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they are the same things with a size, colour or quality change so you end up with the same old description re-written several times over to avoid duplicate content...

I have this situation too.

I always place all color and size variations on the same page.  If I have six colors I will show a photo of each color and place an "add to cart" button below it.

This accomplishes many things.  It makes comparison shopping easy for the customer,  It reduces the amount of work that my webmaster must do.  It reduces the number of pages on the website (and I believe that makes a more competitive site).

Although that does not give me separate pages for "red wooden widgets" and "blue wooden widgets", I will still get a lot of long tail traffic because I have those colors on the page, often in the title tag and the extra long description helps my page pull long tail traffic.

I have three sites with wordpress blogs.  if you have them set up correctly and do proper SEO they can perform great.

What would you suggest that those 3 positions be?

One content writer.   I would get an excellent writer, 4.0 GPA English major, preferably someone who already knows an awful lot about the types of products you sell.  Steer clear of the fiction and poetry types.  I would want a newsy, business, journalist, product how-to-do-it type of writer.

One artist / photographer / videographer who has a great portfolio of product photography and video production.

Another content author who has experience storyboarding for video.  We would be building the best content library (text with photo and video for your product area on or off of the web.

I would get rid of these links.

I'll bet that very few people use them.

They "should not" be the problem since they are "nofollowed".  However, you never know what google is doing.

This massive number of links are going to evaporate a lot of pagerank.  No need to do that.

If it was really important to link to these other sites I would make one internal page such as "about us" or "our international sites" and link to them on that one page with a followed link.  That link will be anchored with the domain name or the official company name.

I would delete all of them at once.  BAM!

Sorry, I edited after you posted...  I agree... If the 301 is more work then no need to do it.

Good luck.

I would delete these pages as soon as possible, since you have determined that they are not of value.   It is possible that all of these pages are dead weight on your site.

Chop chop.

Build an info site with a store.

how do do you make a product or category description engaging?

get a writer who uses the product, knows it really well and has the skill to tell everybody everything that they want to know about it... and what they need to know that they have not realized that they need to know.

how do do you make a product or category description engaging?

For my most important products I often have a short product description at the top of the page... below that I will have paragraphs with subheadings that describe specific details of the project (how to use, maintenance, supplies needed, etc).   I also have a lot of long articles (on separate pages) with video and lots of photos that show how the product is used.  These article pages often rank higher in the SERPs than my product or category pages.  They pull a lot of traffic and I have house ads and links on these pages that direct traffic to purchase pages.

I find it much easier to rank and info page than a product or category page.  The more competitive the category the better article pages compete.

** As on-page SEO what should we be striving to achieve?**

I honestly have more success building an info site with a store than building a store and try to make the product descriptions substantive.  In some of the areas where I compete my sites have more info than all of the other competitors combined.... and all of those info pages get me out there into just about every possible product, accessory, part and information SERP - to the point of keyword cannibalization.

When you move to a new CMS there could be changes in your.....

-- page URLs

-- title tags

-- onpage optimization markup

-- persistent navigation

-- anchor text on persistent navigation links

-- category, page, tag, etc treatment

-- other changes

If you are planning to move to a new CMS your goal should be to kick your SEO up a notch instead of worrying if you are going to lose something.  If you are in fear of loss then that is the call for more study or to have a professional CMS and SEO expert review your plans for moving the site or even do the move for you.  The price might not be as high as you think.

Don't move your site thinking that you are taking a risk.  Move your site with a plan if upping your game.

I write for one website but my topics might include: insurance, education, art, bulk commodities, space,  wildlife, construction or economics.  Lots of writers can write about many topics and lots of people are polymathic.  Most of the people at google I will bet are polymaths.

Rankings that are not in alignment with linkmetrics is one of the most common discussions in Q&A.

If you believe that factors other than links are responsible - at least in part - for rankings then you have to accept the fact that rankings will not always align with linkmetrics.

Also... if you believe that google devalues links then you have another reason to know that rankings and linkmetrics will not always be in alignment.

Now to make people mad... If you are a person who is watching link metrics then your website likely has at least some links that have been devalued because you are spending a lot of time at the link factory instead of at the content factory.

David's answer is really short... but it's really true.

It sounds like you are prepared to spend a ton of money on engineering and promotion.  I would instead put all of that money into making the prize a spectacular amount.  Not $500, not $5000... but spectacular.  The promotion will take care of itself.   Consider opening the contest to a very broad geographic area - line the northern hemisphere.  Get permission to publish the essays.   Now you have what you need.

Substance will defeat SEO.

I agree with Adam.  I grabbed a few random sentences from random pages on the site and there are lots of other sites publishing same stuff.

