Walid,

I've never seen the markup on a subcategory page. All the documentation I'm aware of suggests they only want to see one product per page with markup, so a subcategory page wouldn't work. It might be possible to add the markup to whatever product information exists on the subcategory page and specify the product URL of product instead of the subcategory page's URL. But I'm not sure if any search engines would accept this or if there is any advantage to doing this versus having the markup on the product page. If you go this route, I'd be interested to hear how effective it was.

I'm not allowed to discuss what we actually do at Overstock, but semantic markup is viewable in the source code.

I'd agree with EGOL's suggestions for improving CTR.

As far as expected CTR for position 5 in the organic results, the average is around 1-2% CTR. This is going to vary depending on the quality of the other results (your CTR will be inversely related to the quality of the other results). You will also have to consider what verticals Google is pulling into the SERP. Your CTR might be worse than average if shopping results are showing above your listing.

You might also want to question the reliability of GWT impression and entrance data for the sake of testing CTR. In my experience the data they provide isn't accurate enough to come to a conclusion on the success of CTR tests.

These are called sitelinks and Google derives them from your site navigation. From Google Webmaster Tools Help:

"The links shown below some sites in our search results, called sitelinks, are meant to help users navigate your site. Our systems analyze the link structure of your site to find shortcuts that will save users time and allow them to quickly find the information they're looking for."

Changing the URL as you've done should help, but if it is still a search results page, Google won't want to show it, even though they don't put a lot into identifying internal search landing pages. So you should be fine with what you've done. If you feel these pages are really helpful and you'd like to land users on them, an improvement might be to create navigation to http://www.mysite.com/travelguide/attraction-guide.html and similar pages and redirect internal searches for relevant keywords to that page. This way the page is more than a search results page.

The biggest benefit you'll see with the implementation of micro formats is an increase in CTR.

As for a rankings boost, there isn't anything solid to support it, but it is very possible that search engines already use this as a ranking factor. I believe Rand has indicated that micro formats could be used as a "brand signal" and Best Buy indicated significant rankings improvement after that implemented GoodRelations markup (ecommerce RDFa).

Is there anything keeping you from putting the ISI content in an iframe? Search engines don't identify the content in the iframe as part of the page.

I don't have experience redirecting entire sites to other sites, but when it comes to 301 redirects you want to avoid redirect chains (abc.com redirects to def.com redirects to ghi.com, etc.). This is a pattern too common among malicious sites, so search engines will tend to see it as a negative signal. Avoid this while still passing as much link juice as possible by editing the redirect on abc.com to send traffic directly to ghi.com.

Might want to check out Bazaarvoice's Ask and Answer product. I haven't used this product but they are a pretty solid company to work with.

Mike,

Don't over-think your linking strategy. Link your informational content to your product page, since that is how you would want to drive traffic anyway. You don't want orphan pages that don't have any internal links pointing to them, but you want most of your links pointing towards your most important pages (the pages that convert traffic).

Best practice is a single

per page and using CSS to style.

Yes and no.

I imagine search engines don't consider your ranking for other keywords (fruit salad) when calculating the ranking for other keywords (tropical fruit salad london), but it would be difficult and unwise to optimize your site for a head term in a way that wouldn't help keyword variations.

Good optimization for a head term will mostly involve content and optimization that benefits a range of long-tail terms related to your target keyword.

I hope that helps.

You might still see the red-shoes URL for a brief period of time, but it will eventually disappear from the rankings. While the brown-boots page will receive most of the link juice from the 301, on-page ranking factors will diminish this page's ability to rank for "red shoes". This is one of the reasons, you want your 301 redirects to be to a page that delivers similar content. This redirect should help you rank for terms that are targeted in the on-page content of the brown-boots page by increasing the link juice passed but the anchor text might not always be relevant.

I think it's fine to focus on a few/your most important pages, but I would take the time to make sure the internal linking/navigation is optimized for the entire/majority of the site. Letting bots crawl all your pages is the first step. Then focus optimization where you get get the most return.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with that, as long as I'm understanding your situation. There is not a big difference to search engines whether you pages are HTML or XHTML. Running them through a validator is a good idea though.

http://validator.w3.org/

Go into webmaster tools > Diagnostics> Fetch as Googlebot. Enter the URL for the page you want crawled.

If you are worried about the category pages having duplicate content, that shouldn't be a big concern as most of the content should be unique from one page versus any other page. Some content is almost always going to be repeated to some extent on a website. You need to make sure there is enough unique content on the page to differentiate it as The page on your site about that keyword. Having multiple navigation paths to the same product is going to increase conversion as it makes it easier for customers to find what they want, so I would not shy away from that.

I believe the problem is how you serve the product page for products that are cross-listed. I don't know how your product pages are created, but you won't want more than one URL for any one product.If you use breadcrumbs, you'll have to choose which set of breadcrumbs you want your users to see, even if they came to the page via a different path. If any other content is dynamically created based on the category it is listed in, you'll have to make sure that the one page you serve adequately fulfills what the customer would expect to see based on other experiences with your site.

Sorry I didn't make that a little clearer. But, yes, it sounds like you understand. Only serve one product page. List the product page in whatever categories seem appropriate.

As to which page to serve, I actually like the URL www.site.com/home-gym-equipment/body-solid-g9s.html as it provides additional keywords as opposed to just repeating keywords. But if Body Solid is a popular enough brand where lots of people shop specifically for that brand, then you might want to go with www.site.com/body-solid/body-solid-g9s.html.