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If you use your website content on ebay verbatim.  Then you might have a duplicate content problem that could result in your site being filtered from Google's search results. If you author content on ebay for the same topic that appears on your website be prepared to see ebay.com above you in the search results.  It is very hard to beat ebay, it is awfully hard to beat them.  Did I say that ebay is hard to beat? Linking from your ebay pages to other domains is against ebay rules in most situations.  If you are trying to refer buyers to your website ebay will take action against you. When I sold on ebay, links from their auction and store pages were not allowed unless that link was to a reference only page that did not attempt to refer the visitor to another page.  The rule is probably the same now but you should read their rules to be sure. You are allowed to link to a website in a few situations.  One is from your "about us" pages.  Links out of ebay are OK there.

Hello, Maybe a bit late, but maybe for other people who needs a good search technology. We used the sphinx search technology before but we still needed a better solution, we found: http://www.magentocommerce.com/magento-connect/blast-lucene-search.html with the Lucene search technology. It works really great with a 'did you mean?' function integrated.

If I had products like that I would have multiple articles about each product.  These articles would cover every possible, probable, detail, benefit, aspect, question, concern, etc. that a customer might have about these products. I do that for products that sell for under $100 and all of that content on all of those pages gives me an excellent chance of pulling in traffic on almost every primary, secondary, and long tail keyword in my niche. It also makes my site stand out as the place for information and the people who know what they are talking about.  So, even if I don't beat them on rankings, I beat then on exhibited knowledge.  For items under $100 that delivers a lot of sales - even if my prices are not the lowest.  I get lots of links from forums where people are talking about these products and they link to my information pages as a way of answering questions and settling arguments. I believe that this comprehensive content approach is very helpful for my rankings, pulls in the long tail traffic and convinces customers for whom trust is important. It is very expensive and time-consuming to build this type of attack but in my opinion, it paid before panda and penguin and is paying even better now as I see competitors dropping from the SERPs.

As an add-on, I would really suggest you to implement the rel="alternate" hreflang="x-X" tags in your sitemaps.xml in order to better your international SEO efforts and geotargeting. Check this official post by Google

Yes it will be eCommerce. We want people to come to that page or the parent category page to find what they need and either request a quote or purchase online. Can you explain long tailed search as i am not to familiar with that.

I believe the 'Did you mean' results are triggered by common misspellings, I don't think it would be feasible to manipulate it to correct the spelling of a small business name.

Hi hfranz, Totally frustrating to find pages like that, isn't it? If I read your response right, you can't find where those rogue "Page" pages are being linked to from, so you can't fix the problem? You could try and give it a crawl with Xenu (http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html). It should be able to tell you which pages are linking to the rogues. Once the crawl has run (tell it you don't need a report) right click on the links you want to dig into, and select "URL Properties". At the bottom of the window that pops up, it will say "# Pages Linking To This One" and give you a list of the URLs that link to that page. e.g. find www.example.com/blog/page/13/ on the results, right click > URL Properties and then look for the pages that link to it. If you're having trouble seeing the link visually, then view source and ctrl+F (or the Mac equivalent) to find it. It's a place to start tracking down the problems, at least. Someone more familiar with Yoast will have to chime in on how to fix it (if it's a Yoast problem) but you could always just remove the links to the rogue pages, since they don't sound critical. Hope this helps!

Yes, a visit to example.com/dir should now return a 404 error (if you haven't done any redirecting/canonicalizing). This will increase your 404 count in Web Master tools but it's far preferable to the alternative. If you're not redirecting the robots.txt will eventually work and hopefully the links will just fall out of WMT.

