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easier way to do the same thing Jared. Thank you! Need to spend more time on visitor flow. Still doesn't answer how to track that as goal though.

second option is to use event tracking on your links on the landing page (use case dependent, I know).

_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'AdWords Conversion', 'Success', '/link-to-page-path']); (this is just an example)

From here, set up your goal based on this event which was recently added to Google Analytics.

I use this method with great success for a technology manufacturer website for tracking external clickthroughs to retail partner websites to track the dollar volume sales opportunity the manufacturer's website is driving to it's retail partners for online purchase.
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Here's a start. This is an advanced segment that will provide you with "show me all visits from "cpc" that are more than one pageview (non-bounce)." As I understand the question, this matches,with the exception that it's not exactly a goal. However the # visits should represent the goal #/count. Figuring out how to  make this into a goal now.

Thanks Gerd, Marisa & Nakul. All good feedback. I asked this yesterday with another layer pertaining to mobile and I think it complicated the question too much for anyone to understand or answer.

product.com/shop is the ideal solution and that will require the investment in a new "product.com".  Forgoing the SERP for buyproduct.com is likely the best option anyways considering it will be gone once investment is made.

Appreciate your responses.

Manufacturer product website (product.com) has an associated direct online store (buyproduct.com). the online store has much duplicate content such as product detail pages and key article pages such as technical/scientific data is duplicated on both sites.

What are some ways to lessen the duplicate content here? product.com ranks #1 for several key keywords so penalties can't be too bad and buyproduct.com is moving its way up the SERPS for similar terms.

Ideally I'd like to combine the sites into one, but not in the budget right away.

Any thoughts?

I have a website that has two issues related to SEO: 1) the main website (product.com) is not mobile-friendly and 2) I have a shopping cart site (buymyproduct.com) using Magento that basically duplicates our product pages that exist on the main marketing website. Uses click "buy now" on a product page and are sent to the checkout at "buymyproductnow.com".

The company cannot overhaul product.com website right away and our shopping site (buymyproduct.com) uses a responsive theme and works well for iphone and iPad so I am thinking of making buymyproduct.com the mobile-friendly version of our website by using a sniffer on product.com and forwarding users to the mobile friendly version.

If I add canonical references from the shopping cart product pages and articles back to product.com associated pages, will this lessen the blow to any seo issues? What other factors am I missing/need to consider

Complicated and painful. Maybe doing nothing right now is best.

Thanks for any feedback.

I've set up a new online store and prepping to roll out. I've implemented Amazon Cloudfront to host all of my static files:  images, style sheets, javascript files and small template related images to assist in speeding up this Magento site.

1. Any reason not to do this?

2. What are the SEO implications of having images that arent' stored on the same domain?

3. Does it make a difference if I refer to these files from the amazon cloudfront domain vs. seting up a subdomain like cdn.mywebsite.com?

Thanks for any feedback.

Yes, we have experienced this with our product SteriPEN as well. For our product/brand this is more noticeable in Google Shopping Search rather than Google search. To your point it does appear that these Sears listing are being aggregated from Amazon.com retailers. On the Sears website, OnlineSuperSeller is selling our Journey product at $270 and the retail price US for this product is $99.99.

Don't know where OnlineSuperSeller is getting our product from as we don't sell product to them.

Let's see what others post.

SteriPEN is a portable water purifier that kills viruses, protozoa, e-coli, etc.

Because of the technical and safety requirements nature of the product, our website has much documentation of testing, organisms affected, and more. These are in pdf form and can often be found through google search (and through links on specific pages).

Because of the keyword-richness of these documents pertaining to microbes SteriPEN kills, etc. does it make sense to convert these pdf's into html text and images?

Then I was thinking perhaps writing a blog post AND generating key links on important landing pages to these documents (as html).

Removing pdfs may be harmful? Not a clue as to the cost/benefit.

Thanks Shelly. My bad...2 different questions in the same question :}

My current CMS where steripen.com is, doesn't provide me ability  to integrate wordpress or any other blog tools. It's a standalone 3rd party cms platform.

Unfortunately the blogging tools are antiquated so short-term I am forced with subdomain. I decided to look at it that "I can provide my users with the best presentation and utility of info about SteriPEN by using the subdomain (and WordPress)." I'll have to live with the seo consequences for now until we overhaul steripen.com soon.

In terms of posting to the microblogs, this to me is like whoring content. Unless I can build the blogs in such a way that they are non-SteriPEN branded niche blogs focused on a topic, I just don't see it. And I don't have the time/money to invest in that right now.

