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+1 on the same thing happened to a few sites we work on.  We have now made all the changes we can to on-page and technical and will let that stew for a few weeks before we consider anything else.  Some traffic has returned but there is a long way to go.

In the mean time spending non-ROI money on PPC.  Ugh

Would sure be nice if the webmaster tool recommendations would keep sync with Algorithmic changes so you could properly react to all the silly black and white creatures.

Us the SEOmoz on-page optimization tool to analyze your page.  It will give you tips on what to change and tell you if you are keyword stuffing etc.

Does anyone else see their organic rankings fluctuating wildly.  I have been tracking a few key keywords by literaly typing them in each morning and looking at results.

The pages I have been doing this for where without any doubt affected by Penguin as you can see the huge drop in traffic directly correlated to the Pegnuin deployment.

What is strange is one day these phrases will be on page one position 3 and two days later but on page3 to 5 or not ranked.  Four days later back on page 1.  These are wild fluctuations so it appears to me that I am observing Penguin tweaking ?  Just wish the tweaking would stop on one of the days were our phases for this particular site are on page one.

Most people would check rankings weekly, monthly or quarter and would not perhaps be observing these crazy swings?

Thought?

I am a Pinnacle Cart re-seller and it is a good full featured cart.  The main thing is to pick a cart that meets your needs and budget.  If you want to talk more about your needs PM me and we can talk about your criteria.

It is important to create a criteria list so you can easily compare carts.  Do you need?

1. One page check out (I highly recommend this)

2. Do you want / need product reviews

3. Gift cards

4. PCI Compliance ?

5. What is is shipping pricing - does the cart support it?

6. Who is your merchant service provider?  Are they supported.

7. Do you need Sub-Product skus for drop shipping.

8. Want to market to people that abandon their carts ?

9. Of course SEO friendly (does not mean SEO perfect)

10.. etc.etc

So first make the list and then compare the carts.

I have discover that I have 288 back-links that 404.  Many of them come from suspect sites.  Do I 301 these backlinks so webmasters does not show these errors or to I leave them 404 as a vote that I don't like those unasked for backlinks ?

Thanks Cyrus I am not sure what you mean by

"The meta description aside, anywhere your money keyword phrase is used that it can count is a place you want to be careful about."

You mean not to abuse Anchor Text ?  When you domain and company name are both an EDM (a great thing to have in the past) it is hard not to use it in Anchor.  I guess what you are saying is dont use mysite.com as anchor instead use My Site or Here?

Oh right now I have mysite.com in the title and in many of the meta descriptions so it sounds like I should remove it from one or the other.

I have been looking closely at my backlinks.  I readily admin that I have not worked on backlinks in years since for e-commerce there is little white hat opportunity but here is what I find in doing a detailed analysis.

I mostly have back links that are pointing to our nicely ranked site (well it use to be pre-penguin) being hyjacked by crappy sites that just put us on the their site in order to try and rank.  I have no way to prevent this.  They are like a cancer.  Point me to the Doctor.

Is Goggle penalizing us for these guys listing us in long pages list to create pages that obviously exist for one reason...... To display Adword Ads....isn't that a twist that simply sucks for use but has Google making money either way.

If they want to penalize us for them stealing our link then we should get a say in accepting the link.

Advice on dealing with this?  Do I have to hire someone to create enough good links to overcome this trash that I have no control over ?

Perhaps my competitors are doing this.  I simply can't tell.

Any advice is appriciated.

Very good points.  I would like the company name (same as domain name) to go either in the title of the description but I like your idea to put it in the Description and re-think the title for a call to action.

In some cases Google is using info from my footer instead of the Meta Description in the SERPs?

I am beginning to realize that being an SEO is like being a Doctor or a Lawyer.   You get to practice your entire career and people actually tolerate that behavior.

Oh and thanks for letting me know that I am not alone staring at the dark object on the floor and wonder were it took so much traffic.  Until April 24th I had no idea shadows were black and white and liked the cold.

I guess I should also mention that the name of this company is also an Exact Domain Match (EDM) of a great key word within this industry.

So I am now afraid that if I don't take out all my references to the actually company name out of the Description I will get penalized for stuffing.

Putting the name of the company is very typical for e-commerce company.

Is it ok to put your domain name in the meta description if that is the name of your company?  so if my company name is BlaBla.com and I want to have a meta description like

Shop for your next Widget at BlaBla.com.   We have Widget in 30 colors.  Free shipping for orders over $50.

and I am obviosuly promoting the widget page is this ok.  I am concerned that Google will not like the domain name in the meta description.  After Peguin I am paranoid about my shadow.....LOL

I could turn it off each night and turn it on in the am...LOL ...or better yet redirect it to google.com each night and redirect to the real site in the am.

The 301 works fine no matter the page.  Chances are most people would only type www.a.com and all the backlinks are to www.b.com (the real site)...

The actually site is at the incorrect spelling....but it is a common misspelling.

Thanks for the help.... I did not want to get goowacked for a simple thing.  That is a good new verb ...goowacked.  If you run out and regiester the term ....send me my royalties.

Cheers

I have a customer with two spellings of their domain name.

I set up an account for spelling A and forwarded all the email boxes to spelling B becuase people tend to remember spelling A more of the time.  Spelling B is the real web site.

I also want any www. traffic for spelling A to go to spelling B so I used this .htaccess file in the root of spelling A

Options +Indexes +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.B.com/$1 [R=301,L]

I use to just forward A to B from the registrar but made this change to allow for email spelled either way.

My question is does this create a duplicate site issue for the bots?  Is this in anyway an SEO negative and if so is there a better way to do this.

Thanks

jw