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So in a nutshell this is how I list out products at present but I don't group size just colours, we then have related items linking through to there sizes. Egyptian Bath Towels (15 colours) Alt tags all contain colour as well. Egyptian Bath Sheets (15 colours) A lot of food for thought there. For me, the key is to find the one person who can write the content hit that sweet spot. The search continues! Egol, thanks for all your advice.

Theres me being all organised and giving each advert a header! Thanks for the pointer!

My pleasure, thanks Craig, currently on the Isle Of Wight is lovely !

If I'm (we're) understanding your situation correctly, then I'd have to agree with Mike. You should 301-redirect all of the versions, not "chain" the canonical to a 301. That's going to produce very unpredictable results at best.

Hi, Thanks for the video, a novelty to say the least. Again I think your response just further justifies the changes i am going to make to the primary nav. Thanks again. Regards Craig

Thanks tom for all your help. Regards Craig

Hi Craig, Why not create an awesome kick butt 404 page with links that can direct people to pages that they are looking for?  This way, if your audience is interested, they can continue to navigate your site from your 404 page and you keep all the link juice to your 404 page.  Your 404 page might be one of the top visited page so you should take this opportunity to include links to direct people to the right pages they might be looking for. One reason 301 redirect may not be good is because if someone clicks on a backlink to your stie and you redirect all your 404 traffic to your home page.  It might turn people off for sending them to your home page when they thought the link is directing them to something they are interested in.

Hi John, Many thanks for the answer. I thought it had to be something similar to that which you have detailed. A great Help and thanks again.

I think you are right here, however the pages have links from sites we now probably don;t want from a  link build perspective. I am concerned that these links (mainly low PR sites, forums etc) may do more harm than good so to funnel any link juice they have may be more damaging. Any other suggestions here?

Hi Simon, Understood. These pages are category list pages so when a new category is product the template pull that data in. So the majority of page we are using to rank end with this catlist (70/80 categories). URLS are auto generated based on the category titles and product titles.

Hi Marcus, OK I can tell you what I know as I only got involved on this the summer, some 12 months after the SEO contract finished with the old web provider, nothing actually happened thereafter. I don't think we are working off a penalty, however we did have a lot of problems when the new site was launched last november with duplicate data 1000's of 301 redirects, 2500 pages 404'ing etc. This has only resolved it's self int he last 4 to 6 weeks after a lot of heart ache and dropped revenue. 404's are at 840ish and dropping daily now, duplicate content is down to 28 urls and dropping too. All because of bad advice hence why  we are now looking after things in house. Competition are your Amazons, Marks & Spencer, towels.co.uk, Christie Towels, Linens limited. I think we can better some of these for sure. In terms of link build previously I have no idea how this was done. There was no blog, no social media (still none but looking at this) so I guess normal linking building routes. There link profiles are massive in comparison to ours and i wonder how many we have lost because of all these bad 404 pages etc. So i would like to capture and re-direct anything that got value before the fall away for good. I have tried signing up to link detective but they are not send a authorisation email so can;t gain access frustratingly. Any more info i can provide let me know. Thanks Craig

Hi Craig, Have you looked through our Recommended Companies section here at SEOmoz? Some wonderful companies listed. seomoz.org/article/recommended

No problem Craig. Well, if you do need some help with your social, I can help you there. Send me a private message if you want some more info on what we offer. Matt.

Hi Oleg Sorry I did not respond sooner. I missed your reply! Those site are really useful. We are going to get some nice articles written up that we can post to out blog and link a plenty back through to our main site so I will see how that goes. Social media is something we are yet to touch and know how important is to get on with it. It will come once we have some more of the main site optimised and ranking better than it currently is.

I'm glad to help. If the visits are not organic or referral then I wouldn't worry too much about this.

Hi Mat. OK I had optimized this page for "Turkish cotton bath towels" and "Turkish bath Towels". That said, it still had 47 instances of the keyword in alt tags and a further 16 instances on the page. I can see why and where the extra instances are being generated unnecessarily which can be addressed when the product page is redesigned. As for the lat tags this is beyond me as to why its generating these so many times. BTW, your helps really been useful. This is relatively new to me (2 months working on this site actively) and so much has come to light that you just wouldn't ever ask unless you get "hands on".

It is because you have many ALT-tags in your source code. I can count 92; however, not all of them have any description.

Sounds like the best solution is to alter the template & eCommerce system you are using to allow for that functionality. Anything else would be a hacky workaround that violates the 'Is this for search engines, or users?' rule. Looks like you are running an ASP-based solution. I'll be of no help there

Thank you Justin. These things are sometime so obvious and blinker you when you stare at the site all day. Thanks again for the help.

Hi Marcus. That sounds like a good Strategy. I am going to look at different structure on our dev site and see what works best overall from both technical and more importantly the customers point of view. I'll definitely have a look at he apps you mentioned. They seem really interesting. Once again, many thanks for your advise. Really helpful indeed Regards Craig