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And do you have Google+ account with verified authorship? You need to do that and add the sites you've published to, then add your rel="author" to your name.

Hi Dimitrios,

Sorry for the confusion. There is in fact a safe way to go about this. Since your site is currently showing two different pages on the same URL (big no-no according to Matt https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GyWx31GeQWY), you can do any of the three with the following consequences:

Keep the default domain as the English language as it's been indexed by search engines as of now, and then add a /de/ subfolder for your German visitors. You won't lose any rank in the short term since you're not changing anything that search engines already see, your just adding pages. But as your 70% German users trend toward the /de/, these pages should out rank the default domain in time.

On language switch, your visitors are redirected to the homepage from any other page, so your site wouldn't take that big of a hit by keeping the default domain home page and adding two subfolders /en/ and /de/. In this case, the homepage could be either language, but since the English page has been indexed already, this would be the safest way to go for the default domain. If you're goal is to rank the German site higher under the current conditions, don't worry about the hit. Do what's best for your visitors and make German the default language.

And lastly you could cater to your German visitors by making the default domain German and adding an /en/ subfolder for English. Again, here your site has already been indexed in English and only English, so I imagine you'd take a hit in the short term as the search engines reindex, then you'd recover in time assuming your keywords are in German.

One more option I just realized you were considering was redirecting visitors to either a /en/ or /de/ without a default domain home page. Since this is the page showing on SERP results, it would be a bad idea to remove that page.

Just so you're aware, your English site shows in the German results only because it's the only site Google can see. As far as I can tell, there are no URL parameters to indicate to any search engine which version is English and which is German. Once you fix that, you might actually rank higher.

Hope I got your question right this time. I'll just add here that I run a multilingual e-commerce site in Taiwan with Chinese and English. I set the default domain to show Chinese and added an /en/ subfolder for English. Over 75% of my Chinese keywords rank #1-3 while only 20% of my English keywords rank #1-10.

The only addition to Richard's comments would be to keep domains short and add keywords as appropriate. A single "About Us" page, XYZ.com/about-us, would be preferable to four different pages, i.e., XYZ.com/auto-detailing/about-us, XYZ.com/auto-sales/about-us, etc.

You might want to check Google page policy about having multiple pages for the same business. That might have consequences.

The biggest concern I would have as a business here is site visitors going to the wrong physical location because the website wasn't clear. That would really upset visitors, so this company should have SOPs in place in case this happens to minimize complaints. You'd be right to emphasize this in your site design suggestions.

Oh man, multilingual Wordpress. Just got through with one and bounced through a few plugins. I finally settled on mQtranslate. Still, with the template that was chosen by the client, there was a lot to work getting all that squared away. There are usually settings in these plugins for pages and posts in each language to either skip missing translations or show the untranslated version. While you're probably safe from duplicate content because of the doc type lang declaration, it's still not a great user experience.

As far as domains are concerned, I'd definitely go with subfolders over subdomains simply because search engines will see all languages as a single site and not split rank between subdomains. Matt Cutts also recommends this approach if it's a technically viable option, but you can use alternate tags, lang tags, and other canonicalization methods to ensure both visitors and search engines get to where they want to be on your site.

One option you might want to consider is running a Wordpress Multisite with subfolders, one for each language. This keeps Wordpress content in different languages completely, absolutely separate and avoids the problems with plugins.

Hope this helps.

It would surely be helpful to post the HTML so we can see what's going on. W3Schools has a great tutorial here http://www.w3schools.com/svg/default.asp. If your title tag is properly embedded with the svg element, everything will be fine. From what you posted here, it seems you're afraid search engines will confuse the svg title with the page title. That won't happen if your HTML is correct. Post it here and I'll take a look.

After comparing your links, I see that there are a few parameters that your ticketing platform added to the end of the URLs, like ReturnURL and CntPageID. You can go into your Google and Bing Webmaster Tools, and Yahoo Site Explorer as well, and tell these search engines to ignore those parameters on all URLs of your site. I'd also recommend canonical URLs if you have the option in your ticketing system. Now I'm not sure whether or not those parameter handling settings will be sent to SEOmoz when linking to Google WMT. Anybody?

That's a tough one without more to go on. Google releases updates to it's ranking algorithm every so often and some site get hit hard. If you're content hasn't changed and you haven't engaged in any unusual activity in terms of link building or advertising, then I'd say wait it out. Give it a week or two, which is how long it's taken many other quality sites to bounce back from a Google update. Unlikely you'll have issues here, but you still might want to check your webmaster tools to see if any manual actions have been applied.

This might be a good time to go over your site, again, for the first time;-) See what could be done to answer visitor questions and lead them to the right pages.

Nice question. Stumped me and I had to go find the answer because I typically add two or three links with different anchor text on my home page to one or two important pages on the site, i.e. the action pages like contact us or order forms.

Anyway, I found this video and think it probably not worth the time to go through a vast number of pages to change anchor text. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYWlEItizjI

This may not answer your question but make your question seem like a relatively less urgent matter.