This might be just one problem.  A person could spend lots of time digging into every possible issue... but since you seem to have a lot of gaso sites that made me think "short cut publishing".

Have you read this?

http://www.hiswebmarketing.com/yes-high-quality-guest-posts-can-get-you-penalized/

I agree with the author, Marie Haynes, that you can get in trouble through guest posting.

One topic that she did not cover in this article (because it focused on the Penguin problems), is that giving guest posts to other websites that are relevant to the content of your website is that it feeds your competitors and creates new ones.

I will say that a lot of people disagree with my ideas about guest posting.  I think that they view it as a necessary way to gain links.  I think that it is like gladly allowing someone to take over your business because you think it will bring a little traffic to your website.

Sure, then I will not have to hire a freelancer to find them.

I run leaderboard ads above the design, a skyscraper at top left and a rectangle below the first photo in the right column.  All of these are visible above the fold.   My rankings are great in lots of very difficult SERPs.

The important thing is.... These ads to not compete with my content.  My content is clearly visible and perfectly obvious to everyone and anyone who lands on the page.

Also, the ads are not the dumb, irritating, provocative, suggestive stuff that would put off lots of people.

Bottom line... its not HOW MANY.     Instead... it is WHERE and WHAT.

What a great idea!

I should start contacting all of my weak competitors and ask for permission to republish all of their best articles.  The benefits to me would be huge.  My site would probably outrank theirs in the SERPs, I will get links, likes, tweets and mentions from their hard work, they will probably get the duplicate content problem instead of me, and they will think that I am a great guy for offering to promote their content and place a link at the bottom of the page that almost nobody will click.

This is such a great idea that I should hire a whole team of freelancers to contact all of my competitors, in all of my niches, get all of their best content and post it onto my sites.

What would my answer be if someone called me up or emailed to ask for some of my content.

NO!   (answer here much more polite than reality)

Lots of my informative content outranks product pages.

I place "house ads" on the informative content pages that deliver traffic to the store.  Also links in my informative content pages go to product pages in the store.

I find that my informative content pages compete in search much more effectively than product pages.  They don't convert as well but they get a lot more traffic, so I am still a winner.

House ads can have a very high CTR because they are perfectly matched to the article content.  And the conversion rate of people directed to your store with house ads can also be fantastic compared to the conversion rate of other traffic.

I think that Roger should auction them off. 

Penguin... If you have crap links you must address them.  This can be very difficult to cut what you spent a lot of money on and considered to be assets of your business.  The challenge is a psychological mindchange and a lot of time to address the problem.  Probably pays to have an objective person review the links who has experience in recovering sites from Penguin penalties and unnatural links penalties.

Panda... If you have a site that has lots of thin content, duplicate content or low value content then you must remove that content or  replace it with high value content.  Again you have a psychological challenge.  You must also be willing to spend money to acquire valuable unique content or spend time to create it.  You must be willing to chop off your feet to save your ass.    Keep in mind that some panda problems can be cause by technology glitches.  Before doing major surgery or major content investment it is probably a good idea to get a person  familiar with recovering Panda problems to review your site and your plan of action.

I had two sites hit by Panda.  On one site I had published lots of .gov and .edu press releases, some at their request, some at my decision.  I removed a lot of that content and noindex/followed the rest. That site recovered in a few weeks.  On another site I had pages of .pdf content to control the printing of graphics.  These were causing a duplicate content problem.  We applies rel=canonical with .htacess and the site recovered a few weeks later.

Good luck.

bots

I've had two sites with Panda problems.  One had two copies of hundreds of pages in both .html and .pdf format (to control printing format).   The other had a few hundred pages of .edu press releases republished verbatim at their request or with their permission.

Both of these sites had site-wide drops on Panda dates.

We used rel=canonical on the .pdf documents on one site using .htaccess.  On the site with the .edu press releases we used noindex/follow.

Both sites recovered to former rankings a few weeks after the changes were made.

If you had a genuine Panda problem and only a Panda problem then a couple months might be about the amount of time needed to see a recovery.

I publish long articles.  It works best for me.

If the three articles that you are thinking about are tightly clustered in keyword space then one article is definitely the way to go.  However, if the three articles have a wide spread in keyword space, each with good volume, then three articles could perform better.... but in that case I would write nine short articles tightly clustered around three keywords and publish them as three long articles that go deep and wide around the central keyword.

Google knows that people do blogroll links.

Google gives lots of blogroll links.  Look at this one...  http://adsense.blogspot.com/

I would not worry one bit about a genuine blogroll link if my site is not having any penguin or unnatural links problems.

I've written an article which is now 3k words.

Nice work!   Do you have a bunch of images to kick up the first impression impact, make it interesting and offer short diversions for the reader?

a.) publish as one article and reap the benefits of a very authoritative page on the subject, social shares,

This is what I do.  I have found that a long page is better for these reasons.....

