X-Cart forums

[Readerm]

Originally Posted by JacksmithxD

I just hope you're not hiring a fake 'SEO man' as there are so many noobs out there.

Well, I don't know yet. There are indeed many people and companies poking us, especially from India. We tried initially couple of them. They looked professional in their presentations, but results didn't work out.

Still looking for a good SEO one...

[Jon]

SEO Rule #1. Never hire a company that cold-calls you are cold-emails you. People who do SEO real well typically do not need to seek work.

Michael, please allow up to 2 business days for a response on pre-sales questions. I will address that for you today.

CDSEO when installed initially will import any custom meta data and after that will override X-Cart when the page loads for customers. Meta descriptions aren't a ranking factor so wouldn't have any impact on rankings and wouldn't result in a penalty either. You seem to have over 6500 backlinks originating from 5 domains almost all with the same anchor text, which is likely triggering a Penguin penalty. You should start by removing the link to www.istok.ca in your news as it could be the likely culprit.

Jack, CDSEO is compatible with Rich Snippets Module as of CDSEO 1.9.1 released yesterday. I've contacted you on skype with regard to licenses.

[Jon]

Originally Posted by Jon

You should start by removing the link to www.istok.ca in your news as it could be the likely culprit

... and probably your x-cart forum signature also.

[Readerm]

Originally Posted by Jon

Michael, please allow up to 2 business days for a response on pre-sales questions.

Great. I actually thought it was a past-sale question since the payment went through.

Originally Posted by Jon

You should start by removing the link to www.istok.ca in your news as it could be the likely culprit.

Oh, thank you. We'll do. But imagine, nobody among a handful of SEO-people who inspected the site and worked for us has ever brought up this issue!..

[Readerm]

Jon,

Actually, upon second thought I still think it is weird. May be because of that reference to istok.ca we were not that high, but still listed. Something happened to 'candle stands' keyword after that SEO man made alterations and posted the article. For some keywords we'been always at top-3 (greek cassock, russian cassock). You think that istok.ca could influence just some keywords? This is a sincere question.

[Jon]

You are being penalized almost certainly as you can see if you search Google for site:www.istok.ca

You should log into your Google Webmasters account and look for a message.

You can search google for "recovering from google penguin" and read this article http://www.seomoz.org/ugc/recovery-from-google-penguin-tips-from-the-trenches

[Readerm]

Thank you, Jon, for the great article. It's mentioned there, as I understand it, that including category names in product URLs generates low quality links and is detrimental to ranking. What is your opinion?

Whom would you recommend for SEO these days?

Sincerely,

Rd. M.

[Jon]

Including category names in product urls isn't detrimental necessarily, but it lowers the keyword density of the url and relevance to the actual product page which isn't beneficial.

http://seobraintrust.com/ has great resources for learning SEO.

http://highrankings.com/ has always provided good SEO.

Conor's wife (Hands On Web Hosting) is now doing SEO and while I haven't experienced any of her work first hand she does seem to have a solid understanding of real SEO. http://www.bigredseo.com/

Of course don't forget about our SEO review as mentioned in my signature http://www.websitecm.com/seo/seo-website-review.html

[not_so_young_greg]

Looks like CDSEO replaces navigation line on product page with its own, based on products main category.

This is an issue if one has the same product in two or more categories. Say you are in "training gear" category and click on a "blue t-shirt". Product page opens ok but navigation line reads "T-shirts > blue t-shirt" instead of "training gear > blue t-shirt", because the main category of "blue t-shirt" is "T-shirts".

Is there a way to correct this so nav line displays current category?

[Jon]

BCSE offers an "Advanced Breadcrumb" module: http://www.bcsengineering.com/store/advanced-breadcrumbs.html

Query string based content can be a real problem for SEO rankings, which is why CDSEO consolidates the content under one url and one page content.