I have found pages with 1000 plus words and various pics references and a video or animation rank very well. I'm sure if you hit 5000 words it may get a bit out of hand but in my experience more is better within reason. It's the video or animation that I find really makes the difference. I still count 300-400 as a bare minimum.

im in the equestrian industry and there is a number of thriving fourums out there however like all forums the quality of info is dubious and as yet the Q&A style of community has not yet been made. I feel this is an opertunity I could work with.

I realise that its a long game and will take lots of work. My main worry is that we are a retailer and that people may not trust our Q&A as we are retailers and no matter how much we separate our sales hat from our community element I feel it may not work. The fact that it has not been done make me think it is worth a try.

Any examples of an ecommerce site with a thriving community attached that would be a good model to emulate?

I think its important to have multiple pages about the selected keywords. Not pages that are the same but to use the kiln dried logs example I would make pages like below.

Why hey our kiln dried logs work so well in wood burning stoves.

Hardwood kiln dried logs

softwood kiln dried logs

how we make our kiln dried logs

sustainabley sourced logs

why are kiln dried logs better

I would link all these to your page that actually sells the logs and if you make sure that each article is specific to its title and they are all different yet relevant then they should help you keep on topic without dilution.

If I create a good community in my particular field on my SEO site and have a quality Q&A section like this etc (ripping of MOZ's idea here sorry, I hope it's ok) will the long term returns be worth the effort of creating and man ageing this. Is the user created content of as much use as I think it will be?

It seems to me that for most ecommerce sites (myself included) that canonical is not the answer. If you have to many near identical products on your site it may be better to re evaluate what you have stocking and if you must stock them then the way forward is to make one page that properly explains them and allows purchase rather than many.

The only uses I can see for canonical is to consolidate old blogs and articles on similar topics. Using it to tidy an ecommerce site seems to be a misuse of the tool.

Thanks

Have you used this approach? If so how effective is it?

I have all the usual colour size attributes on my products. I just used that as a simple example. Its more to do with similar non branded products that are different enough to be "products" but not when I have 15 similar it's impossible to write fully different descriptions. Screwdrivers, screws or paint would have been a better example. There are hundreds of ranges like that. If you had five unimportant brands of screwdriver and you had flat head and philips head. Each one is marginally different (handle style etc) but there is no keyword benefit to having each optimised for say "flat head screwdriver". Having a good range is beneficial to the customer but seems to be detrimental to SEO. Is it better to employ writers to make every description different no matter how complex or should I canonical it?

I'm thinking of using rel=canonical for similar products on my site.

Say I'm selling pens and they are al very similar. I.e. a big pen in blue, a pack of 5 blue bic pens, a pack of 10, 50, 100 etc. should I rel=canonical them all to the best seller as its almost impossible to make the pages unique. (I realise the best I realise these should be attributes and not products but I'm sure you get my point)

It seems sensible to have one master canonical page for bic pens on a site that has a great description video content and good images plus linked articles etc rather than loads of duplicate looking pages.

love to hear thoughts from the Moz community.