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Hi Pugh, Good question. Unfortunately, no, you do not qualify for inclusion in Google's local index or use of their local products. In order to do so, you must have face-to-face transactions with your customers, which is not how e-commerce companies operate. You can read the Google Places Quality Guidelines, which cover eligibility, here: https://support.google.com/places/answer/107528?hl=en

Hi, I'm wondering what implementation you used for the rel=canonical? I'm very surprised to hear that adding the tags negatively impacted the mobile site's ranking in the mobile SERPs; all it should have done is change the URL to the m. version. I would not recommend the workaround you suggested, as redirecting a ranking and indexed page to a noindexed page (let alone several noindexed pages) will most likely cause confusion for the crawler.

Thanks for your suggestions chaps, I will take onboard what you have said and complete an audit.

Hi Pugh, Glad to hear it! Yes, you should also implement the tag on your homepages.

Thanks Doug, I will perhaps try having the links removed from the product page and see if that helps.

Sorry for the delayed response Kane. I have been running it for a while now and seems to be OK. Some speed test results have suggested that it  may have slowed page load times but too early to say yet so will test further, then test again once it is disabled.

Paddy, Thanks for clarifying. My mum is indeed very nice. If we replace "my mom's blog" with "a slightly less trusted site, but still very similar in scale, topic, age, etc..." then you can see where it gets more difficult to base the decision on which has been crawled first. But yes, I agree that being the first page crawled and indexed with that content must be a huge (though I think trust-based metrics would be more important) factor in the decision by Google's ranking algorithms.

According to me a sitemap is more important than robots.txt as it help a search engine bot in effectively crawling a website. Robots.txt is generally used to request (allow: or disallow:)a crawler not to crawl and index certain section of your website containing sensitive data. This is totally upto the crawler to respect the request by not crawling and indexing that sensitive part. However, it is a general practice among webmasters world wide to have a robots.txt file for each of their sites.  A common robots.txt with permission to access the entire website should look like this: User-agent: * Disallow: Sitemap: http://www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml So if you want some section (folders, directories) of your site not to be crawled by a bot then you can use a robots.txt. Yes logically its the same like having a robots.txt file granting all the access and not having one completely. Its just a difference between like something having 'by default". Having a robots.txt file doesn't guarantee a rank boost in the SERP. Hope it helps. For more understanding please refer these resources: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/robotstxt http://www.robotstxt.org/robotstxt.html Cheers

From my experiences and from the case studies I've read, schema.org generally helps with rankings. If it's a products site, then there should be no harm in using product specific semantic markup. Rich snippets such as review ratings can also increase CTR. You're not going to fool Google into thinking a product site is a news site. If you want to compete on news, then create a separate section of the site that is news focused.

Thanks for all your help guys, much appreciated.

Thanks David, appreciate your advice.

Yes, thank you. I have the Yoast plugin installed but must have missed the option when settings up.

Thanks Keri. I did think perhaps it was something to do with that because the views starting coming in immediately after the exclusive content went up. I checked the homepage and couldn't see my blog there anywhere though, even when logged out of wordpress. The strange thing is that while it shows my total views have had a massive increase, individual views have not gone up, so it's as if the extra views have not actually come to the blog, not even the homepage. If my blog was featured on the wordpress homepage, do you think each impression could be counted as a view? Perhaps that would explain all the extra views without extra traffic. The influx of views has dropped off again now, the wordpress.com referrals ran for 7 days in total, peaking on the 3rd day and then gradually declining. All in all a nice problem to have provided that it's not a malicious attack!

Thanks for the feedback guys, will give your suggestions a try.

Thanks for the reply, sorry it's taken me a while to respond. I've used a variety of PR sites for the best part of a year now so it seems strange that barely any of them are being picked up.