Welcome to the Q&A Forum

A blog is a must for an eccomerce site today, Lindsay. That's not just from an SEO perspective. It also helps bring in new users, raises brand awareness and is pretty much the bomb. Yes, you can easily add a blog as a subdomain (blog.site.com) or as a subdirectory (site.com/blog). You can go either way but subdomains are going out of style a bit in the SEO world. In my opinion it doesn't matter a whole lot. Keep in mind that you can post content on your site AND other people's sites. That's actually a great recipe for success. : )

Thanks Tom, I do agree about the importance (or lack of it) of the domain/keyword issue, I was more curious as to why it wasn't being seen. But you've put my mind at rest.

If all things being equal between two sites, if one firm has social media, they will probably outrank the ones that doesn't.  This creates a domino effect where more firms will adopt social media marketing  to keep up. So as time increases, I can see it becoming more and more difficult to get ranked high for competitive keywords w/out social media. For long-tails, I think you can rank high organically for many years/decades to come.

Hi, From what I can tell, you are using OpenCart software. If you go to Opencart.com, you can find a list of modules / extensions. There are thousands but if you search for 'SEO', several extensions are available that offer the ability for 'friendly urls' or 'perfect product urls'. I'd have a good look at the ratings for each module before installing / purchasing any of them. Christina

@lindsay Yup I saw the matt cutts tweet You can also look at http://mozcast.com/ if you ever feel like something odd may be going on. SEO Moz is great at keeping track of fluctuations for you.

Hi Mark, Nope none of the above - and what you see is exactly the report I get from SEO Moz. And like you I can't identify where the duplicate content is. Short of deleting the blog page (and consequently the multiple URL's) I'm not sure what else to do?

Be transparent, be yourself, and gain influence. Otherwise, suck at everything.

Hi Lindsay - have you got Google Analytics or similar tracking code installed, as this will allow you get a better picture of where you traffic is coming from. My first thought on this is that your most popular article is likely to be ranking better than the others or ranking well for a particular keyword that is generating this traffic. There are lots of factors that can cause one article to get more traffic than the others but your articles are never likely to have the same amount of traffic as they have different keywords in titles and other text on page, so they are likely to rank for different things. Also it only takes one person to retweet your article that hasn't had interest in the others and this can then cause that article to gain more attention (visits), if for instance they are an authority, without direct tweets of the article (people clicking through from a tweet about this article from a social influencer). The whole concept of social influencers. This article might have had a title that caught more attention or was more relevant at the time it was posted to social networks - this would lead to more visits and potentially more links. In turn this is likely to cause more traffic to your individual article. I would also suggest looking into the links to that page in comparison with the others. If you do have Google Analytics installed I would go to content select your article url and then investigate traffic sources using the secondary dimension drop down option. This will help you understand where your traffic is coming from to this page. You can then compare it to the others for a better picture.

It all depends on what you want to achieve with the blog. I run 2 sites that get lots of comments. For one site, the comments become part of the content of the site (it essentially sets a scenario for people to debate over) so for that example, it adds to the uniqueness f the site. For another site that I run, I have to spend a lot of time monitoring the comments since many people are there to just drop a link. Like everything on the web, you need to decide what's going to make your site stand out from the rest. Allowing "junk" comments won't add any value.

Assuming this domain move is a recent re-direct from your .co.uk to your .com, and a website previously existed separately on the .co.uk, did you just blanket redirect, or does each page point to its equivalent? If it was just a blanket redir, you may be leaking link juice. Also, to confirm, you're stating that the .com's previous DA was 44, then when you redirected the .co.uk to it it dropped? Or are you saying the .co.uk was 44, then when you moved to the .com it is only 33 now? With regards to on-page reports, how are you attempting to pull this data? Just in the campaign tool, or are you using the on-page report card tool manually? If your page does not rank top-50 for a keyword, it will not have an automatically produced on-page report for that keyword in the campaign tool. To recieve reports for non-ranking pages/keywords, you will need to pull them manually using the report card grader under Research Tools.

In many SEO reports keywords that rank above position 50 are left off the report. This is because keywords ranked above 50 tend to jump position a lot so they are of of no real reporting value. In many reports you will see "not in the top 50" or ">50".