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I wouldn't bother. First of all its not very user friendly and second, it distributes your link building efforts over a number of domain names instead of just a single one. I would rather have one extremely strong domain than two dozen weaker ones.

On top of that, keywords in domain names aren't nearly as relevant as they used to be.

There was a time I would have said yes. Nowadays its hardly worth the trouble.

However, if its easy to implement, why not? You might get some marginal benefit out of it.

Depends on where those other links are coming from. If your link profile is natural and you have a few juicy, high authority links, I would not worry much.

Also, if your content is high quality and users like your site (bounce rate, time on site and average paveviews wise) I would not worry much even if the link profile wasn't so great.

Knowing what site we are talking about would help the evaluation

That really depends on how much authority your website has. I have noticed that websites with a lot of authority can stand to have a lot less unique content than new websites with few incoming links. However, since you are not scraping content from another website, I think it's safe to say that having product descriptions that are just about 50% unique should be fine just as long as you have unique titles, headings and some useful unique content.

Then again, since the Panda update has made it significantly more difficult to rank with thousands of pages of feeble content, I wonder how much effort should be placed into these product descriptions. Are they something that searchers will love to see in the SERPs? Is it really necessary to rank with all of these product pages or should you perhaps consider doing a few (say a hundred) high quality landing pages which link these product pages?

If your rankings haven't dropped don't worry. PR has been a useless statistic for a long time. And like Steve said, Panda update has nothing to do with PR since PR is based on links, Panda deals with content.

Happy to help. Bear in mind that link directory links are quite worthless, blog comment links not too useful.

You should also read this: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/dont-ask-sites-for-links-find-people-and-connect

We ran a test linking a new domain (lets say it was asdfdfhfgj.com) and found out that the second anchor text to the same url bears a lot less weight than the first one.

We linked asdfdfhfgj.com from a respected domain/page. Two links, different anchor texts. Both anchor texts where random strings that previously returned no results on Google. For the first months the page only ranked for the first random string, not the second. This is obviously just one data point but it does suggest something about the way Google treats links to identical urls from a single page.

However, this effect is far from a penalty and I doubt Google would ever penalize for having two links to an identical url on one page.

I believe in Google and SEOmoz Toolbar. Go to Google and start going through queries related to the landing pages the rakings of which you are trying the improve. You can also try this tool http://www.seomoz.org/labs/link-intersect.

Make a list of all the search results you find which are highly related and have a decent page authority, domain authority and Moz Trust rank. What numbers are decent? Depends on your language and niche. I prefer sites that have better ranks than the site Im linking although this does not apply for very new domains with weak ranks.

When you have an abundant list on urls start going through them to find ways to get your link sneaked in somehow. Comment, add link, post an article all make your job easier but often mean lower quality links. Contacting the webmasters to propose exchanging a quality article for a few links might do the trick in some niches. Indirect link trading is one of my favorites. Obviously you can just pay for links as well although this a method I tend to avoid.

Whats the best way to get a large number of links in the long run? Good content. Your content should be high quality enough to draw links on its own. It will do so more likely if you remind your visitors to link you and make it as easy as possible. You are the best judge of what content will draw links in your niche. Doesn't hurt to do some keyword research and figure out if there are topics not yet covered by other sites - those are great link baits.

I also tend to be active on sites which have linked me or from which I want a link from. A few good comments might well lead to a do follow link to your website in a blogs next article. And its always nice to say thanks when this happens - not least to ensure some follow up links in the future :).

Also remember that link building is an on-going process. You want a steady, constant flow of links. Not 1000 links today and none for the next 6 months!

Hope this helps

If your homepage has keywords x1, x2 and x3 in its title, headers and content it might be that Google considers your homepage stronger than your internal-page.htm. That could explain why you are seeing your homepage in the SERP instead of internal-page.htm.

You can try to tackle this by making sure that you don't have overlapping titles/headers/content plus perhaps tossing a few internal and external links to www.somesite.com/internal-page.htm.

And one more thing: patience!

Thank you for your quality comments. I think we are going to go for Evaretts suggestion since I do feel like hundreds of thousands of 301's might be a bad idea.

We are also discussing the possibility of keeping the old pages (do index, do follow) up with the old ads, just removing the seller information. We believe that users might well be interested in information about past items sold or expired. This wouldn't require any 301's, just dynamically adding the message suggested by Chris and a search engine/index to help find interesting sold/expired items.

This way we could generate hundreds of thousands of content pages which might over time bring plenty of quality traffic to the website. These pages would have dynamically generated fresh content (new suggestions about relevant ads) so I don't feel too worried about old content in Googles index. We could also consider scraping some details of the sold item from the manufacturer website.

I've never dealt with this many pages combined with this thin content before so The wrath of the Pand worries me a bit. However the root domain is quite strong and these ads seem to draw quite a few links.

The question that requires some further thought is whether or not having this many old, thin pages in Google's index will prove problematic. Thoughts?

ps. Since I didn't mention this before, the website is about used cars

If your rankings haven't dropped don't worry. PR has been a useless statistic for a long time. And like Steve said, Panda update has nothing to do with PR since PR is based on links, Panda deals with content.

We ran a test linking a new domain (lets say it was asdfdfhfgj.com) and found out that the second anchor text to the same url bears a lot less weight than the first one.

We linked asdfdfhfgj.com from a respected domain/page. Two links, different anchor texts. Both anchor texts where random strings that previously returned no results on Google. For the first months the page only ranked for the first random string, not the second. This is obviously just one data point but it does suggest something about the way Google treats links to identical urls from a single page.

However, this effect is far from a penalty and I doubt Google would ever penalize for having two links to an identical url on one page.

I believe in Google and SEOmoz Toolbar. Go to Google and start going through queries related to the landing pages the rakings of which you are trying the improve. You can also try this tool http://www.seomoz.org/labs/link-intersect.

Make a list of all the search results you find which are highly related and have a decent page authority, domain authority and Moz Trust rank. What numbers are decent? Depends on your language and niche. I prefer sites that have better ranks than the site Im linking although this does not apply for very new domains with weak ranks.

When you have an abundant list on urls start going through them to find ways to get your link sneaked in somehow. Comment, add link, post an article all make your job easier but often mean lower quality links. Contacting the webmasters to propose exchanging a quality article for a few links might do the trick in some niches. Indirect link trading is one of my favorites. Obviously you can just pay for links as well although this a method I tend to avoid.

Whats the best way to get a large number of links in the long run? Good content. Your content should be high quality enough to draw links on its own. It will do so more likely if you remind your visitors to link you and make it as easy as possible. You are the best judge of what content will draw links in your niche. Doesn't hurt to do some keyword research and figure out if there are topics not yet covered by other sites - those are great link baits.

I also tend to be active on sites which have linked me or from which I want a link from. A few good comments might well lead to a do follow link to your website in a blogs next article. And its always nice to say thanks when this happens - not least to ensure some follow up links in the future :).

Also remember that link building is an on-going process. You want a steady, constant flow of links. Not 1000 links today and none for the next 6 months!

Hope this helps