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Thank you Mike, Thomas and EGOL for your advice. You have confirmed my fears that there is no good way to do it since it is indeed kind of a link farm. I will give him the advice to not link the webshops together as you suggested

Thanks again

I wouldn't work on the webshops and they would not consist of only one page. From what i gathered every webshop will evolve a theme and have at least 5 different categories of products.

I was surprised by the amount of webshops too. The webshops were very diverse in product categories from what he told me. Still i have a hard time believing that he wants that much.

Aside from that, i'm still curious what would be the best approach to link these websites together.

Thank you for the reply

You could use this extensive guide: http://moz.com/blog/how-to-perform-the-worlds-greatest-seo-audit

If after this guide you still have questions let me know and i would be happy to help you with that

Fellow mozzers,

Today I got an interesting question from an entrepreneur who has plans to start about 100-200 webshops on a variety of subjects. His question was how he should like them together. He was scared that if he would just make a page on every website like: www.domain.com/our-webshops/ that would list all of the webshops he would get penalised because it is a link farm.

I wasn't sure 100% sure which advise to give him so i told him i needed to do some research on the subject to make sure that i'm right.

I had a couple of suggestions myself.

1. Split the amount of pages by 3 and divide them into three columns. Column A links to B, B links to C and C links to A. I realize this is far from ideal but it was one of the thoughts which came up.

2. Divide all the webshops into different categories. For example: Webshops aimed at different holidays, webshops aimed at mobile devices etcetera. This way you will link the relevant webshops together instead of all of them. Still not perfect.

3. Create a page on a separate website (such as a company website) where the /our-webshops/ page exists. This way you only have to place a link back from the webshops to this page. I've seen lots of webshops using this technique and i can see why they choose to do so. Still not ideal in my opinion.

That's basicly my first thoughts on the subject. I would appreciate any feedback on the methods described above or even better, a completely different strategy in handling this. For some reason i keep thinking that i'm missing the most obvious and best method.

Thank you Paddy, Carla and bradley for your answers.
For everyone else, this thread is not so much of a question, but more of a discussion of what YOU think is the best and why you think so. Would be cool to see some people's opinions and experiences with different CMS's.

Don't forget that I am from Holland and that a lot of the American directories do not work for for Holland. But thank you for the advice.

I know what Local SEO can do for your business:)
My question is however whether the small local listing directories are worth spending time and effort on.

The reason i'm asking this is that i got a discussion with some quite recently on the subject of how important the smaller local listing directories are towards your ranking in both the normal search results and in the local search results.

Thank you for responding

So if i understand your answer correctly. You think that the smaller local listing directories are not worth the time and effort or they do not provide any benefit at all?

Hello fellow mozzers,

I would like to start a discussion on whether certain local listing directories are worth it.

Most people are of course familiar with Google+ Local(Google Places), Yahoo Local, Bing Local, Yelp, Hotfrog etcetera..

I know there are a lot more of these big local listing directories.

I am situated in Holland and we have a lot of small local listing directories.
Some of these directories are not really good quality. For example:
http://dordrecht.cylex-bedrijvengids.nl/bedrijf/pizza-presto-dordrecht-12014914.html

This domain is filled with ads in prominent locations. They have a domain authority of 44 and as far as i can tell there are close to 0 reviews on companies. (So not a very active community).

When you perform SEO for a local business you want the business to be found in the local search results. Google goes around the web to see if the business information (contact and address information, website etcetera) is consistent on different local listing directories. The links from the directories are still links and therefor they pass a certain amount of PageRank.

How much value do you think local listing directories such as the links i will provide below will add to a business? Do you think it is worth the time to find these small directory sites and fill in information about the business there or is your time better spent on other SEO activities?

I would love to hear your input on this subject

Links

http://dordrecht.cylex-bedrijvengids.nl/bedrijf/rietveld-doe-het-zelf-j-10800715.html
http://adviesbureaus.zoekeensop.nl/0392908-parket-expertise-bureau-etten-leur/
http://www.allewinkels.net/ijzerwaren-en-gereedschap/rotterdam/henk-schell-ijzerwarenhuis/

Hello fellow mozzers,

I have a lot of experience with Magento and a little bit of experience with Prestashop and i am quite aware of their strengths and weaknesses regarding SEO.

I was wondering which E-commerce CMS is the best for SEO. I am talking about the CMS as you download it. There are hundreds of plugins for the popular systems which improve their SEO power tremendously, but i'm interested in which CMS is the best right out-of-the-box.

Let me know what you think and why you think so.

Thanks in advance

I agree with you up to a certain level. I don't think using blog posts is a lazy or uncreative way. People like to subscribe for to RSS feeds to keep up with the latest content. I don't know if Ben will keep posting after this set of 50 new pages/posts, but i think saying that it is lazy and uncreative to 'slam' in into blogpost is a bit rude.

If the different h1 tags are all about different subjects and they are in different sections then i think there should be no problem.:)

If you mean cancel the Moz subscription. There is a button on the billing screen (on the right).

https://moz.com/users/subscription

Did this answer your question?

I see a link to http://www.odin-groep.nl/Home/ctl/OverOdin/OverOdin/HeutinkICT.aspx from http://www.odin-groep.nl/Home/ctl/OverOdin/ReindersICT.aspx.

It's the bottom left block which causes this link. This way you will get a big nesting effect.

Which URL(s) is/are causing problems?

You don't necessarily have to remove the link. As long as you can verify that it directs to the right page.

But curious to see what caused the problem

Are you somehow linking to www.website.com/dogs/dog.html from the page itself? There could be something wrong with that link.
I made a small mistake not so long ago with a redirection plugin. I told it to go to domain.com. This plugin was looking at the base + what i told it to. So it went to: domain.com/domain.com. Perhaps you made a similar mistake.

Maybe you can send me the URL and i can take a look at it?

If you are really sure that there are mistakes in the software then you should probably contact the Moz Technical Support.

If you contact them and together you will find something out let me know what the outcome is.

What is your exact question?

It could be possible that you dropped ranking around the penguin 2.0 update. It doesn't necessarily have to do anything with penguin though. It could be that the user engagement around this area on your site has been less good because for example the information is out of date.

I could take a look at your site and see if i find anything which could have caused this if you give me the url and the set of keywords you have dropped ranking for.