I don't recommend doing that, Google can see it as a black hat trick. Black Hat SEOs have been doing 301 from good ranking articles on blogs as well as 301 domains in order to boost their rankings. Are the domains you want to forward to your main site brand new (meaning you bought them the first time, not a domain that you bought after someone else had dropped it)  i ask this because if the domain has been dropped by someone else before you bought it, it could potentially have some links pointing to it that might now be from the most reputable sources and it would be EXTREMELY hard for you to know that you were penalized for a bad link to that domain since all links to the parked domain would show up as one link coming into your main site from the parked domain. read this to get a better idea of what i mean, http://blog.majesticseo.com/training/unnatural-links-investigations/ hope it helps

Hi Hfranz, I took a look at your campaign and was unable to duplicate the errors, which leads me to believe it was a blip in the crawling. I'm speculating here, but my suspicion is that there was a miscommunication between your web server and the SEOmoz crawler, the end result being the crawler got sent on a wrong crawl path, and your server kept delivering the bad URLs. Hopefully, things will return to normal after the next crawl. If not, feel free to contact the help team at help@seomoz.org. You can also double check with Google Webmaster Tools, to see if there has been an increase in crawl errors or html suggestions. Finally, your web server should be configured to deliver a 404 for these URLs that don't exist (www.example.com/testing.php/helloworld) Unfortunately, I can't tell you exactly how to do this, and you may need to find a developer with expertise in this area - but my guess is very little, or no, damage has been done.

Over optimizing is having an [Exact keyword] all over a page. If you url is http://url.keyword If your title is - keyword H1- Keyword decription - keyword body - keyword... most people who overstuff will add a ton of words just so they can include there keywords many times. 1 keyword per 100 words is a good number to go by... so they add 10000 words and 100o keywords image - keyword footer - keyword When everything on the page is designed for a bot the bot will know. The best practice to avoid over opting is to include your [Exact] key in some places where it would make sense. To avoid over optimizing use broad for some keywords and exact for some.. Mix it up and focus on where things will be best suitable for your users.

That's a great question! The thing is, there are websites that naturally have high bounce rates and low avg. visit duration time. One example is Wikipedia: people google "what year did  Titanic sink", get their answer and quit without visiting other pages. Can we say that high bounce rate or low avg. visit duration time negatively affects Wikipedia's rankings? No way! I think the algorithm Google applies is more complex. The search engine might stereotype the web and assume that in case of insurance websites, for example, visit duration >N and bounce rate

Greetings Champions! There really isn't any type of SEO training in all honesty. I read a post some time ago that to be a great SEO one has to want to be better. Justin Briggs uses the term "hustle" alot, and he often talks about being motivated with his work and that is the source of his skill. You have to have the curiosity to learn and dig for the information. Visit SEOMoz daily and read the blog posts, watch the WBF's go on Google and do your own experiments and see how the search engine works and before you know it, you will begin to understand how it all works. Good luck with your training and your quest for page 1! Justin Smith

Based on the site names, my impression is the links offer no value. I looked at the first site and it is a free directory. I looked at the last site and it seems to be a below average blog. These links are unlikely to add any value to your site. On the negative side, these links will increase your DA giving you the impression they have value, and it makes any link analysis of your site more difficult because you need to sort through all these extra links. A couple link tests you can perform to consider their value: Ask yourself what if Google did not exist. Would the link have any value? Will this link offer any direct traffic at all? Can anyone get this link? If a competitor looks at your site and sees you have a link from coukdirectory.com, and then they can acquire the same link in 5 minutes, the link likely has no value at all. The links you want are the ones which need to be earned. When you read a great SEOmoz article about a SEO topic and then you tweet it, share it or link to it THAT is the type of link which has value.

That's a great question.  I have wondered the same thing for so long, as I have been working on the SEO of our soccer equipment store at www.soccerstop.com for several years.  One thing I have noticed is that it takes time.  When I optimize or focus our backlink network to particular keywords it takes affect for the different search engines at different times, but eventually it seems to get to all of them.  It's so easy to want to keep making changes because you may see a result in one and not the other.  Then from the changes you don't know what's working or not working because the first set of changes hasn't taken affect in one or more of the search engines.  I have felt that you have to come up with a plan and make those changes as you see necessary, and then give it some time to take affect. Thanks James

Hey here is an example of a Magento site where all pages (even statics like About-us) have been moved to the flat .html extension (example: http://www.topdjgear.com/about-topdjgear.html/) In my opinion it is best to present a uniform URL structure sitewide and generally flat HTML files are a good thing although I also have worked on very successful eCommerce sites that used no file extension. It is relatively easy in Magento to mod you static page to include the file extension, so in terms of lowest barrier, this is the route I would go.