Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Oh, and I assume you have created 404 page within your website .. if not you should do that also to handle the genuine errors, be user of you

You should redirect the page you removed to another page within your website.

Have a look at this video from Matt Cutts (he is the guy who knows ), he explains it better than I would

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=hy3_Rjc0Tso

Regards

John

Yes, it helps them get crawled quicker.

Its like telling them, please go here and find this URL ,as opposed to sitting around doing nothing about it and crying weeks later wondering why your website has not been found yet

I see you edited your post after my response

See Brads answer now

Oh sorry

As Jesse says, that's surprising to hear ...

http://www.seomoz.org/article/recommended

Sorry, I meant of course a subdomian as opposed to a sub directory ... In theory I do not see why it would be an issue to create your new store within the subdomain, I can see why in a subdirectory (with OC)

We use a lot of solutions, as web agency we use what fits the clients, I am assuming you are going down the Open Cart cause the platform itself is open source. e-Commerce off the shelf solutions can be quite expensive ,and a lot of the main ones as expensive as they are ,also insist on hosting with them, which is not what you need.

It really depends on what you want for an e-Commerce solution, do you need the big inventory backend, do you need a CMS.

Foxycart is a brilliant e-Commece solution we use as much as possible ,we use Perch as the CMS if the client needs one. Its so flexible from a design perspective ... and although not free ,is very cost effective compared to some solutions

But it really is horses for course, one mans foe is another mans enemy.

Though we have worked with WP and Woo-commerce ,we have one or two clients still using this platform, and to be honest it works great, considering its all open source, granted modules can cost, but its relativity cost effective to some of the more known solutions, and in my opinion WP is a much more stable platform that OC.

But everything I say up above is debatable ,plenty of people use OC and love it (or at at least tolerate it )

Good luck with your project

I've worked with OC before, its a nightmare at the best of times, I do know there is some issue with the URL rewrite across mulitstores, well I have read of it at least.

Have you considered an add on domain instead

Yes, Goggle will see these as duplicate content, and all your sites be effected by this. Parked domains are a big no no.

I would suggest you set up redirect for all the othe r7 domains to the main domain you want to use, Google advises this and well it makes perfect sense also.

You can actually do this from c-Panel as per your screen shot, or you could use your .htaccess to do this

Regards

John

If you are getting some link juice form the blog, I wouldn't take it down, not in the short term for sure

Can you not start the new blog from a blank canvas, I appreciate you have 18 entries in your current blog, but in the greater scheme its not that much.

You could of course create new similar articles within your new blog, and then eventually redirect your old blog to the new one, that way you retain most of your link juice.

Defiantly do not copy the text ,even if you are taking the pages of the first blog down, just because you remove something from a web server, it does not mean the page is still not indexed, it might be a while before the robots come looking again.

Really I would suggest create the new blog and start from their, as you add similar posts to the new blog as is on the old one, redirect the old post to the new blog.

If you feel you are getting no benefit from the old blog, of course you can reomve it, but I would'nt just copy and past the data to the new blog until you knew it was unindexed, you could use copyscape to verify within a few days because even requesting Google to unindex can take weeks to happen

Regards

John

Its reporting that your Title and Description within your Meta tags are duplicated

And its right ,they are

Title Tag - Online Invoicing Software,UK Small Business

Description Tag  - Learn more about Online Invoicing, managing and collecting payments with the Invoice Studio blog as well as keep up to date on all the latest UK small business news

You should make all these unique to the content on the page

Ask for the site to remove links, if they don't ,you have to use the Disavow tool and ask Google to remove them

If you mean the meta title, then I wouldn't think so, its not really repetitive, rather uniformity.

Myself, I would rather add a more specific keyword to the beginning of a page title, as it helps with CTR and ranking. I always feel these generic page titles does nothing bit hinder ranking for people who use them.

For example, to me

Shoes by Armain at Shoes World ,shop today

Is better than

Shop Shoes | Armani

Obviously you could optimize the text better yourself, but hopefully you get my drift

Regards

John

The store we are currently working on are actually two seperate sites ... .co.uk and .ie , actually they aren't even on the same server , I am of the believe if you are trying to rank in the .co.uk, use a server based in the UK and vice verse (I must add this is more opinion that substantiated evidence )

Lots of stores do though use subdomains, actually I would suggest that this is more  common than the approach we are talking about, for client reasons we actually created two separate domains.

We have though found it a lot easier targeting two local search results using two separate domains than we have in the past using subdomains ...

