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I'm afraid there's no perfect solution. The canonical tag probably is the best bet here - the risk of letting thousands of near-duplicates into the index is much greater than the cost of not landing people on specific colors.

Keep in mind that, once Google removes the color variants, only the "master" product page will appear in search. So, users won't really come into the site with a color intent (except in their heads). Whether that's good or bad for usability isn't clear. On the one hand, it would be nice to rank for every color and have users with a color in mind land on that specific product. On the other hand, some users don't have a color in mind (they know what they like when they see it), and landing on the main product pages shows them all available options. It really depends on your customers, but there are pros and cons, in terms of usability and conversion.

There's no magic Option #3, though - I'm 99% confident saying that. The risks of indexing all color variants post-Panda are relatively high, and I think you'll gain more from consolidating than you'll lose by leaving them all.

Looks like we had a minor bug and it got fixed last night - you should be able to see the duplicates now. I checked out a couple, and we're crawling a few tracking parameters in URLs, such as:

utm_source=enews&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=enews20120117

Looks like these might be links in an e-mail newsletter? The good news is that Google is pretty good about ignoring these, and it looks like your canonical tag is properly configured. I think we may be reporting these too aggressively. As far as I can tell, you should be ok.

As long as the no-cookie variations stays the same, I don't see much practical difference. Either way, the default behavior is equivalent, and users see different content based on geo-location. What Google sees should be essentially the same, and any human editor who looks at the page should realize this is geo-tagging and not any kind of cloaking or deceptive practice.

That said, I haven't used this specific tactic, so I'll leave the question open for discussion if community members want to chime in.

So, essentially, you have snippets from various sources that all appear on one page? Unfortunately, no, there's no way to signify syndicated content from more than one source. Both the canonical tag and the syndication-source tag can only be used once, to the best of my knowledge. If you use it multiple times, Google will just ignore the additional tags.

Just picking one source and cross-domain canonicalizing should solve the immediate risks and SEO issues, even if it isn't 100% correct. Syndication is a topic Google is really only beginning to handle well, and there are a lot of gray areas that the current solutions don't cover.

The other option would be to just META NOINDEX those pages, but that depends on their value and the structure of the site. Whether you NOINDEX or canonicalize them, you're basically knocking them out of search results.

There's no limit on search impressions - there are limits on the number of pages Google may be willing to crawl, and more indexed pages can drag down your ranking power for other pages, but you can have all the Google traffic you want, theoretically.

The biggest issue is that you could be losing decent visitors and you could lose the strength of inbound links if you cut this page off. If there's a more relevant page, then you could 301-redirect (as Ennovation) suggested, but it depends on the situation.

Why don't you like the page? Is it irrelevant to your site, or just not a great page (and one you'd like to update)? Are these visitors worthless, in a broader, conversion sense, or are they just not being driven to action well? There's a lot you could do to channel these visitors better, depending on the situation, but cutting them off cold is just throwing away a potentially valuable resource, IMO.

Unfortunately, I haven't heard of many certifications that the industry respects. I think the MarketMotive program is a good one, but that's more for the training than the piece of paper, IMO.

It really depends on your goal. If it's for clients or your employer, get the certifications they value. It's all about perception, in that case. If it's for selling your services directly, I'm not sure I'd bother. The training can be good, but you still have to pound the pavement.

I'm Google AdWords certified, for example. It's a decent program, and some of my existing clients like that I have it, but when I first got it, it did little or nothing to bring in new clients. The training program itself is good, but you can do that without ever paying them a dime or taking the test.

Is there a specific aspect of SEO you're trying to learn?

Unfortunately, it looks like we haven't completed the full crawl on your site yet, although I'll ask the team.

I am seeing another page rank in Google for the Title:

"Nuxeo Document Management December 2011 Training"

It's this one:

http://www.nuxeo.com/en/layout/set/print/about/events/dec2011training-boston

I have a feeling that, with all of the forms and date variations, you're creating near-duplicates that are low-value. These aren't 100% duplicated, but it's enough that Google is filtering out the main page.

Ryan's right - nofollow wouldn't change the warning, and it's not effective for link-sculpting anymore. I wouldn't use it on main navigation links. 100 links is just a rule of thumb - it's a balancing act:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-many-links-is-too-many

It's complicated, but Istvan hit the core point. More links per page means each link gets less link-juice. Of course, it also means that more pages get link-juice, so it's a balancing act. I wrote about the "100 link rule" last year:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-many-links-is-too-many

There's no one "right" number, and 100 isn't a hard cut-off, it's just a matter of prioritizing. I am worried that your link menus with long article names aren't very user-friendly. I'm guess that people just use the main menus and don't navigate the drop-downs. From an SEO perspective, you might be better driving link-juice to your top 10-20 articles and keeping the main navigation simpler. Again, it's a trade-off, and it really depends on your strategy, domain authority, and the relative value of these pages.

I'm not a big fan of doubling-up on canonicalization tactics, because there's no good way to tell what's working. The 301 is probably a tiny bit stronger (not much, in my experience), but the advantage of the canonical tag on the home-page is that one tag will sweep up any variants. If you 301 "index.html" to the root, and then someone comes along and uses the non-www version of your home-page or adds a tracking parameter ("index.html?track=1234"), etc., the 301 won't do anything - you'll have to create 301s for each situation. The canonical will prevent those problems, which are very common on home pages.

Correct - usually, it's all the same physical page (on the server), so you only need to put it in one place.

If they duplicate your main content, I think the header-level canonical may be a good way to go. For the syndication scenario, it's tough, because then you're knocking those PDFs out of the rankings, potentially, in favor of someone else's content.

Honestly, I've seen very few people deal with canonicalization for PDFs, and even those cases were small or obvious (like a page with the exact same content being outranked by the duplicate PDF). It's kind of uncharted territory.

Oh, sorry - so these PDFs aren't duplicates with your own web/HTML content so much as duplicates with the same PDFs on other websites?

That's more like a syndication situation. It is possible that, if enough people post these PDFs, you could run into trouble, but I've never seen that. More likely, your versions just wouldn't rank. Theoretically, you could use the header-level canonical tag cross-domain, but I've honestly never seen that tested.

If you're talking about a handful of PDFs, they're a small percentage of your overall indexed content, and that content is unique, I wouldn't worry too much. If you're talking about 100s of PDFs on a 50-page website, then I'd control it. Unfortunately, at that point, you'd probably have to put the PDFs in a folder and outright block it. You'd remove the risk, but you'd stop ranking on those PDFs as well.

I think it's possible, but I've only seen it in cases that are a bit hard to disentangle. For example, I've seen a PDF outrank a duplicate piece of regular content when the regular content had other issues (including massive duplication with other, regular content). My gut feeling is that it's unusual.

If you're concerned about it, you can canonicalize PDFs with the header-level canonical directive. It's a bit more technically complex than the standard HTML canonical tag:

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/06/supporting-relcanonical-http-headers.html

I'm going to mark this as "Discussion", just in case anyone else has seen real-world examples.