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Sounds like a loophole to me.  But i'll take it! Thanks for the advice! -Storwell

This is a solutions, but its an ugly one, does anyone really wants a home url of http://www.mysite.com/index.php?a=11&b=16&c=5&d=1&page=2. you then have the problem of people linking to that page. I believe michael said in a previous post that they were prodused by his CMS, the best idea would be to get rid of them rather then deal wioth them if posible.

To be honest you can run it off the sub folders on the website I have seen recently a big website which has a directory on it: http://marketing.com.au/ Also from a link juice point of view it would be better on the sub folder. The issue is duplicant content from people copying other directories and placing the info direct on your site which can leave dup UGC. If you website is established and already has ranks then I would go with the sub domain. you really need to put a internal case together and look at all options both positive and negative.

Just to add to Ryan's comments - if you had massive 500 issues, then you might theoretically argue that 301'ing would keep Google from crawling so many errors. At best, though, it's a band-aid, and maybe even a poor-fitting one. The better question is - why are those 500s occurring. Ultimately, they should be fixed, not patched. Usually, Google isn't going to penalize a one-time 500 error or a short-term server problem. The only time I could see 301'ing is if you knew you had a major problem and couldn't fix it for a few days. The 301 (or possibly 302, in this case) could buffer you from crawl problems while you made the fixes. Obviously, that wouldn't be an ideal situation.

True... But mine is a disaster!   I may need some air and ground support from some of the experts. I'm assessing the damage now...    I'll get it!

We really need a lot more details to understand how to best advise you. For example, you mention sharing a global concept. If you optimize each site for a specific country, you can duplicate content all you want without any concerns. More specifically, if you have 3 sites optimized for Spain, France and the UK respectively then the content can be duplicated and your rankings should not be affected. You can also offer some duplication within a site. For example you can write 10 articles on Ford Mustangs, then offer a generic page with a snippet from each of the 10 articles. If the latter page is properly set up, then it would not be considered as duplicate content. Can you share some example URLs so we can better understand your needs?

I still think it's better to have exact match. The Google Adwords Keyword tool shows far more searches for office refurbishment over office refurb for exact, phrase and broad in the UK (and globally) - both with 'High' competition. Unless you're a really well known brand in your target market I don't see it as a problem if your brand is cut off at the end of the title tag on search results.

Hi again, There are a few really helpful posts you can take a look at that come from Duane Forrester. This one on the Bing Webmasters Blog is about developing great content. Duane also gives some great Bing specific information in these Whiteboard Fridays from March, June and October. Hope that helps, Sha

You can have multiple site maps, with one master site map that indexes the smaller site maps. That way you can have ten sitemaps if you want to, each covering a portion of your site, with none of them being too huge. You would want a totally different type of site map for your users, one where you just looked at the top-level concepts of your website and didn't present the user with all 100,000 pages of your site. Notice how Verizon has a comprehensive sitemap for its users, but doesn't list each and every page. http://www.verizonwireless.com/b2c/sitemap.jsp

Thanks Alsn & Ryan.

Thanks Alan, That solved my problem...

My advice is to make separate channels fro separate client, do not place clients videos on your channel because if you part ways it can get messy.

I work on a big ecommerce client which purchased another ecommerce website, the strategy they eneded up going with was running both websites still as they had such a good name in the market and both had decent ranks. (Option 1) We can also aim for SERP domination on specific keywords, yet I understand the clients request to take one site down. I think if you implement cross site 301's and move content to the main site it is evident that their will be a loss in rankings seen.  (options 3)

YouTube appears to value the same off-page factors that matter on most pages. Having your keywords in the title of the video, leading with the most important keyword in the description and making use of the tags all make a difference, but since these appear on the page, as well as ioff-page there may be some confusion.

Thank you guys!

It's important to remember that "almost the same" can be just as bad as "exactly the same" when talking about duplicate content.  Out of all the words on these two pages, less than 50 are actually different - the names of the few products you have listed. Your products need some unique content to distinguish them really badly.  These pages are content-poor and need more products per page and a good injection of original, readable copy. You're pretty lucky in that writing copy for these products could be really fun for a young intern or entry level person.  Just throw them a couple good keywords and let them go to town with how great these Glee or Jersey Shore costumes are.  You've got a huge white space to fill there so don't hold back.  I'd also encourage you to incorporate other elements like video, social media, and user-generated content - all of which should be easier to generate for such fun products than the boring blue widgets I deal with every day. It's time to go content-crazy!

Hey, I was reading this discussion and I'm just curios to see if you had any success with reconsideration?

The way they're planning it now is really, really a bad idea. First you put a part of the new design. New url's start popping up. SE's crawl that, might find duplicate content, you need redirects in place, but what happens when the site is moved again, you have to change redirects again... So it sucks! You can put everything on the www2 domain, but put a noindex nofollow in the header. Better still would just to let the new website sit behind an authentication screen so only you, developers, etc. can reach it. Once it's fully ready and you know what all the new urls will be, setup redirects (301's!) and once they are ready to go, than move the new site in place.