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I can see how dupe images it might be an issue if you rely on image search for traffic but likely not in your case.  On the other hand, 400 pages with the exact same image...? That is a lot.  It seems that you might help yourself if you alter each image with a little copy specific to the page you've put it on and tailor the alt tags so that they're aligned with the image and the geo data for it's specific page.

Hey Cryus, Thank you so much. This is exactly what I was looking for. I'm ready for the hard work. The tricks I got my SEO company to do were bound to get me into trouble. It's great to have some expert advice thank you Cryus & Trickshotric! Dan (from NZ)

It look like the answer you received here might be helpful: http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/webmasters/hSoJMYFsZpo I think the robots.txt disallow is a good idea. Scott O.

Thank you. I will tell to my developer regarding this issue and than see what they reply.

Yeah, no argument there. I worry about it from an SEO standpoint, but sometimes there really isn't a lot you can do, from a business standpoint. I think it's occasionally worth a little fight, though - sometimes, when all the dealers want to have their cake and eat it, too, they all suffer (at least, post-Panda). Admittedly, that's a long, difficult argument, and you have to decide if it's worth the price.

From a navigation point of view, being able to erase the end of a url and end up at a parent is excelent for UX. As is not having to recall a file type (the .htm) It wouldn't thus entirely surpise me if google favoured such a structure. I expect however, google infurs such relationships from your onsite interlinking more. - Breadcumbs for example would probably have more effect. (I do belive there is a markup for them in webmaster tools, or at least was one being beta'd recently) I personaly wouldn't do such a change less there were other issues being fixed at the same time. (Improving UX would count). Make sure of course to do you 301's and change the internal links if you do.

Could you consider a version of option 4? Main deal page could feature the top 3-5 deals of each of your most popular subcategories.  Then your category pages feature all the deals for that category so it doesn't seem like there would be a duplicate content issue with this approach.  This also seems to be a user-centric approach b/c it allows people to see a variety of deals on the main page and they are being curated by popularity of category and top 3-5 best sellers within the category. Does that make sense?

As always in the SEO industry, there's no right answer for any particular case but I think you got a really structured approach to it. It would be great to know the results of your experiment. This could be a really good article in the seomoz community, let me know how it goes!

Great! Look forward to see your results

Based on the information you provided, yes, I would recommend a 301 redirect to do what you are trying to accomplish versus a 302 or no redirect.

they probably made a mistake. .html is the filename, not a folder and therefor no trailing slash. I would ask them to clarify. As a matter of fact I would even strip off the .html extension.

"Yes, with any URL change you will lose rank. There is a golden rule : never change URLS." I respectfully disagree. The golden rule is keep your domain name unless the site is completely nuked. Update URLs to be more SEO friendly, especially if they look like the ones you have. 301 redirect appropriately, and if the new pages have the same content they will simply assume the ranking positions of the old URLs. Test a category first if you're nervous.

it is good when there is a forum as you can share experiences and gain knowledge but finding a lot of theme clubs without forums

Hi Peter thanks for your reply. The crawl has now completed and given me some more areas to work on, it's a great tool. I was so preoccupied with 'hiding' the site over the last couple of months with the easy code: User-agent: * Disallow: / I hadn't thought beyond this. I've noticed Google has now recognised the new robots.txt which has allowed the sitemap to be accepted.. I'll look at your notes, thank you, and work out my next move. I'll let you know how I get on too. I know (well think) I have to get noindex, follow for 'sorted' category pages... all the best, Mark.

That does indeed help. Thanks Paul

Thanks, Smarties. It's the "Link Analysis">History that makes me want to check webmaster tools.  OSE does show a huge drop in links, but I can't figure out why.  I haven't gotten the latest numbers yet so I'm not sure if the drop is continuing to happen or if it's stabilized.

Thanks for that. I think it is about understanding how to use it. for example i was trying to find out on www.cheapflightsgatwick.com  which is a wordpress site how to add more links under the holiday ideas and under the travel news  but even though i have checked and checked using the tool i still can find out the answer. for me i would like the tool to be made a bit more simple to use but maybe that is just me not understanding it properly

Oxfordcomma, if you will do it using a subdirectory (www.you-domain.com/blog, for example), it will depend on the blog architecture and its optimization from on-page perspective (title definition, title in document as H1, friendly URL, and so on). Some tools (like Wordpress) are optimized for it, so it could be a good option. If you build the blog using the website infrastructure following the recommended guidelines for on-page optimization, I see no relevant difference between the 02 options.