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Hey,

An audit of a client's site revealed that due to their shopping cart, all their product pages were being duplicated.

http://www.domain.com.au/digital-inverter-generator-3300w/

and

http://www.domain.com.au/shop/digital-inverter-generator-3300w/

The easiest solution was to just block all /shop/ pages in Google Webmaster Tools (redirects were not an easy option).

This was about 3 months ago, and in months 1 and 2 we undertook some great marketing (soft social book marking, updating the page content, flickr profiles with product images, product manuals onto slideshare etc).

Rankings went up and so did traffic.

In month 3, the changes in robots.txt finally hit and rankings decreased quite steadily over the last 3 weeks.

Im so tempted to take off the robots restriction on the duplicate content.... I know I shouldnt but, it was working so well without it?

Ideas, suggestions?

Good question.

Why would a quality web directory (say, fishing tour directories), one that is human edited, approve a listing about an article writing service?

The honest answer is to say dont waste time on directories that arent relevant to your niche. Spend your time (and money) on directories that are in your niche (or in the general business theme).

I dont see a problem with it, Google can tell whether you are trying to do something spammy or trying to make something easier for your website visitors.

In this circumstance, I would say hundreds, even thousands of pages with this type of redirect would be fine.

I would like to hear other people's thoughts on this issue.

Hey,

I researched this a few months ago and the best I could find was Buzzstream

http://www.buzzstream.com/

It was cool because it would crawl a website and scrape the contact information, Twitter & Facebook URLs. One of the manager's gave me a webinar about how to use it effectively.

It wasnt perfect, but it was the best I found.

You should watch the webinar where Rand talks about large scale marketing tactics for ecommerce stores. He mentioned that you should always write the product descriptions, even if it's just 5 per day.

This strategy, along with adding chunks of text on category pages has proved to be extremely successful for our ecommerce clients.

Whilst the webinar is more than a year old... it was still well ahead of its time at recording

If some of the pages receive a decent amount of traffic (100+ visits per day), you could possibly change the title tags and place an annotation in Google Analytics.

Give it X weeks, and measure the increase in organic traffic to this page (or set of modified pages).

Quite tedious but somewhat measurable.

I think that multiple hyphened words in the domain would be considered a spam signal.

• online-social-marketing-new-york.com

Hey,

After a few stumbles upon a variety of services that allows you to manage all your local listings from the one profile (the latest one was Yext.com).

It got me thinking - is there an Australian equivalent?

My research revealed nothing.

Thanks.

That's quite a tough question to answer as it depends on a huge variety of factors.

Some of the new websites sit on aged domains and are more powerful than brand new domains subsequently they rank quicker.

Some of the new websites are blogs and are updated with fresh content rather than static 'brochure' websites (which struggle to rank for anything).

Sounds good - the more 'real' interactions on your Facebook wall the more Google will like it.

Competitions on Facebook can be tricky though as you dont want to break their terms and conditions, I am not sure if you actually ask people to write something on your wall in order to enter the competition.

North Social have all the details and links to Facebook Competition policies.

Goodluck though.

Hey mate.

UGC can actually be very high quality content, and subsequently I would let Google run wild through all the content.

Forums can be tricky and you would want to make sure Google doesnt index any duplicate content.

I would use this tool, http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html to crawl the forum. Export to Excel and then assess all the URL structures and see if it's picking up any strange parameters or duplicate content.

I would block the weird paramters in Google webmaster tools, and if technically possible 301 all the duplicate content issues. The problem with restricting things in robots.txt is that you might actually block link juice accidentally.

Hope that helps - my background is more in ecommerce but im sure we'll have similar site structure issues.

Hi,

Try this tool

http://sharedcount.com/

Hi

If the video is relevant to the content of the page, there will be no issues with this. I would just ensure there's unique content surrounding the link (or embed) on both pages.

If you are linking to an amazing video, hopefully the benefits is that the user will be happy they found your site and share it!

This is quite a small issue in the big world of SEO and nothing to really worry about.

From our experience, indexation is actually occurring more quickly!

What method are you using to tell Google you have a new site?

Our web design partners will tweet out a new site when it goes live. I think the latest test it only took about 15 minutes for it to appear in Google's index! The authority of the Twitter account is medium (3-4 tweets/day, 500 followers).

We will always submit a Sitemap in Google Webmaster Tools as well.

These are popping up all over the .AU Google domain aswell.

They appear to be pulling content from tables.

Maybe it has something to do with Microdata formatting?

Hi, We've had experience with a number of Facebook promotions.

1. Quick answer is no. Fanpage likes can easily be bought/fabricated, the raw numbers dont really matter that much. But you are building a valuable community around your brand which can help drive traffic back to your site or a fan page member might 'like' or 'comment' on a post that you make on the wall. Building up your brand, gaining Facebook shares or comments will get Google to smile upon you!
2. The 'sweepstakes' app of http://northsocial.com/ is exactly what you need. You have to pay a small monthly fee for the full North Social suite... but it's definitely worth it.
3. The 'sweepstake' app with North Social enables users to 'like' the page before they enter - this in turn, will appear on their facebook wall and hopefully stir up some interest from their users. You can also ask users to share the promotion directly. Finally, Facebook Advertising might work well for a cool prize like an iPad.

The biggest advice is to just give it a shot!

Hi Juniouf.

Thanks for the advice from the email marketing perspective and individually tracking.

This has been helpful

http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/tracking/gaTrackingSocial.html

The social sharing actions will occur in Google Analytics. Maybe if I dynamically tag each link I will see results in GA for the action.

Although, customers might be a bit freaked out if they land on a URL that has their own name!: www.companyname.com.au/facebook-like-offer?=utm_FB=utm_customer_name

No. I dont want more likes on the Fanpage.

I want to know incentivisation and tracking strategies for social sharing.

What do you mean by " to search on facebook/twitter/etc?" Yes, I want a sharing buttons on everypage. Im talking about how do you track the incentivisation.

Hi Alex,

Thanks for you response. Im not entirely sure how much freedom you have in the code of the facebook share button etc.

Ill have to research this as it seems to be exactly my problem