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Definitely echo the suggestion about looking into automating feeds. I've got a couple thousand SKUs affected by this as well and I would go nuts if I had to do it manually.

You could leave it blank but Google might reject those products, especially as they've marked the field as 'required':

http://support.google.com/merchants/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1346661

Google is obviously also going to favor the more information rich feeds.

EDIT-

Sorry didn't realize you might not know how to do that. The Google feed is pretty straightforward; you just have to render an XML file from your database. That link I put up above should have the info in it for the spec, it's been forever since I coded mine.

Your ecommerce platform might support it too; for example I think osCommerce, ZenCart, e.g. the popular open source ones, have plugins to render Product Feeds.

This depends on what you're doing and how. Most European countries have a 'nameplate' requirement (at least minimum contact info) for sites that operate as businesses. There is no such formal requirement in the United States that I'm aware of. There is however a perception issue, especially if money is changing hands, that you generally should have a public WHOIS.

This one can have a variety of responses depending on the shopping pattern of the customer. For example I've dealt with similar products in the past (e.g. MAP, commodified) and it would depend on a couple of factors. First of which is to determine, which is better known? The product, or the brand? Which is searched for more?

A quick Google Fight indicates (sorry I know it's old but I love this site):

http://www.googlefight.com/index.php?lang=en_GB&word1=IQAir&word2=%22HealthPro+Plus%22

That there are far more documents with IQAir in them as opposed to 'HealthPro Plus' (this is by no means scientific; I didn't use 'HealthPro' by itself because there's some noise from other products). If you use the Keyword Difficulty Tool you'll see that IQAir has a keyword difficulty rating of 50%, HealthPro 40%, and HealthPro Plus 38%. So this tells us a few things:

1. The competition may be more likely to be targeting the brand since its competition is higher

2. The product specific keywords are 'easier'

Take a grain of salt with these difficulties obviously; if SEOMoz could pinpoint exactly what was easiest and what was hardest they'd be making a lot more money than they are now!

The other thing to examine is how do your customers shop. Are they informed usually, and know they want an IQAir HealthPro Plus air purifier? Or do they start by looking for 'air purifier' or 'allergen reducing air purifier', etc. If the brand has a very strong position then you can safely assume that it's the more relevant keyword to be targeting; if it isn't (e.g. dozens of other people offer the same product) then the general product keyword is. So basically it would go:

1. Brand strongest: (Brandname) (Product Title) (Product Type)

2. Product strongest: (Product Title) (Brand Name) (Product Type)

3. Product Type strongest: (Product Type) (Brand Name) (Product Title)

Obviously the second and third criteria might shift based on their strength/shopping patterns too.

Never used one myself, but Google has apparently genericized it like other domain-hack TLDs:

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/359704/google-approves-co-domain-for-international-use

Theoretically this means it won't be tied to Montenegro local search, which is obviously your largest concern. Whether Google reserves some 'special sauce' for .com/.net/.org as compared to .co/.me/.tv internationally is not known.

Speaking personally I'm not in favor of it but more from an appearance perspective. I've seen a lot of cases where this is abused by smaller operations who aren't taking their customer's overall outbound link profiles into account. We've inherited projects where the previous designer put about 100 words into the META author tag spamming his keywords, and then in addition put at least a paragraph of ALT text on his footer link. The client didn't even know it was there, or what it necessarily meant.

I also think it detracts from the appearance/professionalism of larger clients sites. I think personally I'm moving towards either very subtle and small center-footer links, with the full knowledge of the client, or a paragraph and link on the About US/Partners page. Note this is my opinion on what we're doing and not meant as an indictment of anyone else's practices.

Omri -

I had the same problem. The Moz team upgraded the crawler a few weeks ago and all it took was an email to help@ as Brendan suggests and they eventually forced through a manual crawl which fixed it.

Do you have access to edit the .htaccess file? If so I can see two possible solutions:

1. There could be a wildcard in the .htaccess regex, meaning 'take all domains and then redirect to domain/virtual'. If you could change it to specifically process just your main domain, and not wildcard everything coming in that might work.

2. .htaccess entries are executed in the order they're written, so if you have more specific directives you could put those 'above' whatever is handling the rewrites you're having a problem with. If you use the [L] tag I believe that tells the rule 'okay, stop processing after this one'.

WARNING: If you don't understand it, messing with the .htaccess can mess things up! Especially if you change domain rules and then use the 'L' flag to exit processing, and then it skips directory/file rules further on down!

