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Hi Sean, I can certainly empathise with your experience - Magento is definitely more complicated to set-up and customise initially. And for a little background, I worked on the early versions of WooCommerce with the original developers, so I understand why there has been a need for simpler, more effective eCommerce solutions. With Magento, the key is to find developers and agencies/consultants who have experience with it. Like any platform, it's much easier when you know it well, but often we don't have time to spend learning before we're earning. I've worked on 2-3 fairly big Magento sites now, and can get stuff done reasonably quickly and cost-effectively, but it's never quite as fast as with Shopify or WooCommerce (although knowing some Magento specialists makes a big difference). This article about a large company moving to Shopify sums it up - from the article it's clear they had appalling developers, but used that as the reason to switch platforms (http://elumynt.com/magento-to-shopify-plus-complete-guide-for-large-retailers/). I can't blame them for it when it was costing them money and business, but it's pretty clear it's a dev issue... And Shopify isn't bad for what it is. If you're looking for something that is more plug-and-play, it'll do the job. The problem is always that you're limited by what's available. So if what you need hasn't been created/verified/approved, you're basically stuck. From memory, a team I know have put together some SEO solutions for Shopify so will try and dig it out. With regards to any migration - if it's done properly, you shouldn't lose rankings. I've moved tens of thousands of pages across domains and CMS platforms etc, and had minimal drops if any. Usually the new platform etc has been rolled out to improve things, so it often leads to a gain even if everything else stays the same, just because the new set-up is faster etc. The key is to plan out the switch very carefully and with plenty of time to check, double check and triple check - 301 redirects, .htaccess and robots.txt files are the essentials

Hi Thanks. We do canonicalise sizes though not colours as the colour can be an important search term..

Julie thanks for your reply with which I agree mostly.  However there may be a opportunity to use good names if the passage of time and removal or dropping of all links has 'sanitized' the url.. question is how to have this confirmed...

Hey Sean, Left a message for you in your private inbox, feel free to reach out any time! All the best, Rob

Mmm... if your site has not been translated yet, the correct should be rel="alternate" hreflang="en-FR", but - yes - that would mean that people searching in French from France won't see the /fr subfolder. On the other hand, using as hreflang "fr-FR" would not be correct. My best suggestion, in cases like this, is using the hrelang="x-default", where the href is the country selector page, so that people searching in French from France will be pointed to the selector page and, from there being able to click on the french version link. Another suggestion is to create personalized message telling the French people entering in the site but seeing it is in English that the site is going to be soon translated in their language, but that the products and services are already available for the French market, so inviting them to not bounce back, which should be the most common reaction the users can have.

No canonical back to the main product page?

Yes it is Sean. However, I thought I saw that SEOMoz included it in a blog post somewhere. Perhaps if you email them they can tell you where? I just tried to find it and the only "Free" one I can seem to find is Wil Reynolds' presentation. I'll look around a little more and if I can find the link I'll send it.

Hi Sean, Good point, and this is a common issue with link metrics. I believe the metrics used to calculate most Moz metrics were recently tweaked and the models used to calculate them all adjusted by the in house data scientist, Dr. Matt Peters. I can't tell you exactly how every link is valued, but I can say that over time, Moz has tried to model thier metirics (MozTrust, DomainAuthority, MozRank) in ways that reflect real-world link metrics. That said, in spite of the great progress, it remains a game of cat-and-mouse game with Google. We can guess how Google values certain links, but Moz metrics are far more likely to count links that Google is likely to disregard. In the end, as you have discovered, you often have to use your own eyes and judgement when evaluating links past the initial qualifying stage.

Hi Thanks for your input. Screaming Frog looks like a very interesting tool. I will give it a go.

Hi! A while back Tom Critchlow wrote a great post on how to use tools and APIs to gather Social Media data, I think this would help you out: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-to-track-your-social-media-strategy. Check out the post then scroll down to the part about using Google docs to connect to APIs. I think you should be able to do the same thing for your site if you have some sort of feed for your products. Hope this helps! Jen

Alex is right... cannibalization is one the worst thing a site can commit. Personally, the KWs I focus on in the homepage are (or is) the query that most define the subject of the site itself. In your case, designer glasses is surely a good choice, as you are not focusing on any brand in particular. Eventually, but I am sure you know it, I would use a semantically related second query in the title to reinforce the main KW.

Sean - I share Rand' sentiments, thanks so much for the suggestion! We have considered distributed crawling in the past (or even distributed rank checking because then it would be in that user's locale) but there are a whole different set of challenges.  For example, you have to handle all the edge cases: what if a user's computer isn't on, or loses connectivity, what if we crawl too fast and the user gets blocked from a site, how do you write all that data securely? Of course all of these concerns can be overcome, but right now we feel like we have a good handle on the problems, and it will be much faster for us to just fix what we have Although, I know all of us are so appreciative of the ideas and support, and we will have something really great soon!

I don't think it's microformats. For one of my client sites I have Schema.org implemented on Product Pages but not the Category pages. One of the category pages ranks for a search and does show a list of products on the SERP Another of the category pages ranks for a search and does not show a list of products in the SERP. You can see for yourself here: Without product list: http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=espresso+cups&pws=0 (position 5, espressodeco.com) With product list: http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=espresso+cups+and+saucers&pws=0 (position 4) It appears Google is just using a list of products from some sites on each SERP.

aussie address on every page links from aussie websites likely to be your best bet personalisation - get people to google for your brand can you target to aus in webmaster tools from a co.uk? do you see any UK (or any foreign) websites ranking in aus for similar or competitive terms? Can you identify how they did it?

I was caught up in the wording. OSE lists the number of internal and external links for a website. But you also have to factor in where they are linking to. Links to spam sites is not a site you want to be associated with.

In my experience links on highly trusted sites are more valuable than links on low quality sites. I wouldn't stress too much about the number of outbound links on a page. An authoritative and editorial link on harvard.edu would be more valuable with 100 other OBL than a link on a lower trust site/page with only 10 obl. Of course this is only my opinion, many people disagree with me.

Like Daniel suggests I wouldn't use this as a long term strategy, to me it would send a pretty strong signal that the site is spammy. On the other hand, if you are comfortable with it, you could always give it a test and see what CTR difference you get.

In the case of 1. Would we not be as well building these new links directly to our main site? My theory is that if we acquire links to our old site, lets say to page widgets.com/shoecleaner then use anchor text on that page 'shoecleaner' then we will have relevancy built into the  link juice passed( by it flowing through a relevant page on the old domain). This juice would be better than if we simply 301'd??

Both yes and no. Yes, it's a linking strategy. PA 48 and dofollow-links. Nothing wrong with it. No, I wouldn't build links in that way. That notebook you linked to seemed to have bad structure and it was written spammy all over it. It would be intresting to see what other thoughts you mozzers have about this. I'm splitted in two.

Ensure you're present in all the meaningful local directories and join the relevant Australian industry organisations. Make sure your customers can contact you through Australian numbers and include your address or PO BOX if possible.