Your settings in Google supplements existing information, so setting a geographic target won't impact your appearance in search results unless a user limits the scope of the search to a certain country. Do you have a top level domain or a country specific domain? That will also single to Google where to list your site in search results. Lots of info at http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=62399 Hope this helps!

Thanks Tyler. We're committed to Magento. I was inquiring about the SEO effectiveness of the Ultimento template in particular. It's up there at around $600, but if it saves us a complete redesign of an entire Magento theme, then it'll be well worth it. I'd just hate to get involved with this only to find that we still have to work throughout the code changing heading tags, removing extra span tags, inserting XML modifications to add metadata, and all that jazz. If you don't tool with Magento, you probably won't get what I'm jabbin about, but that's ok. Magento is a beast, we're just looking to maximize our SEO dollars in the least amount of time.

Kevin

Always great to help out a fellow Rocketeer! Did you recently update your website, because that template is not 2 years old. This could certainly be a factor.

If you do choose to keep the www, make sure you have redirects in place so when a user doesn't enter the www, he or she will get to your home page. Just FYI, www.domain.com is a subdomain of domain.com, so if your site can be access through both, search engines view these as two different pages and possibly split rankings.

Matt Cutts has posted a few videos about duplicate content and the take away is that it won't hurt you unless it's spammy. A legit e-commerce site shouldn't be negatively impacted by duplicate content issues.

If you're worried about it, why not have only one product page for these products and then just have color chooser that page? This way you'll only have one product page and a lot less duplicate content.

My bad. Looks like it is. It was release for Magento only late last year.

I was curious about this, too. Spent quite a bit of time looking through schema.org and other examples, and it seems the price property must be included. We can't just use maxPrice and minPrice to specify a range.

I replaced the minPrice property with the price property and my testing worked just fine. Depending on your business model, you could consider using price for either maxPrice or minPrice, depending on which price you'd like search engines to show your visitors. Since my prices only increase when adding variations, i.e., extra sauce, pre-cut, etc., I want visitors to see my lowest base price on search results. If for some reason you want visitors to see your high price on search results and then awe them with a lower price when they hit your site, maybe substitute the price property for your maxPrice.

Hope that helps!

The fist thing to look at is to see if the template/plugin/page is published. If so, I'd check if your CloudFlare cache. Read up on how to purge the cache here https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/200169246. This is most likely your problem. If this doesn't help, I'd use dev mode on Cloudflare and start checking caching plugins and memcache.

It's also helpful to rename your new images, i.e., Web-Header-New.jpg to Web-Header-New-2.jpg, so you're not overwriting the previous image that was already cached. You'd have to wait for the cache to expire for a new image to show if the names are the same.

No, no. My bad. You mentioned above that you've been ranking strong for two years, and then when I peaked at your site I saw the RT template. I wrongly assumed the Joomla template was released at the same time as the Magento template (I actually use the same exact template for Magento at www.88k.com.tw, although heavily modified). I was just thinking if you had done a site revamp with a new template that might be a factor in your recent bump off SERPs. Sorry to worry you about that. But it looks like you found an issue with the 404 errors. Good job.

FYI, "Google prefers microdata for web content." This was taken directly from their site at https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/3069489?hl=en

"Google is in the process of adding JSON-LD support to more markup-powered features. So far, JSON-LD is supported for all Knowledge Graph features, sitelink search boxes, and Event Rich Snippets; Google recommends the use of JSON-LD for those features. For the remaining Rich Snippets types and breadcrumbs, Google recommends the use of microdata or RDFa." From https://developers.google.com/structured-data/schema-org

Magento Wordpress installs are my specialty. From a marketing perspective, a blog will definitely be helpful for your visitors seeking relevant info. Most clients I set up tend to neglect their blog, so make sure to approach this with a plan. From the feedback I've collected from customers and clients, a consistent brand image tends to build more trust.

From a technical perspective, there are several ways to integrate Wordpress and Magetno. Fishpig http://fishpig.co.uk/magento/wordpress-integration/ will take a lot of work out of the project if you select to run Wordpress "inside" Magento. This extension basically uses your Magento template and puts Wordpress content into Magento, but you administer Wordpress through the traditional back end. If you have multiple languages/blogs, this gets a bit tricky. You can visit www.88k.com.tw for my site example running a Wordpress multi-site inside a multi-store Magento instance on a custom LEMP stack.

Anyway, to answer your question, a blog would be good if done right. Be careful not to cannibalize other site pages by adding the same keywords, and also make sure to link related blog posts to products. I personally agree with you--the purpose of your blog should be to inform visitors, not to sell. However, consistency is good, too. If you want to sell on your blog, there's nothing wrong with that, as long as you have a good plan.

From all the data I've gathered, I see the best way to go is subfolder. An exception might be if somebody searches for weddings in Barcelona, I think weddingsbarcelona.com would come first, all other factors being equal. How much that means to you I'm not sure, but if you want a safe way to go I say subfolders, as your SEO efforts for one will also help the other.