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Try the keyword research tool for google adwords.

You don't want to do this in robots.txt.  If you serve pages with these parameters, people will inevitably link to them, and even if they're disallowed in your robots.txt file, Google maybe still index them, according to this: "While Google won't crawl or index the content of pages blocked by robots.txt, we may still index the URLs if we find them on other pages on the web." This is what the rel=canonical tag is designed for.  You should use that to tell Google the page is duplicate content of another page on your site, and that it should refer to that other page.  You can read (and watch a video) about that here.

Hi Dunamis, Many thanks for your answer, but in case I don't use the canonical, is correct what I explain? Thanks

Thank you Ryan.

Cloaking is defined by Google as "presenting different content to users and search engines". I recall Matt Cutts offering a geo-targeting example to further explain this issue. It's ok to show users in Canada some content, and then users from the US different content. It is not ok (i.e. would be considered cloaking) to set it up to always show Google bot the US version. Google wants you to treat their bot as a normal user and not make any special changes for them. In your case, you are specifically showing Google bot something different then regular users, so yes it is considered cloaking. The two points to make in the case you brought up are: you are not altering "content", you are altering meta tags which the users do not see anyway and do not impact the user experience there is no malicious intent. You are not doing this to deceive users or Google. In short, yes it meets the definition of cloaking. Google specifically says offering "different" content represents cloaking. Even though you are showing "more" content, that would be a difference. If you didn't show users an H1 tagged title at the top of your page, but you showed it to Google, that would be an example where you are showing more to Google and would definitely be cloaking. My biggest concern would be Google's automated system detecting it as cloaking then removing your pages or site from the index. You would then explain your actions through the Reconsideration Request and then Google would either accept your explanation or require a change.

your are absolutely right and it's exactly what I thought. The only thing is better to do is instead of un-indexing them I'd rather set up canonical links for the tag pages if it's possible.

Looks like we have some "testing" of the landing pages to do.

My best guess would be to read the great article on copywriting by cyrus shepard: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/10-super-easy-seo-copywriting-tips-for-link-building . The following principles could be used for writing a good description: 2. Why Headline Formulas Work 3. Get 20% More with Numbers 4. Free and Easy Power Words 10. Be Honest The page targeted keywords should be in the title.

Hi Peter, Thanks for your reply.  I have removed the header already that seems to be causing the issue.  Will let you know if it resolves it but I suspect it will. Many thanks, Gordon

Hi Chris Great insight, and you've confirmed some of my initial thoughts and feelings on the matter.  I don't want to rewrite purely for google's sake (although that was the tone of the question due to this being an SEO website!).  Many of the descriptions we have (from the feed) are rather poorly written, or block text which is hard to scan and read as a customer.  I want to make that clearer. I'm glad you've confirmed that picking a handful of products and doing those really well is a good idea... we're on the case! As for user generated content, yup, we're asking for reviews but probably need to encourage more in-depth ones. Thanks for taking the time to answer, it's much appreciated.

I believe my question focuses down to which is the safest path: 1. Never change file names on an established keyword landing page 2. Remove existing page and redirect to new improved landing page 3. Keep both until new one ranks as high in spite of some visitor confusion

So true. I think sometimes it's good to forget that the search engines even exist (gasp!), and build sites for our customers that they will love and promote for us. OK I'm dreaming a bit now, but I do believe we should put our customer's first and question why we are doing something for search engines that adds nothing to the customer experience.

I've used All-in-One SEO and Platinum SEO - they both do more or less the same thing and are simple to set up.

I agree with Ryan. In my openion, two important things you have to do for any TLD to work well for you is to ensure that you have relevant information and do not divert your content focus, the second is that tell Google your destination target in your webmaster tool area. I have few good ranked info sites and find that regardless of your domain level, you do it right, you'll rise as a winner!!

Thanks Ryan - just what I needed to know.

I dont believe you have aproblem if you havea bit of duplicate content, google does not penilize you for duplicate content, it just dosent award you points for it.

Nope. Sorry. Google can crawl CSS, so anything you do to hide text (z-index, position:relative, etc) is easily detectable (Google can even parse javascript). Now, sometimes you can get away with such things, like in a drop down menu for example. But if you do it, be sure to use the standards from a site that is well indexed. You're right, I was looking at that to... hahaha. From my experience though, It's better to have one link.. maybe not much better, but at least a little bit. Does this help Jonathan?

There isn't a specific penalty, but you are diluting the flow of "link juice" by linking to everything from your homepage. If you've ever heard of link scultping (a bruce clay technique), it might be of use here. Basically you have your top menu items as normal text links, and the lower levels are pulled in through javascript so the search engines don't spider them. It gets a lot more complicated than that, but at least it will point you in the right direction.

If you're not going to serve the pages from mysite.com/countryname/, then you wouldn't need to put the canonical tags on. If you are going to serve those pages, but not link to them from within your site, you might want to add the canonical tags anyway, in case people link to the URLs  under mysite.com/countryname/, so they'll pass their pagerank along.  You should also disallow that directory in your robots.txt, as Google has a way of finding pages and indexing them even if they're not linked to. I wouldn't expect you to get penalized.  I thought from your original post that the Is the content between the sites different?  If so you shouldn't have anything to worry about.