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.

Splitting a client's website into multiple domains could affect you in branding (unless you incorporate the brand name and the vertical you want to split into the domain).

Subdomains only make sense if you really want to target different audiences and there is little chance of cross-over (i.e. there would be a slim chance that customers would overlap if you sell cosmetics on one domain and DYI products on another). The danger of subdomains is that if content is not properly managed, you will run into all sorts of content issues.

I would rather focus on a single domain with a good product category structure, product pages and a good set of landing-/conversion pages to target the different verticals.

I also think that a single domain will afford you better long-term value (both from a SEO and SEM perspective).

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.

Since last week we have chosen to append the page number to the title. Let's see if/how GWMTs status changes.

I would think that the next possible flag would then be on the page-description on paginated pages

Thanks for that answer. I am already using the pageNo in GWMT (as paginates). None of the searches spin out other copies - what I see in GWMT is only related to browsing through a product category and paginating.

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.

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?

Don't use GWMT's removal tool to remove URLs which should not be in the index (unless those expose sensitive information). Best practise is to exclude them in robots.txt and to also ensure that the pages either 404 or have a noindex,noarchive tag.

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.