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Anthony's definitely got the basics covered. How to handle any particular situation can get pretty tricky. I wrote a post about it, and that post got very long very fast: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-in-a-post-panda-world I took a quick look at your campaign (I have Staff access), and it seems your login page is carrying an event ID - so every event is creating a different URL, but they all land on one page. That could spin out 100s of duplicates on Google, and that login page has little or no search value. A canonical tag would definitely be a good bet here. You may have other issues going on, but clean up one at a time - getting that number down can definitely be beneficial and help boost your ranking power.

Carl If you check through Everett Sizemore's pro webinar about E-comerce SEO, he covers the correct way to set up of Megneto for ecommerce, from memory he also offers some additional resources you can check out. i think its around 45 mins in. http://www.seomoz.org/webinars/ecommerce-seo-fix-and-avoid-common-issues Hope that helps

Yeh, I could do that, but through other websites I noticed that it says it'll take effect only from November! Anyway, sounds like I've done what I can and hopefully Google will crawl the website again soon and re-index appropriately

So it seems like we've gone full circle. The initial question was, "How can I tell Google (and other crawlers) to temporarily (a day or two) ignore my site?  We're hoping to buy ourselves a small bit of time to verify redirects and live functionality before allowing Google to crawl and index the new architecture." Sounds like the answer is, 'that's not possible'.

Agreed. I have just run the tool and its identified a bunch of links we should consider removing.. I am impressed as it has saved allot of analytic work identifying these dodgy links.

Yeah, having the same listings across multiple domains isn't doing you any favors. The best set up is to have all the languages on one domain and make use of the multilingual canonical support. Not sure if that can be applied across different domains.

The geotargeting in WMT should take care of it, but also make sure you include your local address on the site with microformatting, google map(s) if applicable and the country name listed globally like in the footer if possible, as additional indicators.

Yeah we managed to get it to pick up the products for us, normally seemed to take a day or so after the crawl to reflect the change in the serps, although that was going from not showing it to showing it so not sure about the other way around. But yeah 'items' and 'products' seem to be the words which trigger it, although there may be more... Best, Stuart

Hi Nocolai, No problem. Yes, having the link from only the homepage should help. This often happens when a website uses the same template for the whole site which means the link becomes a sitewide link and looks unnatural to search engines. Double check that there is also some anchor text or an image because it didn't look like there was any when I checked. If they are adverts then the links should use nofollow.

Another benefit is possibly shorter URLs. But I prefer the normal approach of example.com/sector/sub-sector/productpage.

thanks very much, your help is appreciated. kind regards, Jon.