Unless you read Practical eCommerce magazine, you are probably not aware that for the past six months I have had a column called SEO Report Card where I “deconstruct” an online store of an Internet retailer and provide some hard-hitting tips and bits of advice to improve their search engine visibility. Because the articles are password protected on the Practical E-Commerce site, they have been unavailable to most web users. That is about to change. I have gotten permission to re-post the articles on my company’s website. Over the next few weeks I’ll get them all posted. Here’s a sampling of my findings from the first site evaluation that I did in my column, of small specialty retailer BalancedLifeProducts.com: 

• URL on the home page immediately redirects to another more complex URL. In many cases, this causes PageRank dilution because PageRank doesn’t always flow from the first URL to the destination URL.
• Site is completely devoid of .edu or .gov inbound links. A quick check didn’t reveal any high PageRank authoritative pages linking to this site either. The site doesn’t even have a Yahoo directory listing. Furthermore, the inbound links include spam sites like ultimate-hgh-human-growth-hormone-releaser.com and wazoopoker.com. Apparently they participated in a link farm or signed up for a link spam campaign in the form of a “Submit to thousands of search engines for $99.” Ouch. The likely ranking penalties they are receiving will be hard to recover from.
• The links out include reciprocal links, some of which are totally off-topic. I would add a rel=nofollow to all the reciprocal or irrelevant links on the links page, so that no link gain (e.g. Google PageRank) is passed to those sites.

For the rest of the findings (nine bullet points in all), read the full article. ALSO… Over the next few days I’ll be working on the SEO Report Card for the July issue. Since the topic of my SEO How-To article for the July issue is blogs and SEO, the Report Card article will be evaluating the blog of an online retailer. If you’d like me to evaluate your blog and you’re an online retailer, then email me and I’ll consider you.