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So I'm trying to quantify some of our drops and I suspect that we've taken some hits on lower quality links (some reciprocals, etc). The problem is most of the metrics I've relied on to help weed out the bad ones seem irrelevant after Panda. So I'm curious, has anyone taken mozRank to task after Panda? Is it still a good metric on valuable links?

I use a CDN and have never seen any impact on my SEO. As long as your HTML is served off your domain you're fine.

If you're using AWS Cloudfront you can set up a CNAME so that your content comes from, say, images.mydomain.com instead of xyz.cdn.com. Helps obscure it from visitors and looks a bit neater.

There's a meta tag you can place on your duplicate content called canonical. It lets you dictate which of the duplicate content gets indexed. You can find out more info in the link below

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/canonical-url-tag-the-most-important-advancement-in-seo-practices-since-sitemaps

I used GC for I think 4 years. I never saw its use exceed 1% but it was solidly #3 behind credit card and Paypal. Then again, after those 3, how many other payment systems can people name?

So why did we drop it? First, it's convoluted. People leave your site and never return. Google sends you a series of XML callbacks when someone pays. They have really good documentation, tho (second only to Paypal, IMO). Debugging is screwy because it's all callbacks as well.

Second, GC has no phone support. Support is only available via email or their forum and it's not easy to come by. We had an odd circumstance where someone filed a chargeback and Google granted it (more on that in a sec). We contacted the customer and they reversed the charges but the money got "stuck". GC considered the case closed and yet Google had our money. Took 4 months to get resolved (a lot of work for not a lot of money). By contrast, I can call Paypal 24/7 with issues.

Third, you play by Google's rules or else. GC mandates you ship all items over $250 with signature confirmation. If you don't, the customer can file a chargeback and automatically win (no I am not kidding). The GC chargeback system appears to be automated in this regard. GC won't even contact you beforehand, they'll just grant it and notify you you're out the money.

Last, they destroyed their only value when they moved to Paypal's graduated fee schedule (was 2% + $0.20, now it scales from 2.2% to 2.9% depending on volume). GC is still free (Paypal charges $30/mo for the same service) but for the hassle you go through it wasn't worth it to us. That, and they used to give Adwords credit once upon a time.

Paypal is no cake walk, but at least there are live humans to interact with when there's a problem. If you need a second payment system go with Paypal Express Checkout (I had at least 5x the use vs GC). I've not tried Amazon Payments yet, but they seem promising as well. I've gotten the distinct impression that GC is a forgotten project (Google has moved onto a mobile payments platform, which has caused drama because they hired Paypal devs to build it)

I dunno about 10 steps (I hate lists that try to make some round number) but my steps would be

1. Who do you want to visit your site? Clearly women in this case, but what kind of women?
2. What do you want your visitors to do on your site? Buy? Read? Participate?
3. Identify your keywords that your audience is using. Look at similar sites and do several searches. Use keyword research tools like the Adwords traffic estimator to help narrow down words.
4. Build your content, focusing on your keywords. You need content that people want, not some formulaic mess that sounds like it was written by a content farm. Read your own content. Would you want to read your site? You need to be on topic and relevant.
5. Spread the news. Without spamming, suggest your site in places where it makes sense. Don't worry about SEO, you just want traffic. Don't just suggest your main page, but suggest deeper content (i.e. "Here's an article I wrote you might find helpful in doing this"). Blogs and forums can be good places to start, but be careful ,lest you start sounding like spam.
6. Consider advertising. Initially, your site needs to be found and advertising can bring people in. If you've done steps 1-5 well enough, your site should start drawing in links naturally as people begin to suggest you socially (blog links, social links, Google +1, etc).

Keep in mind that it sounds like you're bloating your index. If anything about your URL is different (even one character) then spiders see that as a new page entirely. Even if you used canonical tags to reduce your index down to just single pages, you're still going to have bots spider all your pages to realize that you don't need that many indexed.

Did you look at the specific crawl errors in seomoz or are these in Google Webmaster?

I know what the trust seal is (and most often it's accompanied by an SSL certificate signed by Verisign). But if you took a poll of people and asked them who Verisign is, I bet the majority wouldn't have a clue. Thus I don't pay for their seal (which I could have gotten with an SSL certificate). This is the only real difference in their costs.

