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Is the comment on each page, or is there a sidebar saying "[You] commented on a post", or something to that effect?

If the actual comment is on each page, it's something wrong with the site and it'll disappear when the admin corrects it.

If the other option, then it should also show several other commenters - it shows the latest comments and yours will be removed when enough people comment to push you off of that list.

I often see sites offering a discount for liking their Facebook page, but very rarely do I see sites offering a discount for sharing a link or their page. What are your opinions of this, is it something that Facebook could frown upon? Are people likely to just share, get the discount and then remove the post etc?

People often have more than just one interest and writers will often be interested in writing about more than one subject - I have no basis for this, but it seems logical that Google should be fine with it. I would think that as long as the content is good then you'll be fine.

While I'm personally against It I have seen it used. I would think that Google might see this as some degree of keyword stuffing, rather than a 'natural' title, which may hinder ranking. What are your thoughts?

Yes, to put it simply.

The company I work for has several new clients and over the last few months what I've noticed is that the two biggest ones (with more than 10,000 & 15,000+ products each) have exploded in popularity, attracting over 20,000 visitors in the last month since their sites went live at the start of the year. These clients are finding it an absolute doddle to reach the top 5/10 fairly fast.
This is compared to almost a dozen clients who have less than 150 products each and who are still struggling to reach 10% of the popularity of the newest ones, even after a year or more of being online. These clients seem to take 6 months or more to rank for even simple keywords.

Another thing I've noticed is that we have one client who restocks only once a year - as their stock levels go down and product pages are taken offline, progressively so does the traffic go down and their rankings slip.

Ok, What I'll have to try is our other marketing methods first and leave this to a kind of 'last resort' practise. If you think it's a bad idea, I'll steer clear as much as possible - It seems to be used by most of our competitors (especially our biggest one) so I suppose it's only a matter of time before they're penalised for this.

Thanks

Thanks Billy,

I'll try wording it without so many keywords then and keep an eye on how the rankings for different long tails go.
Don't get me wrong - I definitely understand quality over quantity (the point of our products themselves is quality over quantity - a premium above what you can get elsewhere), there's just so much to say that this requires a kind of 'quantity for quality' approach, if you know what I mean. It'd be very easy to write 2,000 words of quality and useful content for this specific product and still have a boatload of stuff left unsaid which could persuade the visitor to convert.

Hi,

I'm currently in the process of optimising a new ecommerce site with tons of content.
We're really well-researching our information and are aiming for one page a week, so each page (such as category pages etc) is getting 5-7 days of research before the content is written, so that we know our info is correct and that more than enough content is available, rather than a simple 300-500 word article.
One category page in particular has the potential for maybe 4,000-6,000 words, or even more (I don't want to hit that, as it's not needed, but I'd like to go into enough detail about enough things to bring us up on top as the market leader) - Our biggest competitor is currently hitting around 2,500 words on the category page for their site and they're ranking for a lot of long tails. (Of course they're also getting a lot of links too!)
To put it simply, we have a better quality product and a range of options (we're one of the first [if not the first] in the UK to have several options for this product where you have the choice of going for the cheap option, or going for higher priced and better quality options etc), whereas our main competitor simply has one stand alone product. By default this gives us much more to work with regarding potential content.

While building this site we haven't bothered to consider 'keyword density', as we're going for as white-a-hat as possible, but when it comes to long tails I'm finding that I may have to consider it for this page at least.
We have a few dozen long tails such as 'Where does X come from', 'Why is X so expensive', 'What is the difference between X and X' etc - You know the kind of keywords.
To help specifically with the long tails we've opted to include a FAQ section to that category page, but it seems that by doing this I have accidentally gone up to ~3% density on the 'X', which I suppose isn't too bad, but at the same time that one keyword has already made ~30 appearances in the content - and all we have done so far is the FAQ section.
I'm going through now and rewording it so that it's less 'keywordy' (although there does seem to be a limit to the number of times to can say 'it' before that starts to sound odd..), but was just wondering how you manage to write a long and detailed piece of content that is all specifically about one thing, without having to use that one keyword too many times, while also hitting plenty of long tails at the same time?

Thanks Marie for your feedback,

Obviously we want to be as squeaky clean as possible. Our biggest competitor is a very big  and well-known company - they rank very well for some big keywords and one of their main sources of links at the moment is these product giveaways in exchange for a review and a link. I think any Googler could see that they are sending free products in exchange for links, as they're getting ALOT of links doing this.

I don't think I've seen that part of Google's guidelines about offering free products - I don't know how I've missed that!
It's a marketing method we can't ignore, so I'm trying to think of different ways we can do it so that it doesn't get too dangerous. Perhaps if we sent out maybe one free sample a week to a blogger who we know writes reviews, then rather than asking for a link, just ask for their opinions (as Chris suggested above) and hope for a review with a natural link, then that might be better, as there's no link being requested and it's not too aggressive on a large scale.
We'll try anything to make this method as natural looking as possible.

Regarding the second note about reimbursing purchases - another idea we had for this was to do the same, but offer people the chance to write a review for us to post to our site. We could add a 'customer reviews' section to our blog and include those there, which of course would be more detailed and more engaging than the regular 'Write a review' section on the product pages. This doesn't involve links as the content would go on our site, so there's no risk of a penalty (that I know of, other than Panda, which we'd ensure it's good content first), so I was just wondering what your opinion of that would be?

