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Thank you everyone for the comments and confirmation. Now I just have to break the news to the client that we are going to have to delete those pages haha. Wish me luck

Thanks for the tip Irving! Lets assume that "basicball" was the same thing as a baseball, but just a different word (Tv vs television) that 'may' be interpreted by googel as meaning the same thing If I use www.baseball.com/basicball/product-page.html would this be just as 'spammy' as if i used "baseballs" instead of "basicball"? thanks!

I don't think it will "weaken" the domain but if it might provide a better experience for users if instead of clicking a link and being 301d they could click a link straight through to the target page. You can 301 the duplicate pages as well if you like.

Alex-      Great question. Nice website. You guys did a nice job on the design and the structure and the content. Lots of solid content in the sitemap....... The answer is yes. It can be indexed correctly. You will want to test it. When I am using wordpress, I actually test the slide panel content to make sure it is getting indexed correctly with the seo plug in. You should do the same to make sure it isnt hiding behind the code. We have had some sliders not work correctly to show text and show up as images.......so in that case for a short term solution, we have enhanced the meta tag description and alt tags to make sure it maximizes seo value. We have also found that some sliders don't index on the home page but we can get them to show up on other secondary pages.....but make sure that you don't have the same content on every page , as it will show up as duplicate content. One other thing.....don't plan on alot of people clicking on the slider....from our testing with over 30 websites that use a slider like that, on the right hand side, less than 7% of the visitors actually clicked on them....we found that most users didn't know there was hidden text.... Hope this helps. Mark

I will do Hannah, thanks again.

Thanks Guys I've got some developers to help me with the tech side so they'll be using the servers etc that they're used too. Just wanted to check I wasn't dropping a massively obvious clanger on the SEO side. Cheers for your help. Alex.

Excellent BJ. Thanks for the input. The Geo landing pages are a great idea and I should be using them. Would you mind giving us a couple of links to some Geo landing pages you think are effective - your own or someone else if you're not comfortable putting it here? I'd like to see a good solid blog or two on building effective money-making landing pages.

Google doesn't store cookies when it indexes your site, so it will "see" your page as someone who hasn't visited before. Perhaps there's another way to look at this.  How about redirecting all user-agents except googlebot to achieve what you want?  Then you'd keep the redirect you want and your rankings!

This sounds like a plan. Give it a shot and test the results

I would go through your list and remove the links and not try to vary anchor text at this point. I've been hit was well and moved to a domain I have held for years, but am slowly removing bad links that are on networks or painfully outside my niche. I would suggest naturally building links slowly with partial match anchor text and with the majority of the links having anchor text of your brand

Carlos, Just wanted to say "Thanks" for this post. I am in a similar situation as Scott, and I had my doubts that a reconsideration request would yield any results. Nice to hear that it does. My "prior" seo advised me to wait it out. When I insisted, they wanted me to remove all reference to them in my response as well as remove their IDs in Webmaster Tools. Been trying to unwind things on my own before i submit a reconsideration. Do you think Google will remove the penalty if i just tell them I fired the SEO? Thanks again.

Yea...but all the three keyword phrases in my case really mean the exact same thing and will attract the exact same audience.  They are synonyms. A better example I should have used is:(probably still not the best) So if I ranked #1 for Car Dealers and wanted to add the following that had equal traffic. Car Auto Dealers Car Vehicle Dealers Could I add those two terms to the same page?

Here's a great SEOMoz post on the subject: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/authorship-google-plus-link-building And if you're using a Wordpress CMS: http://www.devonwebdesigners.com/3278/relauthor-step-by-step-for-wordpress/ Best of luck, I'm in the process of implementing this myself.  And as others have noted, you can test if it's working through GWT.

A link to the sitemap would help.

If you want Google to recognize items in your portfolio as separate pages then you should really create HTML snapshots. You can find pretty much every thing you need to know about the process here  https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling/