Hey,

Certainly, if you could potentially create 150,000 search result pages from only 200 or so products, then you are straying into the ground of near duplicate pages and what is often known as 'search within search'. As you stated, chances are not only could these pages be problematic in themselves, they may drag down other pages.

My advice here would be to try and tie this to your search marketing and keyword research. Look at the actual terms that get searched for and consider some pages that may be useful. Then, if you don't have a page for this, then consider creating maybe tags or categories for these few (certainly less than 150,000) pages and supplement these pages with some additional unique content if there is duplication with other categories.

In fact, try to keep the duplication as low as possible and also try to stick to best practice with those search category pages (canonical, prev next, show all page etc).

Certainly have the search, but I would most likely hide it from search engines and noindex the deep search pages but supplement these with some category pages and/or content pages as tied to your keyword strategy.

Some interesting reading:

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/search-results-in-search-results/

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/fat-pandas-and-thin-content

Alternatively, you could always tinker, and have a go, and then put things back, but odds are, this approach is just creating nearly 150,000 near duplicate pages which are exactly the kind of pages they are currently trying to remove from the index so your main landing pages may end up being collateral damage.

Hope this helps!
Marcus

Well, there are a few HTML elements that you can use with being the standard for a quote and

being for a quote from another site or source.

With regards to duplication, I am not really sure I have ever come across a hard and fast rule here so tend to think the standard rules apply and if you have a good percentage of unique content on the page then having a few quotes won't matter. That is likely as true if you use italics, q or blockquote.

From my perspective, I would use blockquote to indicate it was from an external source and not worry about so long as 90% of my page was not quoted from an external source.

What you can't do is pinch content from another source and just wrap it up in blockquotes and call it good.

Seriously though, I quote things in my blog posts all the time so keep the unique ratio high and this is not something to worry about.

The HTML quote details can be found in more detail over at w3c schools:

http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_q.asp

If you google around this topic, you won't find much, a good indicator that people are not having duplication problems due to quotes and citations else the internet would be moaning about it.

Hope that helps.
Marcus

Good answer. If there is a marketing benefit then it is worth doing. If you are doing it purely for SEO then you are buying links and take the risks that come with that.

If the sites you are contacting are asking you for money for followed links then you are probably not the first so it's a risky path you are walking down.

Great, comprehensive answer from Ryan as ever.

Nothing more to see here folks.

Move along now.

Move along.