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Those links in 'Related Categories' are not required, not from an optimisation point of view nor a usability point of view - they carry no styling to make it obvious that they are links which can also flag elements when Google crawls your pages.

The 'Browse for more products in this category' section at the bottom of the page is also not required. There is uneccessary excessive use of internal linking which is likely to be considered 'over optimisation' by Google as per the latest algorithm updates.

Effective navigation is key in ecommerce websites, the main navigation and sidebar sub / layered navigation with necessary filters should be adequate in most cases. If you're only including additional linkage to try and rank pages higher for particular terms, then Google will detect this.

If your category structure goes quite deep or is relatively complex, consider including a module to display related categories in the same way you would display related products. In its current form though, it's not required, doesn't do your website any favours and will likely do more harm than good in the long run.

Consider checking our a click through overlay (Google Analytics provide one) where you can see just how many of your visitors are clicking through those links mentioned above.

Hope that helps.

Hi Michelle,

So you're 404'ing the old sitemap URL yet you've placed the new sitemap at the same location...? If you want to private message me your domain, I'd be happy to take a look for you.

There should be no need to 404 anything, just replace the old sitemap and Google will do the rest. Alternatively, just recreate the new sitemap index at a new location such as domain.com/sitemaps/sitemap.xml.

Thanks

It sounds obvious but in each account, are the Google localisation settings the same and the geo-targeting in the AdWords tool the same?

You may want to check out these three that I short-listed a while back, I carried out some research and gathered thoughts and recommendations and these were the three that I liked the sound of and am due to test out.

We also use Woopra for our real time analytics solution and they also have a live chat feature and allow you to initiate a chat with any visitor on your website too by the way.

This is where many misconceive the concept of guest blogging. If time is spent chasing algorithms, manipulating search engines and following through any process in the hope to get a backlink, it is unlikely that a) you are doing it right and b) that you will really be rewarded well.

As with anything online, a content strategy should be thought through, you should understand your target audience and know how to address the readers and what content to provide within articles. If the only reason for writing a guest post to get a backlink, then the article is probably only low quality drivel and will subsequently only find a home that is equally the same.

I for one would much rather spend the time creating a fantastic, well researched piece equipped with imagery, citations and the like and be rewarded with placement at a high traffic authority blog with a link back to my site that sends targeted traffic that may convert rather than a bland, uninteresting 500 word article at a blog that no-one reads. Of course, I'm not saying that this is what you do however think of it like this:-

Why should Google devalue weight passed through a link from an article published on a blog that receives plenty of traffic, has significant social signals and a high level of engagement. Just because it's a guest post doesn't indicate that the content is any less worthy than anything else online.

Sure, if the same author bylines and anchors in links are used each and every time, then it's going to be pretty easy for Google to spot - but then, if you're doing this, then you're going about it wrong anyhow.

Write quality, unique content, identify awesome blogs to publish at, encourage audience engagement and maximise social potential. Google will never devalue your efforts if you are only thinking about your audience and customers, that's the bottom line and always will be.

You may find this useful: Link Building Due-Diligence: The Guest Blogging Checklist

Sub domains act as their own domain essentially, a separate section which won't share weight unless specifically linked to. Sub domains are indexed in search engines separately to the root domain and subsequently, building links to these will influence ranking.

If you concentrate your efforts in ranking the root domain, this won't necessarily help your sub domain rank, if we were talking sub directories, then this would as flow of authority and weight can pass through the site. Treat the sub domain as it's own website and initiate it's own strategy for this space would be my recommendation.

Potentially quicker to rank well if you built back up on a fresh domain with no poor history, but that being said, whose not to know if Google have methods in place to identify if domain owners do this - potentially via comparing content, code and copy. You might end up redoing everything on your website just to be safe.

Sticking with the same domain just means that you have to build a relatively significant amount of natural links to bring down the same anchor text ratio vs total external backlinks in the profile - do-able though if you subscribe to a few blogs and regularly comment to articles and maybe write some content for publication at toy (or other related) blogs - ensuring that you avoid blog rings/link networks/farms though.

You're welcome Jonathan.

Feel free to see how a lot of other successful organisations implement this on their blogs on the web. Take Mashable for example, see their topics pages, these are essentially what blog articles are tagged with. Looks like they cut off their snippets at about 170 characters.

Also, ensure that you're using the canonical link element for blog article pages too to let search engines know that those are the originals and where you want the weight placed.

View your link profile here.

Links are mostly coming from unauthoritative sources and mostly contain the same anchor text. This will be what you have to work on, start building natural links with varying anchor text to counterweight the poor link profile and history on your domain.

View the source code when on the splash page and you will see that their entire site is there, this is what a search bot is seeing. View in browser and this triggers a splash screen overlay - really, the full website is there, you just can't see it.

Perfectly safe, perfectly legit.

Remove if you can but certainly start building new natural and genuine links to counterweight any previous negative signals on your website's link profile.

