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Sweet thanks Josh for the info.

To keep your pages and avoid the duplicate content issues i would suggest expanding your product description e.g.  Dell Color Compatible 3130CN －Magenda with chip  Dell Color Compatible 3130CN －Black with chip ...those are your produce titles, which is fine, but they are also the in page product descriptions and there is only one word different. Now the reality... you have over 20K pages indexed so the above approach may not be so practical unless you have a bit of cash to throw at a mechanical turk project that gets all your product descriptions rewritten. You really ought to introduce something like Disqus that lets people comment on products which in turn would generate a load of unique content, but this would take a long time. If I was you I would consolidate products like this into a single page with a comprehensive product description and then put a canonical tag on each of the individual product pages so you can still keep them separate, but for SEO purposes you are telling the search engines to pick up one great pages and not loads of poor pages with no unique content.

Hi Hawktv1, So glad to know you've found some helpful guidance on this topic. You asked a very good question! Miriam

Thanks Ryan, that exactly the information I required.

Rel=prev/next is still pretty new, so we don't have a lot of data, but it seems to work like a canonical tag. It should pass link-juice up the chain. That said, it's pretty rare for "page X" or search results (where X > 1) to have inbound links or much in the way of search value. I think cleaning up pagination can help a lot, if it's a big chunk of your search index.

I've seen more of this post-Caffeine. Now that Google is crawling/indexing faster, site outages can do a lot more damage. Being down for 3 weeks is definitely bad, and it's very likely you'll lost ranking. It's rare to see any kind of manual penalty, and you should recover - it usually just takes time. You've got to get Google back in action - XML sitemaps (if you don't have them), building up some new links, etc. This is a quick confirmation from 2006 - I'd say the problem is much worse now: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/server-outages-lead-to-drop-in-search-engine-rankings/3946/ The bigger argument is just that being down 3 weeks is a lot of lost sales, potentially. To not notice you're down and no know where you're hosted is unacceptable for any serious online business, IMO. I'd be wary of any client who cares that little about their business, to be perfectly blunt.

The 301 and canonical can be used to solve similar issues, so it gets confusing. For home pages, I think the canonical is a good route, because it "sweeps" up other variants as well. For example, someone might hit your home-page without the "www" with an affiliate ID, etc. One canonical tag on the home-page prevents all of that. The "alerts" in our system can be a bit hyperactive. Usually the All-In-One canonicals are solid. We're probably just giving you a general warning, but it's tough to tell without a specific page.

Yeah, the 301 should be taking effect, but apparently Google thinks that the 301 is more of a 302. We have seen Bing come out and say sometimes they will ignore commands and treat a 301 like a 302. Do you 301 things often? Regardless, since there are no more links pointing to the /Lavender page, you can 404 or 410 that page and let it drop in the index. The new one should take it's place. You do risk losing traffic for a little time though, just be aware of that. Should fix the issue though.

Some good comments here, and I'll have to come in somewhere in the middle. I think Vahe is right that there can be meaningful benefits, both for SEOs and visitors. It's also true, though, that a site-wide URL change can carry risks. Solid planning and well-implemented 301s can mitigate most of that risk, though. If it were only to get keywords in the URL and the site is ranking well, I'd probably hesitate. Since these dynamic URLs are creating duplicates, though, I think it's a different situation. Those duplicates could create very real risk to your rankings. If the URL change can solve both problem, I'd be much more inclined to do it. There are other ways to deal with the duplicates - the canonical tag is probably a good bet here (although I'm not sure how tough it is to implement in Joomla). Blocking duplicate-causing parameters in Google and Bing Webmaster Tools is another option. For example, you could block "Itemid" if it had no unique value (I'm not clear on that from the example).

thanks for the help (and good analogy). looks like it's time to start testing a few  combined pages

Good to know that, Visits may be short term. I have set Canonical for all dynamic pages. I have done big R & D before make it happen. That study includes big eCommerce websites. But, I am surviving with my visits since January 8, 2012.

A suggestion that all major search engines obey. We used it massively and it is 100% listened to by search engines.

Hi Atul This should help http://www.seomoz.org/img/upload/Cheat%20Sheet%20-%20301.png Here is the full PDF version of Developer's SEO cheat sheet. I found it very useful when dealing with technical SEO issues.

Thank you for all your replies.. The code is getting cleaned up as I type

james where you are saying about the main header, should i put an introduction there. i have been worried about putting an introduction as i fear it may look out of place.