Welcome to the Q&A Forum

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

Not necessarily inevitable. Without seeing your site and backlink profile it's hard to say. And even if I could I wouldn't say anything definitive when it comes to Google and their spam team. But I would say your gut might be telling you the chances are high, and you should listen to your gut. That's what I did and sure enough here we are... I told everyone here that it was inevitable and we were screwed and to expect a huge drop off in traffic any day now and less quote requests. None of that happened and I think/hope it's due to my efforts to rectify this issue. It is a huge job. The good news is I get paid for it and it wasn't my doing in the first place so I get to come out the hero (if I continue to succeed). You can do the same!! Good luck! Like I said, keep us posted.

Rachel, If your ecommerce cms/platform allows you to use variants that would be one way to avoid showing up with near identical content for the same product. The different thickness bag is simply a variation of the product just like you might have a yellow, black, red, and blue version of the same pair of shoes. Usually a variant is implemented with a dropdown button on the product page.

Not really. I have seen that when I optimize or change elements of a page that are big SEO elements (Title,Htag,Content) Google usually goes through a fluctuation but then returns or improves upon my position. That is of course unless you "de-optimized" your pages for that term. Like pulling it out of strong SEO positions. I would start to think about making changes if no improvements come after about 3-4 weeks depending on your crawl rate. You might also want to check on some of the link building you have done to the page. Some of those links you built may be devaluing your page. Make sure you have a healthy backlink profile going to that page.

The 301 redirects are NOT needed. Just make sure that your title tags target your keywords and that they are at the front of your title.

I really liked it. It worked great for the company where I worked previously as an in-house SEO. We would be using it where I am now for a new niche business we built, however, Volusion's platform, at this time, is not capable of accurately calculating sales tax. If Congress passes the Main Street tax for Web site e-commerce, Volusion's platform will need to catch up and be capable of calculating sales taz accurately across all 50 states, or their business will be in trouble. For the niche site here, we selected 3dcart because it integrates with Avalara Avatax, which is a great (but fairly pricey) service that automatically and accuralte calculates sales tax for difficult states like California and Washington. However, 3dcart has some serious limitations and the backend is not nealy as intuitive as Volusion's. Merchandising on 3dcart, particularly bundled products is pretty much a messy nightmare. Volusion is much nicer. Volusion also has a nicer way of organizing all the backend content, including design elements. 3dcart is very disjunct in terms of how design elements are orgnized for editing in the back end. As far as SEO goes, I think they are both fine. Perhaps 3DCart might have a tiny bit of an edge because it does allow you the ability to 100% customize your URLs. Hope that's good food for thought! Dana

Thanks for the response, Dana. I feel like if I'm more specific I will be a lot more clear. We are an e commerce site that sells trash bags, recycling bags, contractor bags etc. When the site was built (7 years ago) the entire site used the word "garbage bags".  Now we are trying to incorporate the word "trash bag" but so far the rankings for trash bags and garbage bags are dropping lower and lower... Do you think that's because we are targeting more keywords and it's causing a drop in our original rankings?

Thanks Keri for that information! I never realized that, I was looking for an objective review.

Hey Stephen, I don't really agree with you here. It's quite easy to make a calculable difference with a blog for a small business owner. Not everyone needs to be OK Cupid. Not everyone needs a following of people who read the blog daily or come back to the blog often. Some businesses, such as small (local) businesses, only need a few posts on their blog to make a difference. If there is worry about it not getting updated perhaps they can simply make more content pages on their site rather than a full-blown blog effort. Content creation doesn't always mean blog. Perhaps they can do some keyword research and look for long-tails to write blog posts about. Perhaps they could target a local keyword. These evergreen posts will continue to provide benefits for their business for years.... if the keyword research is done correctly.

You can also message me if you have pains with certain parts of your project. I have tons of resources I can help you connect to. Good luck

matt cutts addresses http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHSqLYUPq8w#t=0m22s I found this brief discussion on semoz http://www.seomoz.org/q/using-commas-in-the-tittle-tag