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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.

Did you need specific help to out rank www.leathersofaworld.com or do you just want to understand how they perform better than Ikea and DFS?

One question I have is where you are located. Google will likely show results based on location. Leather Sofa World has "leather sofa" in their domain name and in their product URL, plus they have structured data and Google authorship set up. Ikea's URLs are not as human friendly.

Compare: http://www.ikea.com/gb/en/catalog/products/00214416/ and http://www.leathersofaworld.com/sofas/brown-leather-sofas/latina-3-1-1-seater-espresso-brown-leather-sofas

Just seems that Leather Sofa World is more relevant than Ikea for terms like "leather sofa."

Now I will say that Leather Sofa World could greatly improve their Magento e-commerce site, but it's generally a nice site.

You have some great tools at your disposal here on Moz.com. Try the page grader and open site explorer!

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.

Hi Wianno,

I strongly suggest forwarding the old URL to the new URL at the DNS level (no masking) with 301 redirect. If you can't do that, redirect visitors from your old site to your new site via server side redirects. The goal is here to send all visitors to your new site and concentrate all that link juice to your new domain.

You won't have to worry about duplicate content. Matt Cutts has addressed this issue in numerous videos so you might want to check some of those out.

Hi Dimitrios,

Changing your URL structure will always have an affect on ranking, but you can take steps to minimize the damage. You'll be able to solve your biggest problem with server redirects for URLs containing the old language parameters. You'll need to add these redirects to your Apache .htaccess or Nginx .conf file.

One issue you might run into is an outrageous number of URLs generated by the links from one language to the other, depending on the e-commerce platform. I've seen Google index tens of thousands of pages on some e-commerce platforms with parameters and multiple links to language subdirectories, category pages, product pages, reviews, currency selections, cross-sell and up-selling modules, etc. Best to get really familiar with your e-commerce platform before making this switch.

Make sure to set your content language in your HTML and follow all other best practices. I've gone through several e-commerce site rebranding and domain migrations, and I've seen the slowest sites recover within a few weeks.

Good luck!

Hi Alexander,

First thing is to make sure your site wasn't down the last time Google indexed your site. That would be one thing to cause all those 404s.

If there was nothing wrong with your site, then note the referring pages of the 404 links, then go to each page to view the source code. In the source page, search for the dead link Google says is there. I see you're using Bluefish editor, and I'm not familiar with that technology, but it's possible these link might be dynamically created by your software or some sort of widget. If you find a pattern, perhaps it's a setting somewhere or a widget that's adding these URLs. For example, some e-commerce sites add a cross-sell or related items widgets somewhere on the page that create these links without you actually adding them. Something like this could be happening here as well.

I also see links to your database files. Since you're using Apache, these folders and files should be blocked in your htaccess, then you can edit your robots.txt to block any directory containing links you don't want indexed. For example, your search pages and cart pages shouldn't need to be indexed. Another thing you might consider is setting parameters in your WMT to tell Google and Bing what to do when they run into parameters in your URLs.

After you figure out what's going on with these 404 errors, I suggest you follow best practices and convert your URLs to lowercase (or at least stay consistent) and then change all underscores to hyphens as suggested by Matt Cutts.

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.

Compliance with the law here isn't going to have much of an impact at all on your SEO efforts. A disclaimer in the footer would do it, but you mentioned web site, not web page. Based on that, I would just include this information in an About Us page and let that be the end of it. On the other hand, if you think the registration titles are going to be relevant keywords that visitors would use to search and find you, then you might consider posting that disclaimer on each page.

Now if by disclaimer you mean a novel-long blurb of legalese at the footer, then no. Two or three lines should do it, but do make sure that there is enough relevant content on each page to mute that disclaimer. If it accounts for more than 25% of the text on your page, I'd either create more content or move that disclaimer to your About Us page.

Hope that helps.

Hi Claudio,

I feel your pain. Nearly every time Google updates their algorithm my site takes a hit, but it recovers a week or two later. At some point you're going to have to direct resources to other forms of promotion to Goolge-proof your business. At the end of the day, it's about making money, not getting a number from Google.

I would monitor your WMT account to see if you get any manual actions taken and keep an eye on Moz. I won't make any drastic moves so soon after this hit, but do keep up with the original content and healthy activities.

