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Rafflecopter is awesome for this.I have a client that does it regularly. What we do is add an option (one of the make your own entry options) that says something like "If you already own this product post a review for an entry" and other one we do is "Write a blog or forum post about the product for an entry"

I would say doing that we normally get 100 or so positive reviews on various sites and 30 or so blog posts / forum posts. We typically get about 1k people entering total. One thing we have been doing to further target is to post suggested review or forum sites to post on. I think it is borderline spammy, but I feel like it is on the safe side of the line.

I would, personally I have disabled my tag page and author page since there are no tags, and only one author. As for the categories I have them no-indexed.

Totally did not look at the profile and see it was an ecommerce site. Sorry for the shameless plug, but I did an interview with Rand a couple of months ago about starting SEO for ecommerce sites and he talked briefly about using feed descriptions, you might check it out, it has some good tips. http://www.prestashop.com/blog/en/seo-expert-series-rand-fishkin-of-moz/

I would not recommend either of them. From the looks of it the links they are promising are the kind of links that get a site penalized. While it might not get your site penalized doing them, to me if it were my own personal site i would risk it.

I really think that Moz lacks in this area. For finding things like this I use Raven Tools, they have a really good crawler. It clearly shows all of the pages that reference an error. My thoughts would be that either you missed some links to the pages or the redirects are not working properly, I would suspect that if Moz finds them, Google or Bing will find them.

As long as links are not broken and resources are not returning 404 errors, my understanding is that it is not affected at all. The only thing I would make sure of is that fetch as google returns the page looking like it should. Here is a video from the authority on the matter.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3KgrbiB1pc#t=52

In that case, use a canonical url and you should be fine. Have the canonical point to the page with no query string on it. You had me worried, I thought you might have a platform that needed the parameters to show products, then you mentioned you took them out in GWT. I have seen clients do that on the platforms that need the query strings and de-index all of their product pages.

There is a bit more complexity in using a cname, but a lot of big systems should be able to handle it as a standard thing, unless there is an inherit security risk. I use them both with freshdesk and maxcdn. Like take this http://cdn.dh42.com/certified.png   and this http://dh42.com/certified.png The one with the cdn prefix is actually loaded from maxcdn, but it just looks like it came from my sub domain. Same with my freshdesk account, it is at help.dh42.com, but it actually is on their server.

I would prefer a cname to a 301, but sometimes you don't have a choice. Do you currently have anything at the site you are wanting to redirect to NJoyn? Or are your just looking to make it easier when you need to tell people where to go to?

If it were me and my client, unless it was a huge monetary purchase, I would just redirect it to the current domain. The reason being is that you can 301 redirect everything and the link juice is suppose to stay very close to the same; but why would you? Sure it might be easier for people type in the browser. But people already know the name more than likely. What I would do is redirect the new domain to the current domain. Then I would use the new domain in print advertising. That way you can really monitor how many people are coming from the print advertising (if the company even uses it).

But from everything I have learned when you change domains and 301 everything the traffic tanks for about a month or two. If this is ok, then it might be viable to switch.

I might have used a bad example with Rand, but it is amazing how many companies take paid posts or reviews. Places like Allure, Vogue, Huff Post, NY Times, ect. What you are really hitting is the demographic that thinks they are reading something that is impartial, but in reality they are just being advertised to under the guise of "News". I always make sure the link is nofollow, so I do not really consider it blackhat, be shakey marketing, maybe. But in the end it comes down to dollars and cents. I regularly have posts that are paid in the 500-1000usd range. When you first do it, it is a leap, because there is no SEO value at all. But the largest return I have had was a post that in 3 days grossed 50k in sales on high margin products. The posts usually die fast, because people want the latest greatest thing. But they end up getting shared and work for the most part generally.

Is it possible to mark that up in schema? Sure. Is it supported and will be shown by any search engine, no on both counts. I personally would not invest time in it, maybe you can make all of that information part of the description for the time being.

Do they add value to the site? Are they adwords pages? I have noticed a lot of companies are getting around the doorway pages seemingly by having them displayed for adwords ads. Like say having a doorway page for a city, and it is targeted to the add <city keyword="">so when you open it up it is basically a doorway page. I think it is a sketchy area, I would love to hear what others have to say about it. </city>

I would not call them the best place to get links from, but they are safe generally. I would suggest using Whitepsark.ca to find some directory sites, they list way more than anyone can tell you about. Since you are a Moz member you get a discount too, https://moz.com/perks

No I would invest in Schema, but in this case I personally think that the attributes listed would not be implemented in any search engine soon. Some of them you would have to use the additionalType and that would be one of my last guesses for attributes that would ever be included.

You are going to have to add a manual rewrite rule to the htaccess, preferably at the top. This might help, http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1321123/redirect-from-subdomain-to-domain-htaccess  But like Travis said, be careful, make a back up, because you can break your site doing this.

Do you think it will help your site? Google says not to pay for links, but this is pretty much the standard of how online journalism works these days.

I personally do not think there is any penalty SEO wise in doing it. Although, I do think it will mess up the metric in GWT that shows how many pages have been submitted and how many have been indexed. I find that metric useful, so it would make it no longer useful if there are a lot of pages blocked by the robots.txt.

I did not, it was only one page so I used fetch as Google.

Envato is a big company with a lot of web assets, so it is really for branding of each / ease of use. Some people that use themeforest might have never heard of codecayon before and vice versa. They also have the size of site to support this kind of layout as well, they literally have 10's of thousands of pages for each site.

You also have to consider that during the development of these different sites, SEO was different as well. Exact match in domain names did more than it does now. So having theme, code and so on in the domain name helped back then too.

Tom,

What we do with most of our clients is to point the canonical tag on paginated category pages to the root category page like you are wanting to do. It helps with duplicate content issues generated for category pages and also makes your landing page stronger. I would not use the rel next/previous with this though.

If you look around the industry at the bigger ecommerce sites this is what is done. Walmart, Target, and all of the big players with the exception of Amazon use this practice.