I think this is an excellent question. It's something that was in place where I am the in-house SEO when I came on board. After two years of kicking and screaming, I finally got buy off on doing away with the template. Here's why I didn't like it:

1. It caused a lot of duplicate content problems. We have products that might be alike in every way with the exception of a microphone frequency band. Often, this information wasn't included in the product name/title, and consequently, when it was used to populate the meta description "template" we ended up with tons of duplicates.
2. Problems with length. We had templated copy that worked just find for about 75% of our brands and products, but some of our brand names and products names were much longer, resulting in the templated descriptions being too long and getting truncated, totally defeating their own purpose.
3. Poor user experience. Many of our competitors use templated meta descriptions, specifically Sweetwater, Musician's Friend and Guitar Center. Nearly all of their descriptions are 100% identical with the exception of products swapped in and out. From a searcher's standpoint, this kind of sucks because it doesn't tell me anything interesting about the product.
4. Lost marketing opportunity - Are you really going to use the same marketing message for every single product on your site? That's a huge opportunity lost I think.

Okay, maybe if we were a huge brand like Sweetwater, it just wouldn't matter and we could get away with this because brand recognition would be strong enough to outweigh the fact that there was nothing of unique interest in the description...But, we aren't Sweetwater, so making every marketing opportunity count to us is crucial. We have about 3,000 SKUs, and a tiny marketing department. Somehow we're managing to crank out those unique descriptions just fine. 3,000 really isn't that many. If it does get to be too much, scaling this with freelancers would be extremely easy and cheap to do provided you lay down clear parameters for exactly what you want.

My advice? Take the time to add unique descriptions...oh, and forget about populating the meta keywords. You don't need to do that any more.

Hope that's helpful!

Dana

Hi Robert,

In general I would agree with Moosa, however, in this situation I think a drop-down menu is not the best choice. I think I understand why you want customers to be able to choose from the category page. It's most likely that there are a lot of colors to choose from, which means any drop down menu would be extremely long, and the presentation on the category page is quite attractive.

Yes, the individual product pages are duplicate content, so you have a few options. Since your main content and color choices really live on the category page, you could do as Travis suggested and use the category page URL as your canonical URL for all the separate color product pages. In addition to that, if your preference is really that potential customers find the category page first and foremost, and you really aren't that concerned with them finding a page for an individual color, you could add a rel="follow, noindex" attribute to those pages as well, which would keep them out of the SERPs. However, if you are wanting to rank for longer tail search terms containing individual colors, this may not be the way to go. In that case, simply using the canonical should work. Still, those individual product pages may end up in Google's supplemental index with you category page being the favored result.

All that being said, this scenario is extremely common on eCommerce sites. Keep in mind that there is no such thing as a duplicate content "penalty" per se. There may be negative fallout from situations like this, i.e. the wrong page ranking for a certain term, your crawl bandwidth being eaten up by many pages that are similar, etc. But I would make that secondary to the most important thing: What method will make it fastest and easiest for your customers to find exactly what they want? Do that, and then use some of the techniques mentioned to handle the SERPs.

Hope that helps!

Dana

Hi Theresa, First let me say, welcome to the best SEO community in the world. There are so many ways to build backlinks, that yes, if you read all the posts here, it will make your head spin. So, let me give you a link to the Mother of all link-building blog posts. I have this bookmarked and every time I feel "stuck" I go right back to it because I always find some new idea every time I read it.

http://pointblankseo.com/link-building-strategies

I guarantee you, you'll bookmark this and go back to it over and over andover and still never exhaust all the possibilities. Hands down, the best, most complete list of strategies ever. Now, I'm not saying there isn't stuff missing off this list. I'm just saying, if you completely exhaust this list, you're going to have one kick ass link profile!!!

Hint - Investigate Tynt.com first....a fascinating link-building tool. Free. Easy to use. Yes, it's on the list.

Hope this helps!

Dana

Hi Lisa,

I would argue that rubbish and waste can be completely fascinating to a certain audience...my boys for example, who are ages 14 and 10. They are completely amused by anything having to do with...welll..you know...

I recently saw a billboard here in town for a septic tank company that used the headline "Howdy Doody"

Yeah. I thought it was funny, but my boys thought it was hilarious. So hilarious that they kept talking about it for weeks. Guess who I called when I needed my septic tank cleaned out?

Need I say more? lol

Dana

Hi Godad,

Just from a basic usability viewpoint I wouldn't open that download page in a new tab. Depending on what browser you end user is using, that new page could cover up the old page and they won't even know it, and their back buttonwill be disabled, which could actually increase your site bounce rate.

I know Google uses opening in new tabs in their GWT forum all the time and also in GA and Adwords Help pages. It drives me crazy. Not having access to a working back button makes me feel like I'm not in control of navigating (from an end-user perspective) and that usually decreases my level of good will towards whatever site I might be on that employed the technique

Just my two cents!

Dana

I have heard good things about Webtrends but it's going to cost you, and implementation is doubtful if your site doesn't receive a certain amount traffic). I've used Clicktracks a little. Our IT guy loves it and the marketing team prior to my arrival hated it, so there is definitely some dissent there. Woopra is also a possibility, but Google Analytics is way better.

I had a painful (and very expensive) implementation experience with Coremetrics. I wouldn't recommend them to anyone under any circumstances.

I totally agree with your comment about Google devaluing their own product. I can only think of one reason why they would go ahead with their "not provided" plans....and that is that they are planning on charging for analytics data that will include the "not provided" keywords (and we'll all be queueing up to give them our $$$).

I am interested to hear from those using Omniture, with which I have no experience.

Yes! It was the Kotex campaign they did on Pinterest. Here's a link to the video: http://youtu.be/UVCoM4ao2Tw  Enjoy!

If you are posting, verbatim, your content might very well be attributed to Facebook instead of your site because Facebook has so much more authority than your site. If your ultimate goal is to rank for your content, then posting your content on your site and linking to it from Facebook is the way to go. If your goal is attention to your content, then perhaps posting it on your Facebook page and linking to your site is the way to go.

Is it duplicate content if posted in both places? Yes. You could put a canonical tag on your site, but if the content gets posted on a site of higher authority, chances are that site will get credit for the content, canonical tag or no canonical tag.

Expandable and collapible DIV's are just fine for SEO. They do a great job of accomplishing great design without compromsing content for SEO. Yes, Google can crawl that content just fine. Here's a link to a great webinar that specifically addresses some great Pro-Tips regarding how best to use these: http://www.seomoz.org/webinars/designing-for-seo

Hope that helps!

Dana