If you do go down the root of using www.domain.com/fr, you will in theory, have one website trying to target two different languages, and to be honest, I have never ever worked in that situation ,so hopefully someone with experience there can offer you some advise, thankfully we have only ever worked with English.

3 months ago I would have probably thought going with the subdomin would be the best fit, but from our recent experiences of creating two separate domains of late, I might think that would be a better fit (but once again ,its merely an opinion, there may not be no right of wrong answer here)

Hopefully someone who has worked with two international languages might advise, I mean without stating the obvious, anyone worth their salt in coding can create a  script that will translate your current website into a number of languages, Google has one built in as you probably know.

But the problem there might be if you have optimised your website already to rank within google.es, and then have to adjust your website to target google.fr

I appreciate a lot of the advise here is subjective, buit its hard to offer definitive advice when I have not actually been in your position, or not sue how you are set up at the moment, but at worse it will get your brain working

Regards

John

Content is always an issue when you come to online stores in particular ... We have not worked with Alcohol related stores, but on numerous occasions with Jewellery stores ... and have had the same issues with content being firstly:

Minimal, descriptions of products contain little or no information.

Repetitive - One product can be pretty much the same as the other product.

The way we have tried to address this and been relatively successful, is by not actually trying to rank each and every product, but rather the product category,our client did not necessarily want to rank for a specific piece, rather though the term "wedding Jewellery", or "Pearl Pendant" ...

We then obviously created a section in each website, with proper structure and informal information about each product category, and from there linked to the product page or indeed each product.

I assume you could take the same approach .... by creating product informal pages ,talking about how the gin was distilled etc etc, I am a great believer it doesn't matter how you rank the clients term, its getting the person looking for the product to the clients website, and from there having a well structured navigation path for them to easily and accessibly get to the product to purchase them.

So yes, I would use blogs, I would use any tool available to you to enhance e-Commerce stores cause they are notoriously lacking good content for you to work with.

I would also suggest you use rich snippets ....

I assume you are going to translate the website (as French folk speak French ,not Spanish  ,is it a new website you are doing for the French market ,is your current website set up to target Google locally ...

We are currently working with a client who has two stores, almost identical in content, that targets specifically the Irish and UK markets .. This was a huge problem initially for us, but we got around it by structuring the pages differently ,trying to make unique content for each almost identical page. I got advise of someone on here to make sure the URL for each page was different, which is helping a lot, using rel can ....

Kind of easier to offer specific advise if we know if you plan to use the same website to target France, or is it a new website

Oh, as for using social., Every other drink manufacturer in the world use all social engines, there may be guidelines you have to adhere to ....But you can use it ... mind ya, I am a rugby fan ,and I know from rugby France is very strict on alcohol advertising, marketing

Hope that helps a little and good luck

Regards

John

Title tag is very important, and should reflect the content of what is in your page.

I would always make these as descriptive as possible  and try to add the main key phrase as near as possible to the front of the tag.

I would never ever add a URL to the title tag, you are trying I assume to rank for a phrase as opposed to getting a URL ranked of you see what I mean, so no, I would not advice adding a URL to the title tag as it is taking up space ... Of course if the word Alcohol Rehab are important to your ranking  by all means use a descriptive tag containing those words in your title tag.

Yes, add meta tag description to all pages, and try and make them as descriptive as possible  they wont help in ranking a phrase, but if your results show up in the SERP for a phrase, a good description can help  potential visitors to your site gain some more information.

A lot of snippets under your URL in the SERP contain your description TAG, and well you want to insure your showcase and inform about your page.

Hope that helps

Regards

John

Could be lots of reasons from my own experience, if your site has not been penalized, which I am sure you would know and have not said ... I would start looking at content:

Are you pages optimized enough, or indeed over optimized.

Have competitors naturally pushed your results further down the SERP.

Do you monitor your backlinks, have some of these been removed from affiliates.

Is your content optimised for mobile, more and more people are using mobile devices to browse.

That is where I would start at least and see if you can get any answers there

Regards

John

Actually Martin ,sorry, I misread your reply and should not be questioning your logic in this case

I would also have a look at Rich Snippets, that way the one you intend to trying to rank can be displayed in the results as you would like

We have used them for lots of videos for clients and got great success optimisting the results we are looking for

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=162163&topic=1088474&ctx=topic

Hi Thomas,

Thats great to know, and might make our life a lot easier in the future.

Thanks

John