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Thanks, Wissam.  I have done as you suggested and will watch WT closely.

We have a subdomain that is a Wordpress blog, and it takes days, sometimes weeks for most posts to be indexed. We are using the Yoast plugin for SEO, which creates the sitemap.xml file.

The problem is that the sitemap.xml file is located at blog.gallerydirect.com/sitemap.xml, and Webmaster Tools will only allow the insertion of the sitemap as a directory under the gallerydirect.com account.

Right now, we have the sitemap listed in the robots.txt file, but I really don't know if Google is finding and parsing the sitemap.

As far as I can tell, I have three options, and I'd like to get thoughts on which of the three options is the best choice (that is, unless there's an option I haven't thought of):

1. Create a separate Webmaster Tools account for the blog

2. Copy the blog's sitemap.xml file from blog.gallerydirect.com/sitemap.xml to the main web server and list it as something like gallerydirect.com/blogsitemap.xml, then notify Webmaster Tools of the new sitemap on the galllerydirect.com account

3. Do an .htaccess redirect on the blog server, such as

RewriteRule ^sitemap.xml http://gallerydirect.com/blogsitemap_index.xml

Then notify Webmaster Tools of the new blog sitemap in the gallerydirect.com account.

Suggestions on what would be the best approach to be sure that Google is finding and indexing the blog ASAP?

Thanks, Dr. Pete.

I'll discuss the options with our dev team and see which one will cause the least amount of developer caffeine consumption.

Dr. Pete:

I'm looking into it to be sure, but I believe that you are correct in that this is an ad-tracking URL.

A follow up question:

The URL that is the canonical version of each page would be in the format of

http://www.gallerydirect.com/art/product/vincent-van-gogh/starry-night

However, this exact URL redirects to one with default parameters for substrate, style and frame size:

http://www.gallerydirect.com/art/product/vincent-van-gogh/starry-night?substrate_id=1&product_style_id=1&frame_id=&size=25x20

Should we change our canonical from the first URL (without the parameters) to the second URL with the parameters? Or is that a moot point with Google?

Cyto, I don't get any of the structured data in Bing/Yahoo. At least in Google, I get the star ratings.

Just as an FYI, I also don't see the image in the Rich Snippets Structured Data Testing Tool, although I've been over and over the specs for the images, and the code (at least to my knowledge) is correct. This, along with other posts that I've read elsewhere, tells me that Google simply hasn't implemented the image aspect of the code yet.

This is similar to the Demand Studios model, wherein they tried to get as many pages as possible with very similar content (but not completely duplicated) based on minor keyword modifications. For instance, how to grill a panini, how to cook a panini, how to make a panini, etc.

Google smacked them for it, and rightly so.

I haven't seen images for product snippets working yet. I have had that part of the Rich Snippets product code in place for a few months and other aspects of the snippet are showing in Google, but not the images yet (at least not for me or any of my competitors as far as I can tell).

I am a bit confused about canonicals and whether they are "working" properly on my site.  In Webmaster Tools, I'm showing about 13,000 pages flagged for duplicate content, but nearly all of them are showing two pages, one URL as the root and a second with parameters.  Case in point, these two are showing as duplicate content:

http://www.gallerydirect.com/art/product/vincent-van-gogh/starry-night

http://www.gallerydirect.com/art/product/vincent-van-gogh/starry-night?substrate_id=3&product_style_id=8&frame_id=63&size=25x20

We have a canonical tag on each of the pages pointing to the one without the parameters. Pages with other parameters don't show as duplicates, just one root and one dupe per listing,

So, am I not using the canonical tag properly? It is clearly listed as:Is the tag perhaps not formatted properly (I saw someone somewhere state that there needs to be a /> after the URL, but that seems rather picky for Google)?Suggestions?

We're using a service called Gigya for integrated logins using your accounts from Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc. Gigya apparently does some goofy stuff and from what I've been told, we essentially have the reviews on each page twice, so we have to hide one of them so that there isn't duplicate content (Whenever I ask the development team, I get a lot of jargon spackle rather than some straight answers). It's very likely that may be the reason why you see the markup so low on the page.

Interesting. I know that we don't update the sitemap every day, but maybe we need to look into auto-generating the sitemap. With so many pages being crawled daily, are they only updating the cache for pages with changes?  Or does the cache result that you sent mean that this page hasn't been crawled for a month?

Jake, Google is crawling over 100,000 pages on this site daily, so I doubt it's an issue of it not being crawled enough.

Mike:

I've been through all of their docs that I can find, and have only one possible issue that I can find (whether to use Count or Votes for the total number of reviews, so we actually have both in the source code).

Many of our competitors for these searches are having their star ratings appear in the SERPs, which is the reason for my concern. I doubt that Google would allow the ratings to appear for some vendors and not others (unless there is a technical reason, which is the reason for my original post).

We implemented the hreview-aggregate and hreview structured data formats in order to get the star ratings of customer reviews on our site into Google a couple of months ago. These star ratings appear properly in the Rich Snippets tool through Webmaster Tools, but they don't appear in the SERPs.

We've gone through the suggestions I can find from Google, but I can't figure out why they don't appear in the SERPs.

An example page is http://www.gallerydirect.com/art/product/bailey/earth-fact-iv

Can anyone spot a problem in the code that might be causing Google not to display the Structured Data?

The <iframe>makes the most sense for this company's requirements. Do I need to do anything regarding noindex or nofollow if we create a dedicated page for each artist's bio and then pull the bio into the <iframe> on each print's page?  Or does simply pulling that data via the iframe from the original "source" (that being the proposed artist bio page) eliminate the duplicate content concern?</p></iframe>

Well, according to this post from a Google employee on a Google forum, Google ignores the noindex or nofollow in an <iframe>:</p> <p>http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/webmasters/tSHq764AA0A</p> <p>He also references this link on the robots.txt file:</p> <p>http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=93710</p></iframe>

Chad, while posting a link instead of the dupe content makes sense logically, it dramatically reduces the amount of content on the page, so from a usability standpoint to the visitor (as well as the directive of the site owner), the bios need to remain on each print's page.

I am currently working on an eComm site for a company that sells art prints. On each print's page, there is a bio about the artist followed by a couple of paragraphs about the print.

My concern is that some artists have hundreds of prints on this site, and the bio is reprinted on every page,which makes sense from a usability standpoint, but I am concerned that it will trigger a duplicate content penalty from Google.

Some people are trying to convince me that Google won't penalize for this content, since the intent is not to game the SERPs. However, I'm not confident that this isn't being penalized already, or that it won't be in the near future.

Because it is just a section of text that is duplicated, but the rest of the text on each page is original, I can't use the rel=canonical tag. I've thought about putting each artist bio into a graphic, but that is a huge undertaking, and not the most elegant solution.

Could I put the bio on a separate page with only the artist's info and then place that data on each print page using an <iframe>and then put a noindex,nofollow in the robots.txt file?</p> <p>Is there a better solution?  Is this effort even necessary?</p> <p>Thoughts?</p></iframe>