No, assigning multiple tags to multiple pages on your website is good practice. (Providing they are of relevance of course).

What you should think about doing is only displaying excerpts for tag / search result pages so that it doesn't flag as duplicate content. You don't need to be displaying the entire post(s) for a tag page, a small snippet with a 'Read More' or similar link will ensure the full original is only ever at one location, it's specific URI.

Google since released a 52 pack of updates since the roll out of Penguin and Panda 3.6 which you may have been stung by almost immediately after the first hit.

SEOmoz provide up to date change history of algorithm updates as soon as they are released.

Any backlinks you have which are associated to blog rings / networks - I would delete as many as you can. If the network has been identified and blacklisted by Google, then they'll be rolling out penalties for any domains that have used them. Parallel to this, build some natural links to balance out your link profile as soon as you can too.

To answer your question specifically, the 70 characters limit for page title recommendations is not important at all for "getting excellent search positions", it's a guideline because search engines won't pay much attention to anything after70 characters. It's not a ranking factor.

As Zeph points out, search results will only display the first 70 characters so anything longer than this won't be seen by your intended audience anyhow. Much more focus is giving for the beginning of page titles, and then it fades, the longer it gets - hence why it is recommended to structure your page titles in order of relevance and importance.

So page titles longer than 70 characters will not hurt search engine positions directly, but will prove more likely that their is wasted opportunity and contain stop words unnecessarily.

We are a creative design and development agency as well as a search marketing agency, we can build and develop ecommerce websites and look after all migration, hosting and configuration - we can manage everything basically. We are based in the UK though so unsure if you are looking for someone a bit nearer to you.

I also appreciate that it's not really a recommendation if we are pushing our own services to you so if I were to recommend another company that I have no affiliation with, in terms of anything Magento related, Inchoo would be my recommendation.

Glad you identified the setting, thought it looked something like that.

Site is looking a little better, is there any way you can change the layout of the product pages, perhaps putting the price and options alongside the image gallery or anything similar to that? Any kind of layout options available from the admin panel?

Appreciate your decision to stick it out with 3dCart for now, can sometimes prove a daunting task migrating to a new ecommerce provider - it should be a relatively smooth transition if you hire the right person/company if you decide to do so in the future though.

Happy to advise on your current site as required based on what the platform will allow you to do though.

It amazes me that there is still discussion about dofollow social bookmarking websites, article spinning, automated backlink sourcing and the like.

Focus your attentions on other efforts that matter, other efforts that will prove genuine, legitimate and natural.

Sure, if you feel a social bookmarking websites such as Mister Wong will drive targeted traffic to your website, go for it. The likelihood is, it won't. Social bookmarking has had it's day really, few of them are really great traffic drivers and even those that are, the value of the traffic is questionable.

I wouldn't recommend wasting your time on sourcing dofollow links only, it's not natural, it only indicates to a search engine that you're trying to game their system. A handful of relevant nofollow links that send traffic is going to prove far more useful than a handful of dofollow links from websites that no-one ever visits.

There are plenty of automated tools on the market to produce what you're after, but expect to get penalised further down the line.

Hi Bill,

Check out my response to this on your other question.

In response to the above, most free ecommerce templates are poor and unprofessional, it would be worth looking into hiring a designer that can build you a bespoke template, this would serve you better going forward.

It sounds like you are swaying towards self hosted solutions as per this and your replies on your other question - there will always be restrictions in your websites development with these solutions, I posted my recommendation for this though in the other thread.

No problem Bill, glad you sorted it - what was the cause in the end?

No it isn't, not really.

It's still not an open source platform which means you can't make any customisations to the code and you're limited to what the pre-built ecommerce templates they provide have to offer - and looking at a demo of theirs, the way the platform is built, is still far from good.

It's similar to 3dCart in this sense. It's self hosted meaning there are various fees for data transfer, limitations on quantity of products etc etc.

Our recommendations for both an open source platform and self hosted solution are as follows:-

Open Source: Magento - We're worked with pretty much every open source ecommerce platform there is, we've had issues and nightmares with most of them - very few are flexible and bug free however after 6 years of expertise in the ecommerce sector, I would recommend Magento every time (if it fits with your ecommerce requirements). It's free open source, very extendable, anything is possible and can be customised - all you need is a decent developer / agency that knows the software inside out. We generally charge anything from £1200 / $1900 ish for a Magento build depending on specifications (as an idea of costs).

Self Hosted: Liquidshop - If you want a solution that is fully looked after for you, managed, hosted, with a support department you can just contact when you require to action anything on your ecommerce website, then by an absolute country mile, I would recommend Liquidshop by Sitemakers (based in the UK). Monthly fees are involved (as with any self hosted solution) and may prove to be a bit steeper than others on the market but you get what you pay for, they are at the forefront of consistent development, well coded, well optimised, clean and correctly coded platform stacked with tons of features.

Ultimately, it comes down to budget and requirements, but these recommendations would be based on our experience within ecommerce - and we've worked with most providers.