Thanks very much !

I might do a sort of A/B test with this kind of thing and see what happens - Ask 20 people for a review and ask 20 people (who I know already do reviews) if they'd like some free samples, to see how it goes. Probably a bit pointless, but if there's any way I can try to get our links looking as natural as possible then I'll give it a go

Thanks for the response Frank - It's good to know you were in the same situation and what you decided on is working for you. Good point about ranking multiple pages too, that would make us seem more authoritative if that happened.
Leaning a little more towards the blog posts

Hi David,

We'll be making sure to mix in plenty of other marketing so will hopefully be able to gain some links to water the 'sample-links' down a bit.

Thanks

Hi Chris, thanks for the response.

I actually meant that we would be asking for reviews, but just not for specific anchor text. So the reviewer could link to us however they want, or not at all - As long as we get our name out there.

We also had one more idea which I'll make a note of in the OP.

Thanks

One of our main methods of advertising for my startup business is by sending samples to bloggers for review. I've read a lot of good things about this method and many of my competitors use it very well - I've even seen it suggested on the Moz blog several times in the past.

The one thing I do worry about is that Google may see this as a form of 'link purchasing', as I'm offering something in exchange for a link and some of the blog posts may reference that fact (or at least most likely use the word "Review" - Which could be some kind of footprint?).
We don't intend to ask for anchor texts, so at the very least that should look natural.

What are your opinions? Could this be seen as paid linkbuilding or is it regarded as a natural marketing method?

[EDIT]:
One idea we had was to potentially offer bloggers the chance to earn a portion of their purchase back by writing a review on their blog. They'd buy from us and let us know they have a blog, then we'd reimburse them some credit towards their next order for every blog post they write about us. Does this sound like a good idea or is this potentially more dangerous than simply offering free samples?

Hi,

We have around 40 products which we can produce plenty of in-depth and detailed "how to"-type pieces of content for. Our current plan is to produce a "How to make" style post for each as a long blog post, then link that to the product page. There's probably half a dozen or more of these kind of blog posts that we could do for each product.

The reason why we planned on doing it like this is that it would give us plenty of extra pages (blog posts) on their own URL which can be indexed and rank for long tail keywords, but also that we can mention these posts in our newsletter. It'd give people a new page full of specific content that they can read instead of us having to say "Hey! We've updated our product page for X!", which seems a little pointless.

Most of the products we sell don't get very many searches themselves; Most get a couple dozen and the odd few get 100-300 each, while one gets more than 2,000 per month. The products don't get many searches as it's a relatively unknown niche when it comes to details, but searches for the "categories" these products are in are very well known (Some broad terms that cover the niche get more than 30,000+ searches a month in the UK and 100,000+ world wide) [Exact].
Regarding the one product with more than 2,000 searches; This keyword is both the name of  the product and also a name for the category page. Many of our competitors have just one of these products, whereas we're one of the first to have more than 6 variations of this product, thus the category page is acting like our other product pages and the information you would usually find on our product pages, is on the category page for just this product.

I'm still leaning towards creating each piece of content as it's own blog post which links to the product pages, while the product pages link to the relevant blog posts, but i'm starting to think that it may be be better to put all the content on the product pages themselves). The only problem with this is that it cuts out on more than 200 very indepth and long blog posts (which due to the amount of content, videos and potentially dozens of high resolution images may slow down the loading of the product pages).

From what I can see, here are the pros and cons:

Pro (For blog posts):
1. More than 200 blog posts (potentially 1000+ words each with dozens of photos and potentially a video)..
2. More pages to crawl, index and rank..
3. More pages to post on social media..
4. Able to comment about the posts in the newsletter - Sounds more unique than "We've just updated this product page"..
5. Commenting is available on blog posts, whereas it is not on product pages..
6. So much information could slow down the loading of product pages significantly..
7. Some products are very similar (ie, the same product but "better quality" - Difficult to explain without giving the niche away, which i'd prefer not to do ATM) and this would mean the same content isn't on multiple pages.
8. By my understanding, this would be better for Google Authorship/Publishership..

Con (Against blog posts. For extended product pages):
1. Customers have all information in one place and don't have to click on a "Related Blog posts" tab..
2. More content means better ability to rank for product related keywords (All but a few receive very few searches per month, but the niche is exploding at an amazing rate at the moment)..
3. Very little chance of a blog post out-ranking the related product page for keywords..

I've run out of ideas for the 'Con' side of things, but that's why I'd like opinions from someone here if possible. I'd really appreciate any and all input, Thanks!

[EDIT]:
I should add that there will be a small "How to make" style section on product pages anyway, which covers the most common step by step instructions. In the content we planned for blog posts, we'd explore the regular method in greater detail and several other methods in good detail. Our products can be "made" in several different ways which each result in a unique end result (some people may prefer it one way than another, so we want to cover every possible method), effectively meaning that there's an almost unlimited amount of content we could write.
In fact, you could probably think of the blog posts as more of "an ultimate guide to X" instead of simply "How to X"...