Also, here's a StackOverflow article about conditional .htaccess rules:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1035953/how-can-i-make-my-htaccess-skip-rules-conditionally

If you're going custom then I agree with Highland, phpBB is pretty okay; it's not as knock your socks off as some of the paid solutions, but what's nice is there's lots of example code out there. Forum software is generally so abstracted that it doesn't matter if there are lots of topics or not, since you can create sub-boards for each major topic. This wikipedia link has a good write up of feature-sets, and then near the bottom are links to comparison articles for PHP and ASP based forums:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Internet_forum_software

Another thing to watch out for is see if someone is trying to snake your design/business model. I know in the past when I would get suspicious traffic like that I would quickly take a spin around elance/odesk/etc. and often find a competitor had posted something like 'make me a site just like (mysite.com) but cheap and scrape all their products so they're already in a database'.

If Bangladesh is nowhere near your customer base I'd do what Ryan suggests as well and block em.

To tell the truth, I'm not sure what you could do here that is

a)useful to sites you actually want to promote and

b)in the best interests of your client.

There really isn't a fit SEO-wise, but it sounds like this is something you enjoy doing for its sake. If you get anything out of it I would just link to a personal site of your own (properly, not bottom of every page kind of thing), maybe list the Geller work there, and build that site up with juice from your ever-increasing stable of celebrity clients.

Note: By SERPs I'm assuming you're referring to Search Results within the site (e.g. a product listing) and not actual Google SERPs.

If so, it sounds like it could be a case for canonical. If the pages are all site.com/search.htm?searchterm=xxxx&page=y&rows=100 kind of thing you could canonical them all back down to search.htm.

If you're not familiar with canonical here's a YouMoz post that explains it pretty well:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/complete-guide-to-rel-canonical-how-to-and-why-not

Based on my experience in the past the canonicalized pages will eventually 'disappear' from the index (not really, but Google doesn't display them anymore) in time. They would also eventually fall out already with what you've done in regards to noindex no follow etc., but I've found it takes longer.

From what I can tell SEO-wise they're basically the same, and they may not have any benefit at all. This is gut feel (since Google doesn't exactly publish this stuff) but strong/bold might be comparable to H5 1/2 or something like that relevance-wise.

Where it gets interesting though is semantics. STRONG implies emphasis, where BOLD is a formatting choice. From what I've been reading some semantic aware systems would give STRONG priority, whereas they would treat BOLD the same as Font-color=Blue, or some other non-semantic signal. Because of this Strong is interpreted differently in some specialist systems (e.g. readers for the blind, certain mobile browsers), but that becomes more a client side concern than an SEO one.

From a standards perspective there's some discussion saying that in the XHTML 2.0 spec Bold is actually being deprecated in favor of Strong:

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/archive/index.php/t-257310.html

Given all of that, my guess is Strong may have some weight, but not enough to be a critical factor that's going to put you 'over the top' in any meaningful way. I also don't think it hurts unless abused, and again that would only be for semantic-aware clients like visual readers and so on.

Argh, sorry for the delay I wrote up a great response but the Moz system ate it and then I was in client meetings. I'll try to summarize it from memory.

It sounds like you want to know if WordPress is worth replacing DW with. From what I can see you've got 3 choices:

1. Do it all manually in DW as you are now. Pros: Familiarity, total control. Cons: Time of maintenance, time of creation. Also less functionality for moderation, comments, etc.

2. Do normal site in DW, blog in WP. Pros: WP will automate posting dates, categorization, comments, trackbacks. Cons: You have to learn WP. You have make a WP template in DW that matches your current site. Two systems to maintain.

3. Convert entire site to WP. Pros: All in one solution. WP will probably help automate mundane site tasks you do manually now. Cons: Loss of total control, WP run-up learning time, WP template creation time, possible SEO implications if sitemap/linking structure changes (positively or negatively)

If you know you're in this for the long haul, and the blog is going to be fairly active I'd suggest #2, with an eye to going to #3 when you're comfortable, or deciding on something else if you decide you hate WP. WP is very easy to maintain and create content for, but it's not a fit for everyone (see my final note). The hybrid approach of #2 lets you get familiar with WP, make a template for it, and see how Google indexes content published in it, without having to commit to having your entire site on it like #3.

Final note: Speaking personally I'm not super comfortable with WordPress because it feels like every 3 months or so there's an exploit that hits nearly everyone. I've worked with it and maintain current installs, but that's always at the back of my mind when considering it for a new project.

It's kind of an apples to oranges thing; Dream Weaver is an authoring tool that has a lot of CMS like extensions. WordPress is a full on CMS that makes authoring very easy. I'll restrict my comments to SEO and general practicability:

The main difference really is going to be that with Dream Weaver you theoretically have total control over every page you make. If you want to edit page (x) way down in the sub-hierarchy to have meta keywords/canonical you can do that very easily. Want to make a unique page totally outside the template? You can do that too. The downside is that it's mostly manual and you spend more time on development.

