal preference (to an extent). I'd like my customers to share a product with their friends on Facebook etc. so I like to get straight to the point in the URL. Maybe having domain.com/department/category/subcategory may be a better option for you, depending on how keyword friendly your categories are. For example, my DJ company ranks number 1 on Google in the UK for "disco speakers" and this is how I have the URL structured: http://www.electromarket.co.uk/speakers-audio-equipment/dj-pa-speakers/active-powered-pa-speakers/ That is just for a specific type of speaker. This has worked best for us, but it completely depends on how deep your categories go. We try to make all of our most popular categories as closely linked to the homepage as possible. Hope this helps! Tom

In addition to EGOL's excellent comments, you will also have to compete with all the Amazon affiliates that sell your product, and even worse, they will create crappy ads on the web and Youtube showing your product.  There are countless Youtube videos of Amazon products that are nothing more than a pan and zoom of an affiliate product set to elevator music.

Great question.  Even though it's been 3 years since this question has been asked, I feel like it's been a hot topic for the past 10 years.  No one knows the "REAL" answer, SEO's can just assume.  There are several companies in fact who even offer "SEO Hosting" as a package with unique IP addresses aka a Full C-Class IP so that every client will be on a dedicated IP. Think of it as a house.  You and your website is 1 person living in a home.  Now imagine sharing your home with 1000 people or 1000 websites.  How does Google take you seriously if you're sharing a house aka IP addresses aka page speed (bandwidth).  If you're on a dedicated IP, you are the owner of that website...No ones spammy links, gambling, porn, directory submission sites will be shared with you, and if they are, people often question if those sites should be connected to your site...even though the website names are different. I used an example from http://www.colocationamerica.com/why-a-dedicated-ip-address-is-important.htm that shows one website with a dedicated IP vs a shared IP.  If you do a reverse IP lookup on the domain with a shared IP, you get websites that have no affiliation with your website that can also be spammy and/or have spammy related links.  From what I remember, that's when you have bad neighborhood links, and I don't think your website wants to be a part of it. As far as costs, a shared IP is basically free vs. a dedicated IP is $4-10/year. Now if we're going to talk about the dedicated server vs a shared server....there's no question that if you're serious about eCommerce sales, you want to go with the dedicated server.  Prices vary from $99 up to $400 for reasonable speed.  Now as an example, if you were selling water bottles for $10 and your cost was $2, your margins (with the cost of shipping of processing fees), contribute to a $5 net profit.  If you sell between 5-30 bottles a month, there no need for a dedicated server just yet.  I would accept the fact that keyword rankings wouldn't be as high and would bank on Ebay and Amazon to stay above water.  But when you're serious about selling 30+ bottles, your sales will indeed offset the costs of a $99/month dedicated server.  Not only will the speed of the dedicated server lower the bounce rate and increase conversions of your ecommerce store, but your keyword rankings will have a significant boost when your page speed increases to a comfortable level so that your customer doesn't get irritated from the slow shared server speeds. Best, Shawn