Yep, Richard is right about the anchor text in your link having the exact same keyword phrase as your URL. You could take that one step further and name your image automotive-merchant-services.jpg.

With that in mind, posting an image on the same site multiple times with different alt, title and anchor text might not be what you want to do, depending of course on how your articles or products are posted. I would actually have multiple versions of the image and rename them as mentioned above, especial since these images will appear for completely different articles. Site performance issues would be minimal compared to the SEO benefits.

Hey everyone!

Just got a note from Erin at MOZ and the Google+ issue is fixed! Kudos to the team on getting that done. I know how tedious and time consuming debugging this issue must have been, but they kept on it even after this thread went cold.

Kevin

Hey everyone!

Just got a note from Erin at MOZ and the Google+ issue is fixed! Kudos to the team on getting that done. I know how tedious and time consuming debugging this issue must have been, but they kept on it even after this thread went cold.

Very cool guys!

Kevin

Been spending a little more time in the Moz community recently and though to update this post. In case anybody finds themselves in a similar spot: http://googleblog.blogspot.tw/2010/12/being-bad-to-your-customers-is-bad-for.html

This company I mentioned did a fine job of pivoting and grew from $500K to over $8M since I asked this question.

Oh, my bad. You want the review look. Seeing as how WP is a very mature product and that the plugins you mentioned have a relatively few number of reviews, it would be a question of whether or not a few dollars is worth the potential benefit if they work the way you expect. I'd venture to say not many people here will have tried these particular plugins. Sorry Chris!

As a developer myself, I'd add schema.org and build the theme myself. Adding social comments to your site is pretty simple and free if you can follow the instructions on the social media dev sites.

Kevin

The most popular e-commerce package for Wordpress now is WooCommerce, but there is a long list of plugins for WP to enable online shopping. And yes, there are plugins and themes that include structured mark up for products, reviews, blog posts, etc.

As for the Amazon experience, that's a custom theme you'll need to design or find out there. Or just use the Amazon e-commerce platform if you like that a lot.

By the way you've posted your question, it seems you're relatively new to e-commerce, so I'm going to save you a lot of money and time. Don't do this yourself--hire a reputable company to do this for you. Also consider that hosting your own platform like Wordpress may actually be more costly than running a Shopify or Amazon store, as you will need a server admin, software updates, security patches, systems integration, and training. You'll also need to manage software to print shipping labels, receipts, packing slips; you'll need fast order management, customer support, and a whole bunch of other stuff that some of these hosted platforms actually roll up into one. Shopify, Adobe Business Catalyst, Magento, Big Commerce, and the list goes on.

Before going all out on Wordrpess because is "looks amazing" and can easily add schema.org mark up, get a grip on the features that will help you run your business. You can make anything look great and mark up pretty much anything out there today.

It's easiest to remove the pages you created manually, but it really doesn't matter if you connect all your services per Google instructions. I went the hard way years ago and manually set up everything, but it's good to know there is some automation now so you don't have to go to 20 different G sites to legitimize your business presence with Google.

Phil has a nice write up here http://moz.com/blog/building-a-video-seo-strategy

As far as SEO ranking is concerned, structured mark up and time-on-page should increase page rank of the page your video is hosted on, granted you do it right and submit your video site map. Then you'll undoubtedly get social likes and convert more visitors to customers with your video, which I'm sure will also help with page rank (and revenue).

But as far as SERPs go, the simple fact that there are statistically far few videos on your topic than simple text web pages. Make good videos, follow Phil's advice, and you'll certainly see some benefits for your business. That's good all around, but videos cost more to produce. Might want to break out a spreadsheet to run some numbers.

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.

You'll need to be running Apache with mod_ssl or Nginx with http_ssl_module enabled (And SPDY if you want), and you'll need to have 443 port enabled. Of course, you'll need to properly configure your VirtualHost(s) with a valid SSL certificate installed. Then you can simply change your "Wordpress Address" and "Site Address" in your Wordpress "Settings"-->"General" from http:// to https://.

http://make.wordpress.org/support/user-manual/web-publishing/https-for-wordpress/

Hope that helps!