Des,
Sorry, I got distracted by Hopefully Harold's nonsense.... I forgot to include a response to something else you wrote....
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i'm proxying my astore via java so that I can do some transformations and make the content more effective from a user and SEO perpective |
If you're really doing this, and writing your own code, you're a smart person, right after my own heart. However I'm worried you've been seduced by the dark side of the scripts though, which is putting too much faith in your automatic SEO driven transforms that actually do nothing to help users.
I didn't look inside the source of your page to see what cool things you might have been doing. The best advice I can give you on SEO is to not let that trump providing unique content that is useful to users. Providing useful information to users is what every search engine webmaster guidelines advise. If your site, to a human reviewer, looks like just a clone of info available on Amazon, you could end up on the bottom of the SERPs.
Did you know that Google claims they have a staff of 10,000 human evaluators providing them feedback about what is on websites? If they come to visit (like I did), and it aint incredibly easy to find your unique content, (they'll spend much less time to help you than I have), you'll be at the bottom of their results without a second look. Did you know that many sites will instantly reject your site listing if it's main purpose is just to repost Amazon content? Hutcheson is the meta-editor I like to criticize the most, but to his credit he does clearly point out why this is human reviewers don't like to see yet another clone of Amazon
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Just simply cloning Amazon info, and remixing it up, did work for a long time. I know people who made tens of thousands of dollars over a course of years from websites that they built in month, and then forgot about, simply using remixed Amazon content. But Google and others have gotten really good at recognizing that, and penalizing it to the bottom of the stack.
Historically, unique content has always meant fresh text that you have personally produced and added to your website. The classic essay on this issue, "how to get to 10,000 visitors a day" by Brett Tabke has something like 26 steps. Practically every other step is almost the same "everyday add to your website new content that real users would want to read". The other steps that mention anything like SEO stop at not much more than just making sure the search engines can completely crawl your site.
Take a look at sites other associates mention in the footers of their messages. I trolled through a couple last night. While I thought some of their layouts looked like a ransom note of letters pasted from different magazines and newspapers, I know they are on the right track since despite the spammy advertising, because the core of their pages included lots of editorial content and unique information that only they could have written.
I'll leave it as a home work assignment for you to track down the sources for the things I've mentioned, the search "will do you good" (as the song says). Good luck and happy click streams!
