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If your main concern is page load time, then I'd suggest you look into the @media query for higher resolutions. In fact, if you use sprites, you can recognize via CSS the display and serve different sprites (or images) based on the display resolution. Take a look at the RetinaJS project here: http://retinajs.com/ Hope that helps!

That would be craziest think from me if I would put such kind of statement about responsive design. I newer told that responsive design is dangerous! I told that any technique to hide something that is not visible for humans and is visible for search engines 'could' be read wrongly by Google if not now then some day! I wouldn't risk with my personal business with this. Any possibility for me that could lead to been blacklisted/penalized etc. is strict no no. For me, to hide something in my website is bad and to show two different versions according to 'responsive design'  is something completely different and it is good. For example: One day SEO/BH people will start to utilize this responsive CSS design/technique to manipulate their results in Mobile search. I can guess personally what will happen - Google will tell that they are not longer favor this design or they will 'ask' to tweak and twist it. Or, they can tell that they will favor something else. What will happen with my business!?  - I will be forced to redo all my work and change design,coding etc. If I will have heavily developed platform at that time I will be forced to implement huge amount of work which will cost me thousands and thousands. I would follow only proven values and not follow some trends that are not stable in this field even if that is obvious for now. That was what I meant and that is what I'm saying now. Best, Jungles

A common practice is to provide a page for affiliates to access that has unique content, images, banners, etc for affiliates to use.  This can be anything from descriptions, to blog posts.  Affiliates are pretty busy and appreciate short-cuts, so providing that information to them makes their job easier, and prevents you from the possibility of any duplicate content penalties.

Thats great! The canonical URLs are showing URLs without slash as they are probably reflecting their original URL which is without slash. Hope Google clears them soon..

It all depends on how you code the ajax and what you're looking to get indexed on your site. Vague enough? Check out this guide. The major things you want to make sure of are 1) you're not using ajax when you could be using simple HTML/CSS; 2) that you're not using ajax on things you want to be indexed; and 3) that the ajax doesn't make it look like you're cloaking things from Googlebot.

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.

There are a few possible issues at play. The first thing you might do is look at your URL structure as you are navigating through your categories, products/SKUs. 1. If you are filtering and sorting without the URL structure changing, getting properly indexed will be your challenge.  Noindex vs.canonical is moot in this case. 2. If you are are filtering and sorting and the URL is changing with every parameter change, then you have to worry about duplicate content.  Robots.txt vs. canonical steps into the game and here's an example that I fell illustrates it best.  As you'll see, there are more ways than one and it will come down to which one is most easily done for your specific site while achieving the link structure that you desire. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-block-redirect-or-canonical If you are using AJAX, a good xml sitemap is your lifeblood. Good luck!

yes, you could preserve and possibly increase your rankings. First, Index your valuable resources ( content, urls, metadata,  keyword rankings, etc) that have to be preserved. If you use  Joomla content management system & sh404SEF, you may rewrite URLs and keep them the same as on the current site. Here is an example of site recently migrated without losing its rankings: http://www.alaskaflyfishinggoods.com/new-flies-for-2011/view-all-products.html http://www.alaskaflyfishinggoods.com/

Typically slider content and partially hidden content isn't an issue, just try to use layers in a clever way instead of moving the content way off the page left or right. As Steven mentions: TEST TEST TEST.  You'll want to look at this from both a user experience angle and how well the page does in Google post change.

The link limit is 100 suggested by matt cutts. No it's not The 100 link limit suggestion was removed a while ago, though it's is indeed best not to go wild with it. But the more pages that you link from your home page and back to your home pge the better the home page will rank. This isn't really true either. If that were the case I could just make a site with 1,000,000 pages all linking back to the homepage and expect to rank. Whereas actually the only way I'll get value to flow back up to the homepage is to attract links to these 1,000,000 pages from external sites.

I agree with the other two response - why have 3 sites selling the same product? This problem isn't new though. Many big sites have the same problem where they sell the same product as many of their competitors. You should be fine as long as you make each page different to the others. Amazon got around this by giving users the ability to write reviews of the products, which ensured that each page had unique user generated content on the pages and was therefore useful for Google. If you can, stick to one site.

Nop, not true at all, I ranked a a fairly competitive keyword No.1 with an exact match keyword domain name, we only focused on 2 variations of a keywords and no penalty.

I would always use, as Spencer has stated, .com/blog/ so you do not risk splitting the link juice.

unfortunately, paid links do work, just ask J.C. Penney! you will find more value long term getting organic links and those you build through participation.