!) much greater ability to attract long-tail queries (most of my traffic comes from these and 3000 words on a page will give you more long-tail word combinations)

2. if you have one big article then all of the social and link equity will focus on that one page.  That will make it much more powerful than splitting it between multiple pages... and one big page with lots of subheads, lots of images will be more impressive and linkworthy, tweetworth and emailworthy to your visitors.

secondary keywords will be formatted as sub-headings (H2 tags) within the article.

YES.  Use lots of these and don't hesitate to use tertiary keywords in h3 or h4.

And, consider onpage anchor links at the top of the article that enable visitors to reach a subheading in one click.  IMO these are second in optimization power only to the title tag.

Good luck.  Let us know how it works whatever you do.

It is really easy to say... "I could do that in FIVE MINUTES."

What if this site was hand-built with lots of different page formats and huge messy code from one of those old Apple WYSIWYG webpage creators, with lots of images, captions, in-text wrap arounds, etc.

This site has 15,000 pages!   So, I could easily imagine a briarpatch site that would take twice that amount of time to do a great job.

And, yes, you can plug in Yoast or any other magic plugin.  That will do the SEO, but will it be good SEO, making every page into a finely crafted arrow with KW research, onpage optimization, alt tags.

I am not saying that these people did all of this work.  I am just saying if you don't have any idea about what these people did, what they had to start with and what they produced....  then saying "I could do that in five minutes or five hours" could be way off.

Looks like nofollow ads to me.

Nothing wrong with it.  I show ads on almost every page that I have published.

Rankings are great so I think that it is good for SEO.

Almost every large commercial site on the web shows ads.

For the one I originally was posting about I've been all over the board and still am. Back to 15 today and was 10 earlier a few days ago..

I am willing to bet $50 that your rankings for this KW will stabilize on page one after these new pages are in the index for a while.

If one of the new articles is really strong for this KW it might get you a second listing... but you will need a really strong article.

Thanks for the report.

What has been your historical ranking for this KW... have you been at #3 for a long time?

SEO for 1,000,000 page site....  the remaining are automated content, however, they are also unique with data (numbers, figure)

Sounds like professional spam. 

If your automated content is genuinely good content, then you are going to need about 1000 deep links of at least PR3 to PR4 to get all of these pages indexed.  Those links should hit hub pages deep within the site that force spiders down there and make they chew their way out through all of these automated pages.  Those links must be permanent or google will forget these pages and drop them from the index.

What's everyone else think?

I am building information sites with small stores.... and small stores with lots of information.

My investment in information content pays back slowly as people looking for information find my sites in information SERPs and then make a purchase.

On those information pages you can also make nice money running ads.  If you run adsense ads you can block direct competitors or if you run a network like Tribal your competitors will probably not be seen because they don't advertise there.

They seem to be completely geared up to making life much much harder for E-commerce companies to rank organically, and much easier for informational sites to rank organically,

In most of my money SERPs the sites that I have difficulty beating are the big retail and auction sites like Amazon and Ebay.....   I have more information on my site for my product line than all of my competitors combined, potential customers can email questions, call us on phone and  watch videos about how to use products.... still can't beat the big retailers who simply sell, offer no support, no information and allow all of their customers to come to us for support.... but that is exactly why some people buy from us instead of them - even if we charge more than amazon.

It just seems like Google is trying to make every site an information resource - how else are you supposed to get natural links without publishing 'sharable' information

It seems that you clearly understand the business model needed for success.  So, what's stopping you???

Nice work!

Let us know if you see more movement.

When this type of work is done an architect or a civil engineer often draws up the plans, making sure everything is "to code".  Then separate contractors are brought in for carpentry, electrical, plumbing, control and finishing work.   A single job can be spread across four, five or six companies who specialize in a certain type of work.

If I was a contractor in this business I would want my website to showcase the best jobs that I have done.  Show examples of great office space, retail shops, restaurants, professional offices, etc.   My website would be designed to convince the visitor that I am the right person to do their project.  I might have professional photographers visit jobs that have been completed to produce a gallery of my work.   My website would be more about WOW! than SEO.

My goal would be to acquire more jobs, especially the higher end projects.

Question 1) When it says "local monthly searches", is it defaulting to MY local area based on my google info? So if im in Philly area that local area is whats displaying?

Quoted from the google Help....  "Local Monthly Searches: The approximate 12-month average of the number of searches on Google for each keyword in the locations and devices that you selected. If you've selected multiple locations, a location that isn't a country, or if we don't have enough data, you'll see this noted with a dash (-)."

Look under the box where you type your queries into the KW tool.  Note the locations.

