Some time back we implemented the Google recommendation for pagination (the rel="next/prev"). GWMT now reports 17K pages with duplicate title-tags (we have about 1,1m products on our site and about 50m pages indexed in Google)

As an example we have properties listed in various states and the category title would be "Properties for Sale in [state-name]".

A paginated search page or browsing a category (see also http://searchengineland.com/implementing-pagination-attributes-correctly-for-google-114970) would then include the following:

The title for each page is the same - so to avoid the duplicate title-tags issue, I would think one would have the following options:

• Ignore what Google says
• Change the canonical to http://www.site.com/property/state.html (which would then only show the first XX results)
• Append a page number to the title "Properties for Sale in [state-name] | Page XX"
• Have all paginated pages use noindex,follow - this would then result in no category page being indexed

Would you have the canonical point to the individual paginated page or the base page?

I found (although many SEO's don't think it is necessary anymore) to have good title,meta keywords/description. And then structure the category page as follows:

• Your general navigation (menus, cart, search etc)
• Your category title as a H1 (should ideally be the same as your page-title)
• A category description (not more than 2 lines) - ideally the category description should overlap with the on-page content, title, keywords
• Your category bread-crumb, annotated with the Breadcrumb-microformat/RDFa markup
• You will obviously have some category drilldown (i.e. sidebar menu) - those should be crawlable links with relevant anchor texts
• I would present the multiple products per page with hProduct annotation, but would limit the number of products per page to not more than 40.

I disagree with the sentiment of the presenter, that text / additional links are unnecessary/irrelevant below products. We have found that we achieve good ranking on keywords by moving the category description from the top to the bottom of the category page.

From my experiments there is no noticeable difference in placement of the category copy, but then again this might very well depend on the overall site- and category-structure.

Use Google's disavow tool - detailed description here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2648487?hl=en

Have a look at this Q&A which touches on similar points: http://www.seomoz.org/q/how-much-copy-should-there-be-on-a-category-page

I would get rid of the product descriptions on category pages - I think it is more an user-experience issues and I do think that having so much copy on the category pages it will weaken your category pages.

Are those images for search results (i.e. product thumbnails) or actual product pages? A link would help to understand how your site currently looks.

If you have not done it yet, I would run you page through webpagetest.org (or pagespeed) and then look at obvious optimisations (CDN, HTTP cache directives, image-size optimisations) first.

It sounds to me that you are "caching" multiple products in JS and based on user interaction show then the relevant content. Depending on how this is done, you might actually not get any SEO value from this.

I personally would update your robots.txt and then submit a sitemap with the URLs in question via GWMT - this will result in your pages being crawled very quickly (within 48 hours) and then dropped out.

I would also look at either using 301's if you see link-juice from those URLs or using 404s/410s.

I personally found that resubmitting takes longer than pushing an updated sitemap.

Is the intention to eventually get rid of the old domain/brand (provided that the new one is successful)?

Duplicating a domain would mean that you would pay extra for PPC (driving different brand terms) and would also mean that the reskinning would include some brand-term landing pages.

I don't think your new site will take off from an SEO perspective - especially considering that it will take about 4-8 weeks for the index to properly build out and you will only know about any duplicate content issues after it happened.

I think "trying out a new brand" is a bit dangerous, by just duplicating content on another domain and slapping a new skin on it. Unless of course the current domain does not have much SEO value with regards to branded keywords.

Depending on the number of products I think it would be better to pull up the new domain with a set of landing pages (preferably covering some of the most revenue-driving and least revenue-driving products) and a set of product pages with canonicals to the new domain and sitemap for the selected set of products and then setup PPC and funnels and do a side-by-side comparison.

If the new domain/SERPs/conversion performs better, 301 the old domain to the new one and move your products over. Anything else feels like being half-pregnant