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Hi Alex, Great stuff. Thanks for that

I would never recommend altering your site in any way specifically for a bot. Google has repeatedly stated that would be seen as cloaking and you definitely run the risk of a penalty. It can happen any time. Do you really want that cloud over your head? Even if Amazon is able to do it, you are not Amazon. Despite any statement to the contrary, a huge site like Amazon can do things that you or I may not be able to do. We can debate the fairness of it, but we are not on a level playing field with them. You seem to really want to do this, so feel free. But x months from now you will likely make a post "My rankings dropped and I can't figure out why", and then someone will notice the setting and that will be the answer.

Thanks Bryce, I like the iFrame suggestion, it's a good one.

canonical tags totally save the day in regards to multiple category based products

Agree with EGOL on the complexity of this issue.  Seeping decisions on this can be dangerous.  One point I will speak to is the duplicate content on the search results issue.  I assume you are running into this problem because your search results pages are being indexed by google, and many of them show similar content.  There is no consensus on this issue right now, even from Google.  They will not penalize, however, because of duplicated content found in search results.  So i wouldnt worry about that problem right now. As for the expired/sold inventory pages, i would say to either redirect to a more permanent page (like a ford explorer sub category page for all explorers) or you just delete those pages, making sure that you manage your sitemaps and urls on a regular basis.  But that usually takes too much time.

Yes, that's making sense now. Just don't forget the hyphen

Thanks Ryan! That made a lot of sense. -Alex

Does Google respect User-agent rules in robots.txt? Yes I've seen googlebot ignore nofollow rules set at the page level. Google honors the nofollow rules set at the page level. The issue is there may be other links on your site or elsewhere on the web that Google will find and follow those links. Robots.txt is the absolute last means to use for blocking pages. You should not block a page with robots.txt unless you have exhausted all other options. A more appropriate method of keeping a page out of the index is the noindex tag. If you use the tag appropriately, Google will honor the tag.

I should have close to 6,000 or even more.  The issue I am having with my sitemap is that my URL are fed by Zend, some of them are pretty long too.  When I run a call for all the pages to put on the sitemap, the system runs out of memory and crashes. Do you know what part of a search result, in google, say, comes from the URL?

From what i have read Google wants their crawler and end users to see the same content and have the same experience. Based on that, if you have a header image that says "Great Deals" and you want search engines to read that, simply place that content in your ALT tag (SEOMoz has even posted studies showing that the ALT tag holds more relevance than the in regards to keyword placement). So my question to you is why would you need the to be their in the first place?

What is it's done through Frame Forwarding?

Hi Ryan (x2) Looked at that faqme system and thanks for the tip but would have to agree that faqme looks very seo unfriendly. We've found a couple which we're looking at and I will update with the 'chosen one' soon. Thanks again guys for your help. Trevor

Interesting note to add to this, I did just notice via Google Webmaster Tools, that our blog had been hacked and 150 or so of our blog posts were injected with hidden link spam.  In webmaster tools it said that the 2nd biggest keyword within our site was Viagra.  So that is definately playing into these drops in rankings I'm guessing within the last couple of months.