Question 2) I tried to run the same keyword list I pulled from Adwords tool  through Moz KW tool, and it tells me some of the terms don't have ANY traffic! So know I am real confused as to whether the KW's i picked are good or crap! I attached image of the stuff.

Most of the people that I know who need commercial construction are not searching google to find the right guy.  They already know him.   So it does not surprise me that search volume is really really low.

One domain have authority 44 and other 24... After I merge I will have authority 68?

I doubt it.  I think that domain authority is closer to logarithmic rather than linear.... If I am correct, merging a DA 44 with a DA 24 might lift the DA 44 to 47 or 48.   Why?  A DA 24 is very weak compared to a DA 44.

Also, if the DA 24 has a lot of the same links that the DA 44 has then don't expect to gain much of anything in the rankings.   The best benefit will occur if the DA 24 has links and other quality signals that are totally different from the DA 44.  Then merging will bring fresh strength to the DA 44 - but again, a 24 is very weak and the benefit might only be worth a few points higher on the DA scale.

Thoughts, opinions?

Looks like they have a site that is less than one-year old on a domain that might be infringing and are using a number of things that google is likely to penalize them for.   They might be doing this same type of work for their clients.  This sounds like a short-term problem for you.

One thing about Google is that relatively new sites doing shady stuff can persist for a while in the SERPs before Google finally slaps them down.

I think that you will eventually get their customers.

Can you find one good reason why this site would rank well for a competitive phrase?

Yes.  They are pretty good at blackhat.... not the answer that you want...  but I think its a good answer.

Was driving down West Liberty Ave one day and saw a new hair styling shop that opened.  They had a sign out on the sidewalk... "Haircuts $5".....   about two blocks down the street a shop that has been in business for a long time put out their own sign....  "We fix bad haircuts $18".

You need to make a sign... "We fix bad SEO"  

I doubt that I will ever sell model warships.  I would not want to sell them because I don't know anything about them.   And, I am getting close to retiring from retail.

I tried Google's DFP ad server and am getting such good results on my adsense sites that I am moving as much of my time to them as is possible.

Nice!

Let us know how it works!

No reconsideration requests are needed for Panda.  It is algorithmic.

Good luck.

I was originally using on-page anchor links like this...

Brass Widgets

In my opinion these are some of the most powerful on-page optimization elements that you can use, ranking just below the title tag in their effectiveness.   Perhaps removing them caused the rankings drop and putting them back caused the rankings recovery?

I stopped using these types of pages.

In my opinion my long tail traffic suffered and visitor engagement dropped.

Same content before and after...

This was not an extensive text.  Just a few pages.  But I am not using them anymore.  Instead I am going to build bigass pages, which any noob will know how to use... and will appear more content rich to people who visit.

Is a reconsideration request necessary?   [...]   Pardon the very long question...

Just a short report here...  I had Panda problems on two sites.

On one I was republishing government and academic documents.  These were noindex/followed or deleted.  A few weeks later SERPs and traffic recovered for the rest of the site - these pages fell out of the index but were still useful for my visitors.

On another I had dupe content in .pdf documents to control printing format.  I used .htaccess to implement rel=canonical on the .pdf pages.  A few weeks later SERPs and traffic recovered.

One of their pages has two sentences on it. Two.

I usually have a lot more content than two sentences, so might not be my site. 

Honestly......  Try something like this in that SERP.    Build three pages...

1. Your standard product page.  (Brass Widgets for Sale)

2. Nice article about how to use that product, with a few photos, maybe a video.   (How to Use Brass Widgets)

3. Short article about how to select the perfect brass widget, with a few more widget photos, maybe another video, add a table that compares colors and sizes.   (Brass Widgets: How to Select the Perfect One)

Then, put obvious links connecting each of these three pages.   If you have a competitive site in this niche, could be kickass.  All of that info might make you look like the brass widget professional and boost your conversion rate.

This is what I do for lots of products.

Pushes competitors out of the SERPs.  Pisses them off.   Makes them spend time hopping around mad instead of waging war.

Maybe your blog is kickass and lots of people are likin' linkin' and tweetin'?

Maybe your main site has a Panda or Penguin problem?

Why on earth are they able to suck up a whole half of a results page?!?!?!

   Maybe that is one of my sites 

Because instead of fearing keyword cannibalization, they attack it.

Works great in low to moderate competition.

I have positions 1 through 4 for some nice keywords.

'snot fair.

Go Cannibals!

Nice link, Chris.  Thanks!

I have found from personal experience that long articles pull in a LOT more long-tail traffic.

I have lots of pages on my site that had 50 words several years ago and I have slowly be rewriting them into 1000 to 3000 word articles with lots of photos.  As I do this the traffic skyrockets, not only from increase longtail but also by higher rankings.