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Hi Igor,

I think you may be mixing up rel="publisher" and rel="author" mark up here.

By implementing the Google Plus rel="publisher" link on your sites you are establishing your brand to Google. You should use this link to link to your business' G+ page which should be unique to each business (including the two ecommerce sites). (For reference: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1708844)

Additionally, you can set up a rel="author" link between the sites which you contribute to and own to establish your personal G+ account as an author. (For reference: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2539557)

Thanks,

K

Hi Bob,

There are no rules on link styling. It is purely up to you how you want to style all elements of your site and you can control this via CSS: http://www.w3schools.com/css/css_link.asp.

Thanks,

K

Hello,

This can happen for many reasons. But going off the information you have provided you may want to check the links your newer sites have from newspapers as some UK publications have been hit recently by a Google penalty: http://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/interflora-what-really-happened.html

Before you get carried away though, check your verticals and compare your sites with their competitors to see if they have experienced any changes.

Hi Alan,

I would probably start by adding a disallow rule to robots.txt.

**Disallow: /*_**  _may work and block all your dated URLs from being indexed but may also have adverse affects if you have any URLs containing underscores. To test whether this solution would work I would firstly implement a disallow directly on a chosen dated URL, _**Disallow: /20_07_13 **_for example, and then test whether Google has noindexed the page. GWT should tell you whether you have inadvertently blocked any other pages by doing so.

You should also be thinking about how these URLs are being created and taking actions to prevent it. Consider implementing canonical tags if you haven't already to clean up any potential duplication issues.

Cheers,

K

Hi Chris,

This is a question of relevancy.

The best way to answer this question is by asking yourself whether your homepage will satisfy a search query about ecommerce products. Think about the searcher's intent and your page's content - is it relevant? - and consider your competition. If a searcher isn't going to get the answer they're after from your homepage, find the page that will. Once you've identified a relevant page think about optimising it and create some outreach around it.

Thanks,

K