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Wow, thank you ever so much for this awesome response Cyrus! There is alot of information you have provided for me to work through, I appreciate your time. A response to your question, we did receive a unnatural links warning back in 2011, being quite naive to this type of warning we stupidly ignored it Once again many thanks, Mark

If somebody gave that site to me I would go back to basics. I think that the category and product titles have not been planned with keywords in mind.  I would talk to the business owner and determine what keywords he needs to be visible for in the search results. Then a detailed plan of systematic categories and product types would be developed and the goal would be to fill all of them. Then I would make no more than one page for each product type.  That page would have several photos (sometimes a lot of photos) and each photo would have a generous description.  I would tell the business owner that I need those descriptions.  If he is not willing to write them I would ask him if he wants to be competitive or if he wants to fart around.  If he wants to be competitive and bring in long-tail traffic then he better get writing and do a good job of it. They say a picture is worth a thousand words so the owner of this business should have no trouble describing the product.

Thanks very much Christopher. This is an excellent explanation. What do you think of Charlie and EGOL's suggestions regarding making sure that there are links embedded in these PDFs pointing either back to the product page or even to the home page? In your opinion, is this something worth doing? If so, why?

Hi Shane, Use dashes, and make sure that the URLs are "hackable as well.  That is, they can easily be used to navigate to different sections of the site through modification.  For example: You have a blog with two sections, news and movie reviews.  See two URL examples: Good: http://www.myblog.com/movie-reviews/shane-reviews-ironman-3/ Wrong:  http://www.myblog.com/movie-reviews-shane-reviews-ironman-3/ If I am a user on your website, it would be a good experience for me to understand the structure of your site through the URL itself.  If I remove "shane-reviews-ironman-3/" from the URL, I should be taken to the movie reviews section of your blog. Also, don't forget canonicalization. Hope this helps! Brice

Hi Miriam, to get a grey pin you only need to mark a place somewhere in the world on google maps. Example: I have a hotel website for a hotel on a river in Nicaragua. The next village is 20 miles away. But still google localized the place and I can put a mobile phone number with it. Or another hotel is located at a deserted beach. I put the marker on the position and describe the position in the address fields as good as possible (e.g. Street name: Playa del Sol, City: Islandname, Zipcode: a random figure). In my specific case we talk about the listing for "Hotel Little Corn Island" and "hotel bellavista corn island". Thanks for help...

I would go with the first choice, or even something like domain.com/category/product (you could always include the brand in the SEO-friendly URL). The only situation where I would use the second option would be if I had a really tiny site, say 50 products or less. I would do it more from a future-proofing viewpoint than any specific SEO reason. With choice #1, if you ever move or replatform your site, it will be far easier to keep your products organized and to implement any necessary 301-redirects than if you choose options #2. It will also be far easier to sort these URLs in a database and then populate new categories on a new site. I suppose I prefer #1 because it makes managing the data easier, particularly on large sites.

The site is three months old and I did the 301 about two weeks ago. We can rule out the EMD problem since the old domain was just the name of the business. Plus everything was fine until two weeks ago when I messed it up, and that would be too coincidental. Is there any issue with redirecting an html site to a php site?

thanks for that keri, just contacted my hosting company for them to investigate

Thumbing up both answers - I think they've got you covered. This is definitely a situation where you should try to sort out why the deeper page is ranking. It could be a positive that you should try to encourage (disrupting that could harm your ranking, ultimately) or it could signal something about your home-page that needs work. Rand had a good post a while back on the subject: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/wrong-page-ranking-in-the-results-6-common-causes-5-solutions

The point I'm trying to get across is this: "I asked the question of why these pages are considered duplicate, the answer appears to be : because textually they are even if visually they are not." I don't think that's the complete answer, or even the most important part of the answer. Surely having mostly similar content across pages won't help, but as I've tried to point out, there are other factors that come into play here. It's not just about the content, but putting the content into context for the search engines. In order for them to understand what it is they're looking it, there's more that's important than just the content. Michel

Thanks guys!