WordPress automates many of the publication/management processes but loses the granularity Dream Weaver is capable of. It's possible to hand-tweak specific WordPress pages/properties, but it's not easy (nor feels as easy!) as just opening up the file and editing it. I'm saying this as someone who still handcodes HTML in Notepad sometimes, so your mileage may vary.

I think in the end it depends on what you want the system to accomplish. If your page and content turnover is low either will probably suit your needs. If you feel you need that granularity Dream Weaver. If you want to spend less time managing the site WordPress.

Brett -

You've probably already down the road on this but just thought I'd chime in, that most of the review services (e.g. PowerReviews/Buzzilions/etc.) are really geared toward ecommerce. I know for a fact that they help conversion on products based on past experience, but they're not really appropriate for realtors. The fact you're in Canada is unfortunately even worse, since Canada of course often gets the short end of the traffic stick for this kind of thing. There's www.rate-my-agent.com but to be frank, it looks pretty unappealing (you're not there, don't worry!). Even ResellerRatings doesn't really have a realtor section.

One could argue that this is a crisistunity, and that all it'll take is someone like you to make a great, social media enabled, non-scummy review site, but based on my past experience Real Estate is one of the shark tanks of SEO. This might be something worth kicking back to RE/Max and seeing if they want to manage it, but I doubt they'll bite on it (what if there's a bad review?). It also might take an outsider to do it, since as a Realtor you may not be considered a trustworthy source.

Only thing I can think of is have a testimonials page and give it some link juice from your other pages. Then at least it'll show up for 'brett cairns reviews' and 'brett cairns testimonials' etc. Maybe if your customers have websites (if you do commercial business) get them to link to you perhaps. It's sad really that the real estate industry as a whole has invested a lot of money into SEO/internet marketing but there still aren't really any 'killer apps' that service it.

Depending on the longevity of the outage, I would say no, that you're using 302 appropriately. In fact I'm trying to think what else you could do that's better, and really can't come up with much (url rewrite so the end user isn't confused by app.mysite.com versus www? and that's reaching). If the outage is short term (e.g. less then 24-48 hours) I really can't think of a better solution than 302. Google dislikes it when you flip 301s off and on at the drop of a hat obviously.

Based on what I've seen of how other penny auction sites work the spammy links probably aren't even going to hurt you. Being lumped into the penny auction category probably will, but that's another matter. Check out the backlink profile on domains like Zeekler, QuiBids,zBiddy, etc. and you'll probably see far worse. The majority of these operations make their cash through affiliate signups, which means a lot of relatively low value affiliate links as well (Zeekler especially has Google bombed every 'Zeekler + phrase' search result). You could probably stand out by doing 'good old fashioned seo' on it, I think Bidz.com is trying to go this route and they're one of the bigs.

Personal opinion here, not criticizing you: I think the penny is going to drop on these penny auction sites soon. The FTC hasn't said they're legal, hasn't said they're illegal, just that they're not covered by current laws, and the legislation may soon change to take care of that.

Speaking personally (not technically or SEO-ly) I'm not a fan of these pages. I'm the kind of guy who looks at the scrollbar to estimate how long a page is, how far through I am, etc, and when it suddenly lengthens it undermines that certainty. This is merely opinion mind you, but in my experience ecommerce users on average aren't necessarily the savviest when it comes to technology in the first place so doing something like subverting their interface expectations might not be the best move.

Another thing that bugs me about these pages, especially for something like categoric listings, is that it's hard to tell exactly how many things are listed. If I'm on page 5 out of 7 I know there's only two more pages of purses to look at and then I have to decide. With this sort of thing it just keeps going. I've also seen some implementations that just repeat the products as soon as you've gotten to the end, and that's even worse. What I find is that most online shoppers want to see everything in the list, but with that kind of structure they might never feel that.

Again, this is just 'gut feel'/opinion based and not anything specific or technical that I'm arguing against.

SEO Wise I don't think there's any issues, though I wonder what resolution the Googlebot reports itself as having. It's important though that you do it the way Chas Blackford states; if you have actual server side code that changes a bunch of things around based on resolution then you might get in trouble. This is an interesting article about using stylesheets to segment mobile layouts (it also mentions Media Queries which are kind smart/new phone specific):

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/return-of-the-mobile-stylesheet

There are some implementation issues, the most important of which is reliably getting the resolution from the agent. Essentially, you can't guarantee it 100% of the time. From what I've read a combination of user agent string matching and resolution detection can probably get you most of the way though.

EGOL -

I thumbed myself since I felt I didn't really answer the question, e.g. gave him a concrete plan of action.