Thank you Jesse, that's pretty much what I thought, but I wanted to have someone else confirming me that.

Thank you very much, appreciated your help!

All the best,

Hello,

I own virtualsheetmusic.com website and we have several thousands of media files (Mp3 and MIDI files) that potentially Google can index. If that's the case, I am wondering if that could cause any "duplicate" issues of some sort since many of such media files have  exact file names or same meta information inside.

Any thoughts about this issue are very welcome!

Thank you in advance to anyone.

Julian, we sell digital sheet music and the additional 100,000 are products from Alfred music publishing company. Of course they will not be "high quality pages", but they are product pages, each one offering a piece of music. We are an e-commerce website, how can we avoid having product pages?! But of course, as Wesley said above, we can improve each product page quality content by giving more/custom information for each product, increasing user reviews, etc.

Other suggestions?

Thank you Wesley, yes, I think you are right. Our business is suffering really too much without traffic coming from the "noindex" pages, and after many months we still don't see recovery. I think the best approach would be probably to keep the pages in the index and differentiate them as much as we can.

Thank you!

I understand what you mean and I agree with you in general, but specifically to our own website, I have no idea who put that link on that page, which is by the way a "nofollow" link. We never built links, all our incoming links are either natural and/or links from our own affiliates. I don't see much of "that stuff" on our back-link profile... am I in error?

Anyhow, yes, we are aware the situation is quite complex. Thank you again.

Thank you Takeshi, I think you got the problem right. The "crawling" side of the issue is something I was thinking about too!

We are actually working on every aspect of our website to improve its content because we have suffered by Panda a lot in the past two years, so here is the strategy we begun to take since March:

1. "noindexing" most of our thin or almost-duplicate content to get it removed from the index

2. Improve our best content and differentiate it as much as we can with compelling content (this takes a long time!)

3. Consolidating similar pages with the use of canonical tags.

In order to tackle the "slower crawling" problem you have highlighted here, do you think that would be probably better for us to stop engines to crawl those pages altogether via robots.txt once they have been removed? Would that solve the crawl issue? I could do that at least with these new 100,000 new product pages we plan to add!

Thank you!

Wesley, that's because of being penalized by Panda several times in the past... so we are trying the "clean-up" strategy with the hope to be "de-penalized" by Panda at the next related algorithm update. Looks like we had too many "thin" or "almost duplicate" pages... that's why we removed so many pages from the index! But if we don't see improvements in the coming 1-2 months, I guess we'll put the product pages in the index because our business is suffering a big deal!

Colin, what do you mean with "fake links" exactly? Our link profile looks actually in better shape than our main competitors:

virtualsheetmusic.com (our site): links: 614,013    root domains: 2,233

sheetmusicplus.com (competitor): links: 5,322,596    root domains: 6,149 (worse than our profile!)

musicnotes.com (competitor): links: 6,527,429    root domains: 2,914 (much worse than our profile!)

Am I missing anything?

Hello,

I have a question for you: our website virtualsheetmusic.com includes thousands of product pages, and due to Panda penalties in the past, we have no-indexed most of the product pages hoping in a sort of recovery (not yet seen though!). So, currently we have about 4,000 "index" page compared to about 80,000 "noindex" pages.

Now, we plan to add additional 100,000 new product pages from a new publisher to offer our customers more music choice, and these new pages will still be marked as "noindex, follow".

At the end of the integration process, we will end up having something like 180,000 "noindex, follow" pages compared to about 4,000 "index, follow" pages.

Here is my question: can this huge discrepancy between 180,000 "noindex" pages and 4,000 "index" pages be a problem? Can this kind of scenario have or cause any negative effect on our current natural SEs profile? or is this something that doesn't actually matter?

Any thoughts on this issue are very welcome.

Thank you!

Fabrizio

Thank you guys! I really appreciated your help! This clarified a lot for me.

All the best to all of you!

Hello,

I have four outbound links from my site home page taking users to join us on our social Network pages (Twitter, FB, YT and Google+).

if you look at my site home page, you can find those 4 links as 4 large buttons on the right column of the page:

http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/

Here is my question: do you think it is better for me to add the rel="nofollow" directive to those 4 links or allow Google to follow? From a PR prospective, I am sure that would be better to apply the nofollow tag, but I would like Google to understand that we have a presence on those 4 social channels and to make clearly a correlation between our official website and our official social channels (and then to let Google understand that our social channels are legitimate and related to us), but I am afraid the nofollow directive could prevent that. What's the best move in this case? What do you suggest to do?

Maybe the nofollow is irrelevant to allow Google to correlate our website to our legitimate social channels, but I am not sure about that.

Any suggestions are very welcome.

Thank you in advance!