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How you are checking the rank will influence the result. Checking from your own computers that often "visit" your own site can make your own pages show up better in the rankings. Did you try using a rank checking service, or  an anonymous Google search tool like startpage.com ?

Thanks...

Hi Everett, Thanks for the reply, and choices. We just implemented choice #2, so Im pleased that you think it's a good solution. Thanks a bunch and have a great weekend . Cheers, Christian

You may not be able to change much content, but you can add content. Add a human element that discusses why product A may be better than product C. Rand also discusses something similar in today's Whiteboard Friday at http://moz.com/blog/handling-duplicate-content-across-large-numbers-of-urls.

Having many links on a page will not reduce the PageRank of the page that it's on. However, it will reduce the amount of PageRank being passed to the individual links on the page, so you should try to keep the number as low as you can while maintaining a good user experience. A general rule of thumb is to keep the number of links to 100 or less, although many ecommerce sites have many more (the typical Amazon.com page has 400+ links). Linking to high-quality, relevant external sites is believed to improve the relevancy of your own page. These should not be nofollowed. In general, it should not be necessary to use nofollow for external links unless you are linking to a direct competitor (but then, why would you be linking to them?) or in the case of UGC where people may leave links to low quality sites. In general, just use your common sense and link to any relevant internal or external pages that you think will enhance the value of your content. Don't use nofollow. It's good to use target="_blank" to have external links open in a new window.

If you have an online store dedicated to selling shoes in France, I would focus less on how to optimize and more on getting someone that is fluent in French and native to France. You are going to have to give that person the time to really translate your site from a French person's (someone that lives in France) perspective. All the site content. Once you have accomplished that and used the correct implementation of HREFLANG and the meta language content tag (for Bing), let it sit for the time being. See how much traffic it garners. Get user input, check internal search patterns. If you aren't already tracking internal site search, please do that. If you don't allow internal site search, add that and track it in analytics. Only then do you optimize for specific text.

Perhaps you should add product schemas

Thanks alot! The reason for the pre-launch site would på to get up relevant content and start building SEO-value. Of course, there would be much more beneficial to also get some inbound links, however the resources for this is limited. Setting up a Wordpress-site is not much work and I have the content, but I am not sure if it is worth doing anyway?

If duplicate content does between two sites owned by the same company exist what is generally the outcome? Does one site rank and not the other? Are both sites penalised? Does location influence the site that ranks?

I really like Alan's answer. I think that the three questions one must ask are... Q1: Why are you writing? Q2: What is the content quality? Q3: Why are you linking? A1: On my site I am writing because I have something to say that I genuinely believe that people want to know and should read. I am also doing a lot of writing because I know that there is search volume for the content. I am trying to produce a quality content resource for the visitor. I am not blathering. A2: My goal is to produce several hundred to a few thousand words of content with several great photos, interesting graphs, attractive graphics and tabulated data. Before I write, I make sure that I am going to produce content that will be one of the best pages on the web for that topic. It is high quality content deliberately produced because people are searching for it. I am not blathering just to get a page up. This content can take several days per page to produce. A3: When I link, I am linking to additional information that the reader might want. Often that content is on my own website and for that my links are similar to the in-content links on wikipedia - where a keyword links to another page on my site that matches the topic perfectly. I also often link to several other pages on websites that I don't own and those links are going to content that is superior to mine in some way. Again like wikipedia. If you are writing and linking with a purpose then you might be doing well. You can assess that by determining if visitors are "liking" or "sharing" your content. If that is happening then you are doing fine. If that is not happening then maybe you are blathering because you want to put links in the content. If that is the case I would post less often and post higher quality. It will be a greater bang for the buck.

Thanks Federico for the quick response!

Having the keyword terms in urls in the native language is certainly a better user experience for both searchers and your website visitors. As part of Google's algorithm, keywords in the url do have some influence - this item even appears in the Moz Analytics On-Page Grader tool showing Keyword Usage in URL as Moderately Important. If the IT team can only provide urls in English for now, then it's probably what you'll need to do until you can move to native language words in your urls. From a search engine perspective, as long as your site is setup correctly for international/multilingual, you should be fine. Google has a very helpful post here. Then when your team can do urls in native language, you can appropriately redirect the English language-specific pages to the new urls.

Hi Edmond, We'd love to chat to you about this - be great to maybe jump on a Skype call?

I actually show both terms graded as a C for that page. If you run the page grader again (http://pro.moz.com/tools/on-page-keyword-optimization/new) it actually lists out exactly what items it looks for and doesn't find and those are the reasons why the grade would be lower. If there is a green check mark to the left of the item then that means it was able to find this on your page, if the green check is missing then that is something you should focus on.

As a rule of thumb, I don't trust anything with PHP Link Directory in the footer. There's a few correlations here: 1. The anchor text used and the ranking lost are very close. 2. The number of links (and anchor text) from one place shot up dramatically in that time frame. 3. The ***linking site's link footprint appears to be pretty terrible as well. If you want, you can try Linkdetox Pro for 149 EU a month. Just take a couple of weekends and really sort it out. (I'm not affiliated with Linkdetox.com)

It could be the difference in your on-page optimization.  Have you checked competiton vs. your pages with the http://moz.com/researchtools/on-page-grader yet?

Hi Adam. I've just actually posted regarding this (the backlinks) in the backlinks section. Might be better to address that specific question there: http://moz.com/community/q/dealing-with-spam-link-attack I'm not really sure where to start with getting these links removed. Thanks for your input.

You have 5 identical sites but you want to solve the duplicate problem? Then change each site and their content?

Sorry to take so long to respond; I wanted to wait until the child pages had dropped out of the index, in case I had any follow up Q's. Everything's looking good so far, and it seems all the links to any individual views of child pages have now been removed. BTW, great post on WP and SEO, Dan! Thanks again!

Hi Tyler, Based on your description above, to Google or the bots, it only seem like it is 1 page with the URL and it is definitely bad for SEO.  I am assuming the developers have some sort of script in your website to create this effect.  I would suggest removing the script and making it not so fancy and have different URL for each page. Furthermore, the URL itself is bad since it doesn't tell bots and users what the page is about.  You should look into how to optimize URLs or best practices for optimized URLs.