Tim

before moving to pure ecommerce/digital marketing this year, I worked in digital news publishing for 15 years previously. During that time I was exposed to: Drupal, WordPress, home grown Cold Fusion CMS I built in the 90's (may it rest in piece), Ning, Tumblr, TownNEWS Bloxx CMS, the very expensive platform Clickability and Blogger.

I am in agreement with Ryan that WordPress is probably the simplest and easiest to get up and running quickly. Just set this up in 2 weeks: http://community.steripen.com

If all you need is to post content: text, images & video with some social media push capabilities, then you can be in business very quickly.

I loved Drupal but had a very difficult time getting it implemented live as customizations were time consuming/complicated (for me anyways) and outsourcing quality Drupal help was expensive. It's great for community building but might be overkill for blogging. Acquia has some great use-case builds that you might find useful to check out if you need more than basic blogging. Basically from a programming perspective it was over my head. That is just as much my limitation as the product. I also didn't find the blogging tools to be very robust. As I recall it required a lot of plugins to do some of the most basic things that wordpress does out of the box.

Three years ago I walked into a job where there were 5 Joomla installs pumping content for 1 newspaper in Utah. It was a nightmare for me. Joomla seemed like a big step backwards. to some degree though, these products have unique feature sets that are geared towards certain product dev groups so this is a very opinionated discussion for sure. By the time I left we had moved off Joomla to something called TownNews  Bloxx CMS which is overkill for you.

As I recently learned, be careful about setting up a new blog. All best practices here at SeoMoZ point to keeping your blog in a subfolder of your main site. Due to limitations of my cms, I wasn't able to do that short term.

I've read a lot of info here in the Q & A tonight and there was a thread that stated it's potentially a good thing to post content on multiple blog platforms such as:

1. blogger.com
2. posterous.com
3. wordpress.com
4. tumblr.com

I've also been trying to figure out how to deal with my blog as a subfolder instead of a subdomain. That research in Q & A clearly indicates that Google treats subdomains basically like separate websites and links from my blog to my main website will not be as valuable if i stay the course with my blog on a subdomain short term.

Given that, if the 4 blogging tools above all require the use of a subdomain, then how am I actually taking advantage of the seo value of blogger,posterous, tumblr?  In my case my domains would be:

• steripen.blogger.com
• posterous.tumbler.com
• steripen.wordpress.com
• steripen.tumblr.com

Just not adding up to being viable given what I read states these would be treated as new websites, not to mention I worry these posts, even slightly differentiated, would be suspect. Who am I truly benefitting by doing this? Users?

These are all great responses. In the coming months, we will be integrating the following URLS

steripen.com (custom cms), community.steripen.com (Wordpress blog) and buysteripen.com (Magento store) into the core domain of steripen.com.

Unfortunately we can't fold our GetSatisfaction implemention under the domain as well. will have to keep subdomain for that.

Not looking forward to the potential effects of this but all this feedback is greatly appreciated.

Thanks to all for the great feedback. I only wish I had read this last week. Unfortunately I created a subdomain. Unfortunately our primary domain is fairly antiquated and not conducive to blogging/social sharing, etc. (legacy to my arrival) so I guess in the  short/intermediate term I had no choice until we overhaul the website next year.

Great feedback. thank you so much Sha.

Thank you so much for your reply. Your info about page authority was telling. Holding technical issues as a controlled variable, If I can have an "add to cart" button on a page authority of 44 instead of page authority 1 and be able to control the content for a "best case scenario" for my users, I've got to believe that is a win-win for both the user and SEO.

To your point though, I worry we will lose our strong page authority on our product pages if we switch platforms (even if I am able to keep the URLS exactly the same).

THanks again for your help.

My favorite golf ball is the Srixon Tour Yellow ball. Srixon has a product detail page here  (www.srixon.com) AND there's also a product detail page here at shop.srixon.com.

Is there any sort of SEO penalty here because there's some duplication? Does the fact the store is a separate subdomain make this more allowable?

Many branded manufacturer websites work this way but it just doesn't make sense to me to have two product pages that you have to manage content when you can have just 1 with a call to action.

I also work for a branded manufacturer and am considering rebuilding our website from the ground up with the online store and the main/marketing website blended into one to eliminate this duplication. We have this same duplicated marketing/store setup as well.

any feedback is greatly appreciated.

Confused.