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Thanks for your replies guys. Now I know how to proceed.

You're welcome.  As you might have guessed, I've tackled this problem myself a few times!!

Every website created after, I dunno, let's say 2000 uses divs. View source on any page on the internet and ctrl+f for it. Divs are how you separate blocks of content so they can be arranged and styled. The spiders would be pretty bored if they skipped over all the pages with divs.

I would not worry about it... That's like saying "For next day delivery lease make sure you order before 3pm monday - friday." - which is completely legit. It's when you have two pages that are almost the same you run into issues, or two urls for one page Or you are copying content from other sites.

Thanks, you were a big help. I'll do the A/B you are talking about. I am thinking at this point I'll probably go with the body text. The site I'm talking about has well written text as the body of most pages. And, as I said, I'll be writing custom descriptions for the most important pages.

Thank you very much.

Thanks Lucek great answer, i went ahead and did it, it was pretty painless and i used the GWT to verify it was being read.  Its reading the review counts, high and low values but doesnt display them as star ratings - maybe thats only for PPC.  But the rest all works which is great. I was surprised that an ecomm category page wont return any snippets as it contains multiple product tags (according to GWT), but this now puts my worries to one side about too many key word repetitions on the category pages as ive told google exactly why that is. Here's to a succesful launch!

Whether you were talking about the anchor text or titles it is the same principal. If you are worried about over-doing titles don't use them on all the links.  I'm actually not a heavy user of them at all myself - only using them when they are needed rather than when there might be some seo benefit. Can't help you with the schema question I am afraid.  I'm lucky enough to have someone who deals with that for me. I'd put it up as a separate question.

I am ready to shout "NO" anytime I see anyone talking about using a subdomain... but you have made me consider it. I have a site (not nearly as large as yours) that has a lot of press releases given to us by government agencies and industry sites.  (These are not SEO press releases, they are from people who have a message to get out.)  For a few years these were about 2/3 of the content that we published. They ranked really well - often above the original source and we added a bit of unique commentary to each of them. In October '11 we took a Panda hit.  Fortunately we simply dropped a couple positions on tons of pages - not a huge loss like some people see. To escape we did noindex / follow to the most popular releases and threw the rest overboard.   That cut off search traffic (which hit our income) but kept the content on our site for visitors.  Google rankings returned partially a couple months later and then a couple months after that everything was back to normal - but income was down a little. After reading your post, I am thinking about starting a subdomain for these press releases.  Hopefully that will isolate the main site from any damage that the duplicate content might cause and allow them to pull a little traffic from search. About "index pages"....  If I do this I will keep them on my main site because most of my content is there (my own unique content).  Since Panda I have become highly selective about which press releases I publish and they are now a minority of new content. Thanks for the idea. Good luck with your site.

I think this is borderline and the kind of thing Panda hit in some cases. While the pages aren't true duplicates, they do appear a bit thin - they're basically the same content with a few brand-related keywords swapped out. It really comes down to scope, though - if you spun out 100s or 1000s of these, you could really dilute your index and even creep into potential Panda penalty territory. With about 600 pages in the index, though, and these accounting for only 19 of them, it seems like your risk is pretty low. It would be great to build out the content and make it more unique, but I don't think you're in any immediate danger. You don't want to NOINDEX or block these pages somehow, because I assume you're trying to get some mileage out of the long-tail keywords. My best advice is to try to beef them up and don't spin out too many variants (100+ of these pages with a 600 page site would be dangerous).

I have thousands of duplicate content warning. I am using a hosted server/realtor package that doesn't let me see the source code. I basically have duplicates of every page on my site some how. I've used the company for 8 yrs though. I am in deep trouble. I fear I can't stay with them.

Can I help you any more?

Did you ever get additional clarity on this?  I'm trying to do the same for a joomla website and want to make the image gallery as easy as possible to grab images from.  We have lots of food images and so looking for best practices, as I don't want to do this multiple times. Trying to figure out for joomla, and struggling with embedded content. www.bitecatering.net

I was certain that we addressed our redirect issue and I am very surprised to see it come up. Can someone perhaps shed light on why we are getting Accessible to Engines response? This is the page I am crawling... http://www.nutrivinevitamins.com/product/pure-encapsulations/

Hi Shulman Definitely get familiar with the WordPress SEO guide I put together for Moz. It will cover all the basics including good settings for a starting point on any WordPress blogs. To answer your question specifically; First make sure you're using Yoast SEO Then, it sounds like you need to "noindex subpages" - these are pages where the URL is /page/2/ /page/3/ etc. You make this setting in Yoast. Secondly, set up title and description templates, also in Yoast. This is why some descriptions are empty. If you set up a template it will fill them automatically. Hope this helps! -Dan

What do you mean by "The /ezine dir is still working for me"? What do you mean by "other issues"? I appreciate your response, but making statements like that is not very helpful.

It's tricky for home pages. Google really tends to prefer the root URL, and it's best if you can target that. Unfortunately, .Net has a bad way of forcing you to use a deeper page. If you can't resolve to the root, then you need to be consistent with your internal links before you set the canonical. If you're resolving and linking internally to: /keywords/default.aspx ...then canonical to that page. It's not quite as good as the root, but by setting the canonical to "/keywords" you could actually be creating a third URL that isn't represented in either your inbound or internal links. In other words, the first step to a good canonical implementation is to actual use ONE URL, no matter what it is. The canonical tag itself is a bit of a band-aid. It's effective, but fixing the on-page structure is the first, best step.