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Thanks for helping me bounce the ideas around.  Always valuable comments from SeoMozzers!  Have a good day!

OK, thanks for your detailed response.

I am wondering whether I might just have a dynamically generated URL for the "product level" pages, i.e. page.php?id=1, page.php?id=2 etc and then have a canonical tag that is the same across them all.  I could then limit the product pages to those that are genuinely different in some way.  That way, I can avoid the noindex,follow issue, have very few duplicate product pages and avoid Panda related issues.  Sound sensible?

Gary

Alan Thanks for this. Can I check I understand your comments. Are u suggesting that a large number of noindex, follow pages causes google to lose interest in following the links from those pages? Do u know this to be the case through an empirical study? I like your suggestion of integrating the product purchase onto the category pages. I agree that would be ideal but the products themselves have alot of options and some are designed online so it could end up quite complex. Food for thought though as it would be a good solution SEO wise. I'm just a little concerned on a user ability front. Gary

Hi

Can I have people's thoughts on something please.  We sell wedding stationery and whilst we can generate lots of good content describing a particular range of stationery we can't relistically differentiate at a product level.  So imagine we have three ranges

Range 1 - A Bird

Range 2 - A Heart

Range 3 - A Flower

Within each of these ranges we would have invitations, menus, place cards, magnets etc.  The ranges vary quite alot so we can write good textual keyword rich descriptions that attract traffic (i.e. one about the bird, one about the heart and one about the flower).  However the individual products within a range just reflect the design for the range as a whole (as all items in a range match).  Therefore we can't just copy the content down to the product level and if we just describe the generic attributes of the products they will alll be very similar.  We have over 1,000 "products" easily so I am conscious of creating too much duplication over the site in case Mr Panda comes to call.

So I was thinking that I "might" NOINDEX, FOLLOW the product pages to avoid this duplication and put lots of effort into making my category pages much better and content rich.  The site would be smaller in the index BUT I do not really expect to generate traffic from the product pages because they are not branded items and any searches looking for particular features of our stationery would be picked up, much more effectively, by the category pages.

Any thoughts on this one?

Gary

I tend to agree with EGOL and Keri, I suspect you will be viewed as a spammer.

Yes, you are answering their questions, yes this makes for the internet being a warmer fuzzier place (and your answers might be the best damn answers in the world) BUT it will be clear to the forum owners that your intention is to generate a link.  The trouble is you also know that the reason you are doing this work is to generate that link.

I wouldn't necessarily not do it, but I would be prepared for quite a few of the links to be removed because they will be viewed as spam (even if directly on topic).  Don't get be wrong I don't think what you are doing is spam but it will be viewed by many forum admins as such.

Gary

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I don't see how it possibly could, it is just a number.  If it was taking into account a given keyword then it would an array of values for a given keyword - but it ain't!

I would second that.  You also want to consider any other possible variations including things like /index.php or /index.html which might also resolve to your homepage.  All of these should be redirected to a single version to avoid duplicate content issues.

I'm not sure you really have any sort of problem at all.  Unless you have seen a fall in traffic/ranking etc then I wouldn't worry.  DA calculations seem to lag what Google is doing anyway, so if you have not suffered in terms of traffic/ranking then I wouldn't worry at all.

DA is just an indicative metric about your domain, the end goal is conversions, so worry about it if those are hit but otherwise - stay calm and carry on (I should get that on a T-Shirt or something!)

Gary

It's not that I'm not (unavoidable double negative) trusting google.co.uk (that is the "correct" answer after all - that's what we are trying to find out).

It's just that browsers cache results and cookies sometimes interfere with the current position.  This together with personalised search can distort the "truth", i.e. what  YOU see on google.co.uk through a browser might not be what the rest of the world sees.  Make sense?

I agree, I find RankTracker to be very accurate.  I trust typing things into google.co.uk far less.  If the two differ I generally clear my browser history, cookies etc, logout of google and then try again.  I can then see that RankTracker has it right!

It very occassionally misses something but I think this is when the SERPS are moving around and something falls between pages and gets missed.

Wow - now I feel like my idea has been blessed by a god (Lead SEO at SEOMoz).....feeling quite chuffed actually!

I'm not sure you really have any sort of problem at all.  Unless you have seen a fall in traffic/ranking etc then I wouldn't worry.  DA calculations seem to lag what Google is doing anyway, so if you have not suffered in terms of traffic/ranking then I wouldn't worry at all.

DA is just an indicative metric about your domain, the end goal is conversions, so worry about it if those are hit but otherwise - stay calm and carry on (I should get that on a T-Shirt or something!)

Gary

I tend to agree with EGOL and Keri, I suspect you will be viewed as a spammer.

Yes, you are answering their questions, yes this makes for the internet being a warmer fuzzier place (and your answers might be the best damn answers in the world) BUT it will be clear to the forum owners that your intention is to generate a link.  The trouble is you also know that the reason you are doing this work is to generate that link.

I wouldn't necessarily not do it, but I would be prepared for quite a few of the links to be removed because they will be viewed as spam (even if directly on topic).  Don't get be wrong I don't think what you are doing is spam but it will be viewed by many forum admins as such.

Gary

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I would second that.  You also want to consider any other possible variations including things like /index.php or /index.html which might also resolve to your homepage.  All of these should be redirected to a single version to avoid duplicate content issues.