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Hi Ken,

Is the content actually exactly the same but running on different domains?  That will determine how to approach this issue.  If all the the content is the same you can either utilize 301 redirects or rel=canonical tags to help the engines view the multiple sites as a single site and combine any link juice that's associated with each of the 50 sites.  If the content isn't actually duplicitous then it or the page titles are extremely similar.  In the long run I would recommend localizing your content so as to not only help from an SEO perspective but to also improve the user experience and hopefully the conversion rates as well.

Rand has a great post that discusses proper site architecture to promote indexation.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/diagrams-for-solving-crawl-priority-indexation-issues

Basically you want to stick to four levels. Home page > Category Pages > Subcategory Pages > Product Pages.

If you stick to that you should be able to have all pages indexed.  I would definitely add the categories to the top nav and you may also want to include a best sellers type of category.  That would allow you to push your best selling items closer to the home page and hopefully increased rankings as well.

Given that we know there isn't any difference from an SEO perspective it comes down to purely external factors.  Some questions to think about...

1. Are people going to constantly link to the www version any way?
2. In a competitive space is one more eye-catching than the other?
3. What's more memorable to the visitor?

We are using actual rewrites and then using rel=canonical for all sub pages.

Working with a large number of duplicate pages due to different views of products.  Rewriting URLs for the most linked page.  Should rel=canonical point to the rewritten URL or the actual URL? Is there a way to see what the rewritten URL is within the crawl data?

I was taking the approach of rewriting only the base version of each page and then using a rel=canonical on the duplicate pages.  Can anyone recommend a better or cleaner approach?

Haven't seen too many articles on retail SEO when faced with a less than optimized CMS.

Thanks!

Hi Ken,

Is the content actually exactly the same but running on different domains?  That will determine how to approach this issue.  If all the the content is the same you can either utilize 301 redirects or rel=canonical tags to help the engines view the multiple sites as a single site and combine any link juice that's associated with each of the 50 sites.  If the content isn't actually duplicitous then it or the page titles are extremely similar.  In the long run I would recommend localizing your content so as to not only help from an SEO perspective but to also improve the user experience and hopefully the conversion rates as well.