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about 20% of total 500 products in our shop have a manufacturer product description, which appears repeatedly on maybe 10 other sites and also on ebay and amazon. Issue is just with our own brand. We have another brand website where we publish the same product descriptions as well (google knows that we own both sites).

The product description was first published on shop website before anywhere else and we are ranking number one for the product despite quite strong competition and we outrank our brand website as well.

Which of the following options would you opt for?

1. keeping the description and just adding some unique content
2. replacing the complete product description by a new one

thanks. I see your point regarding effective ad copy, but in our case the time saving would be valued higher than perfectly optimized ads for each individual item. Setting up 3000 individual product adgroups in 10 languages would just take really a lot of time.

This was actually also the only script that I had found in my former google search.
You have to pay at least 1 month subscription of 250USD to get access to the script which seems reasonable (scripts not available in free trial).

I was just surprised that I could not find any other options for doing this automization, as I thought that there should be many website owners being interested in such an automized setup.

I am in the process of setting up a fresh adwords account for a recently launched ecommerce site with about 3000 products and would like to automize the generation of the ads based on a spreadsheet of our product database.

I would like to have full control over the code to generate these ads and a programmer with knowledge in SOAP and javscript would be availlable to assist in implementation.

Any recommendations? Would you use adwords API or rather adword scripts?
Do you know whether there may be any existing code for doing this that we could just adapt to our requirements?

Marcus, Arnout, Cyrus, excellent comments. Thanks a lot.

Martijn, thanks.

Regarding potential: We would want to make the changes anyway at some point. 
So would you do all changes now with platform migration or would you do them later (which implies significantly more work), maybe in several stages?

We are moving a domain from oscommerce to prestashop.
We will setup 301 redirects for each page and have made sure that new platform is following SEO best practices.

I read a lot that it is critical to keep changes to a minimum when migrating to a new domain, but is this also critical when migrating just to a new e-commerce platform (same domain)? Change of URL is unavoidable, but what about these other changes below? Would you be very concerned about doing them at the same time, or rather would you do them some time after the migration?

1. title tag (about 30% of text in title tag will be different)
2. meta description tag (more customized and varied meta description than before)
3. h1 (expanding product name with some relevant keywords for a number of products)
4. additional table with product features (additional content in product pages)
5. adding additional products to store
6. moving to https instead of http

Product descriptions and product images and category descriptions will remain the same.

Replicating title tag, title description and h1 from old site would actually imply quite a lot of additional work at this point and we would have to make the change anyway at a later point, so if it is not a major risk I would prefer to do it in one go.

Any thoughts?

uuhh thats a long time for bouncing back.

I would use a 301 redirect to assets from old to new domain. This should give clear signal to google to where content lives, or do I oversee anything here?
My key concern really is that google may get signals that new domain is about topic of asset I am moving first and then when I migrate later my core content, it may be more difficult to rank for core content since google associates the new domain with the topical focus of content that was moved first. Is this something you would be concerned about?

Cyrus, thanks a lot for the advice.

In the long-run, what do you think is the percentage of organic traffic you lost at moz.com due to the domain migration? 30% was just short-term effect, right?

Regarding moving assets upfront, it would be quite easy to do in our case.
But would you be concerned about giving google wrong signals about topic of domain which may make it more difficult later to rank our core content well?

We plan to perform a domain migration in 6 months time.
I read the different articles on moz relating to domain migration, but some doubts remain:

1. Moving some linkworthy content upfront to new domain was generally recommended. I have such content (free e-learning) that I could move already now to new domain.
   Should I move it now or just 2 months before migration?
   Should I be concerned whether this content and early links could indicate to google a different topical theme of the new domain ? E.g. in our case free elearning app vs a commercial booking of presential courses of my core site which is somehow but not extremely strongly related) and links for elearning app may be very specific from appstores and from sites about mobile apps.

2. we still have some annoying .php3 file extensions in many of our highest traffic pages and I would like to drop the file-extension (no further URL change). It was generally recommended to minimize other changes at the same time of domain migration, but on the other hand implementing later another 301 again may also not be optimum and it would save time to do it all at the same time. Shall I do the removal of the file extension at the same time of the domain migration or rather schedule it for 3 months later?

3. On the same topic, would the domain migration be a good occasion to move to https instead of http at the same time, or also should we rather do this at a different time?

Any thoughts or suggestions?

thanks Monica. Will then setup seperate campaigns.

Is it possible to show different prices by country of visitor in adwords using adwords customizers?

I would like to avoid having to setup campaigns for each country, in order to show country specific prices in adwords.

thanks

in webmaster tools 404 are going gradually down for desktop and now suddenly going up for mobile for pages that are not linked to for months.

thanks a lot SilverDoor.

The huge number of errors, were caused by a problem with the internal site architecture several months ago which got thousdands of pages in the index that should not exist (and also have no other related relevanted pages). This architecture is fixed now. Still for some reason mobile crawler of webmaster tools is returning now suddenly lots of 404 for mobile view, which I suspect are coming from old 404 in google cache.

We are building URLs dynamically with apache rewrite.
When we detect that an URL is matching some valid patterns, we serve a script which then may detect that the combination of parameters in the URL does not exist. If this happens we produce a 301 redirect to another URL which serves a 404 error page,

So my doubt is the following: Do I have to worry about not serving directly an 404, but redirecting (301) to a 404 page? Will this lead to the erroneous original URL staying longer in the google index than if I would serve directly a 404?

Some context. It is a site with about 200.000 web pages and we have currently 90.000 404 errors reported in webmaster tools (even though only 600 detected last month).

Fresh Web Explorer finds daily about 10 articles/blog posts where I could post in comment section a relevant link to content on my own website, which I really belief may be of interest to many readers of the articles.

I would like to do this for the traffic that these links are generating to my site (intention is not ranking improvement).
Would I need to be concerned that it could affect negatively my ranking if I post so many times links to my own site in the comment sections and also considering that I would always link to the same about 5 landing pages on my site?

To give some context. The site for wich I want to build links for is long established PageRank 6  site with legit links from about 1000 different root domains. I would only post to articles published within last 48h.

Would I need to be concerned about the frequency of the posting and if so, any ideas what may be a reasonable frequency to post my links?

good point. thanks Gianluca.

But in this particular case crawling would not be an issue since non-English language versions are in subdirectories which are accessable via country dropdown. US google spider seeing the EN version in the main domain is exactly as desired. So if crawling is not an issue, do you still see a problem with option 3). To address your point, I  would also enforce that if someone clicks via country dropdown to English version, that this person would not be redirected again.

What do you think?

In case of websites following an international one domain strategy such as booking.com, redirecting to subdirectory may be most convenient for vast majority of users, since the name of the main domain is promoted to users in different languages.

I want to show some additional info on our website that will only be visible to the IP address of our office.

Do I need to be concerned that google may consider this cloaking?

Vadim, thanks, but article is mainly about crawl bandwidth concerns. My concern is not crawl bandwidth, but link juice flow.

Now I have facets setup with ajax and ajax just adding parameter #facet1... at end of URL and I have setup canonical so that

domain.com/category/#facet1 refers to
domain.com/category/

Would you make the facet links no-follow or better better not to add no-follow for better link juice distribution?
Would you hide the whole facet block from google and if so how?

Any thoughts?

Would like to submit the different language versions of our site to some non-english web directories worth submitting to. Does anybody know about a good list as a starting point? To get an idea what may be the 3-5 most important web directories in different countries/languages.

Thanks