We have repeated issues with one of our ecommerce sites not being crawled. We receive the following message: Our crawler was not able to access the robots.txt file on your site. This often occurs because of a server error from the robots.txt. Although this may have been caused by a temporary outage, we recommend making sure your robots.txt file is accessible and that your network and server are working correctly. Typically errors like this should be investigated and fixed by the site webmaster. Read our troubleshooting guide. Are you aware of an issue with robots.txt on the Shopify servers? It is happening at least twice a month so it is quite an issue.

Hi Mozzers, Just reading up on Google Analytic's Terms of Service and wondering if collecting post codes / zip codes (from a website's 'Find my nearest...' tool) adhere's to the following: "You will not (and will not allow any third party to) use the Service to track, collect or upload any data that personally identifies an individual (such as a name, email address or billing information), or other data which can be reasonably linked to such information by Google." What do you think?

Hi Mozzers, I'm delivering some Google Analytics (Fundamentals level) training, and trying to make it was fun and as interesting as possible... which is quite a challenge when it comes to GA. I was just wondering if you're aware of training tasks, or interactions, I could bring into this kind of training session? The group are particularly interested in user journeys and the effectiveness of content. Thanks!

I think Keyword Explorer was only providing search volume data for the US (whereas difficulty and opportunity were available at a country level) but recently I've started to see differences between the US volume data and the UK (see examples attached). Does this mean Keyword Explorer is now providing accurate volume data for the UK and other countries? DEIKsVJ 5kels

Is it possible to force Google to use only the Meta description put in place for a page and not gather additional text from the page?

Hi Mozzers, What does Google think about a press release, appearing on lots of websites (relevant websites) as part of a link building campaign. Does the fact that this press release content is duplicated across lots of sites have a negative impact? Thanks in advance

Hi Mozzers, We're working on a website for a manufacturer who allows retailers to reuse their product information. Now, this of course raises the issue of duplicate content. The manufacturer is the content owner and originator, but retailers will copy the information for their own site and not link back (permitted by the manufacturer) - the only reference to the manufacturer will be the brand name citation on the retailer website. How would you deal with the duplicate content issues that this may cause. Especially considering the domain authority for a lot of the retailer websites is better than the manufacturer site? Thanks!!

Hi everyone, We are working on an e-commerce site that has three different physical stores that each hold different products in stock. A listing is created on the website for each product in each location but if the same product is in all three stores the images and description are duplicate content We can't have one product page and tag locations to it as this would then require keeping two different stock systems updated, but is there a way to avoid the three pages being duplicates of each other? Many thanks for the advice!

Hello all, Is anybody experiencing blanck page's in Google's 'Cached' view? I'm seeing just the page background and none of the content for a couple of my pages but when I click 'View Text Only' all of teh content is there. Strange! I'd love to hear if anyone else is experiencing the same. Perhaps this is something to do with the roll out of Google's updates last week?! Thanks,
Elias

Hello, We are looking at creating an eCommerce section to a website and we are just weighing up the options: Magento - host on hour own server - great but it can often be very slow when hosting a shared server. Shopify - hosted solution but hosting is in the US and we are in the UK and shop will be hosted on a subdomain as a result Build our own solution - time consuming and costly There are two issues that have arisen from this situation.... Is it worse for SEO to host your store in a different country or to host in your country but your store potentially run slower? I'm swaying to the side of the argument that says give your users a good and fast experience instead of worrying about where you host the store. Bearing in mind that the main website will be hosted in the UK anyway and it is just the subdomain that will be hosted in the US. Just wondered if anybody has had experience with this or if I'm missing something? All feedback greatly appreciated! Thanks, Elias