Remember, the trust seal only shows up if you're running AVG antivirus in your browser

If your average user even knows who Verisign is I'd be amazed. I have an EV SSL certificate through Godaddy (who is more well known, but for other reasons) and I've not seen any indication that anyone even knows the difference. I've even found many users don't even know what the green bar in the browser means (and Safari doesn't help by making just the protocol text green).

As far as Google goes, I can't say Google does anything significant with SSL, let alone care who your SSL is with.

Google does try to spider Flash (or it did a few years ago) but it's not very optimal. What it does is look for text within the Flash file and pulls that out. The problem is, it ignores program code and lumps ALL text together. So if you have several pages of text in your Flash, you could wind up with one bulk content page instead of several content pages (which is bad SEO in general, let alone for end users)

Google doesn't execute code or read images. If you want to make sure Google indexes your content properly, offer an HTML only version.

The short answer

The character ! is added only for Google purposes, this notation is a Google "standard" for crawling web sites intensive on AJAX (in the extreme Single Page Interface web sites). When Google's crawler finds an URL with #! it knows that an alternative conventional URL exists providing the same page "state" but in this case on load time.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3009380/whats-the-shebang-hashbang-in-facebook-and-new-twitter-urls-for

Google will cache whatever you serve up. So if your page serves up random text, Google will cache random text.

Have you tried to add the file back in with a NOINDEX command?

The correct answer is

"It's worth the paper it's printed on"

Good idea nonetheless!

A subdomain is considered a separate website. This is why it is considered good SEO to pick between domain.com and www.domain.com and 301 one to the other (most pick www). This means that your new subdomain might as well be a new domain entirely. You'll have to do a new campaign.

As far as seomoz goes, I am not sure why they would aggregate it like that. Would probably need to ask the staff if it's a bug

The only solution I can think of is to use an htaccess file to determine if you're using SSL or not and then feed up a special robots.txt to disallow crawling for the SSL site.

If you're using Firefox, go get the Domain Details addon

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/domain-details/

Then go surf to your site and it should tell you (based on the headers) what kind of server you're running (for instance, seomoz is running Apache 2.2.14)

The most common solution is using htaccess, which can determine at the server level which version to show and 301 all traffic there. Not all web servers support this, though (which is why Kyle asked the question). IIS7+ can support it, as can the most popular open source ones (nginx, lighthttpd, Apache).

Here's an article on how it works

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/rewriterule-split-personality-explained

Here is the reason I'm entertaining this idea.

Each page needs some sort of relevant content within. Most resort to writing a small paragraph or two on the products they have listed within the page, and will use filler words and search terms to improve SEO.

My problem with this:

So you write a paragraph containing 150 words, yet only 10 of them are search terms for the actual products on the page. The remaining 140 words then appears to simply clutter and/or reduce the value of the words you were trying to optimize for the page.

And to counter the problem I am suggesting avoid writing a bogus paragraph as filler content and drop an array in at the footer with all the products title to multiply the number of times relevant words are used within the page.

So, pointless content with minimum search keywords or product title array's? We just don't know if we could get penalized in the eyes of Google. That's the last thing anyone wants to happen.

Thanks!

Great advice and I fully agree with you that its really pointless and creates nonsense on the page to the human customer. The main concern I have is getting penalized by crawlers for duplicating the title a second time on the page.

I have been debating this with a few others within my office and we would like an outside opinion on this issue.

This screenshot is of a new product grid I have been designing. I have decided to try something new for SEO that I have seen elsewhere. (see attached image)

The page-content below the last products on the page, now have a small paragraph that contains all the products "titles" that are visible on the page. The intention is to capitalize on multiple search terms by using modifiers to replace special character sets within the title.

For example:

46" 3 Seat Perforated Square Picnic Table = 46 Inch 3 Seat Perforated Square Picnic Table

Not only does this give a secondary search term that could convert but increases the number if instances of "Table" within the page.

Suggestions or Thoughts?

Thanks!

GviGn.jpg

I can control it (it's a custom piece of software) but it's not as easy a fix as adding a meta to the template.

The main problem is we have a junk TLD we use to test some new ideas off the live server (lets clients give us feedback) but it gets spidered and indexed and starts ranking for client sites before they're ready to live in their own TLD. This means we have to compete against ourselves (even with a 301). There's nothing sensitive or it would live behind a password.

When you say "image heavy" define that. How many images are on a page? If you had, say, 100 images on a page and added alt text to all of them, it could be seen as spammy.