Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I assume by this post that it has positive implications, however I must admin that I'm not too familiar with eTags. SEOtown - article on eTags

Yes i agree, it is useful. I was, however, talking more about how we can promote pre-existing material.

I believe the number 100 is the limit of links in a page. and yes the more links the less pr being passed to each page. But 100 links on the home page means means you can have 100 child pages with 100 links on each means 10,000 links only 2 clicks from home page. as for re=canonical, is page 2 unique? then yes just as you would for any other page. I assume you are aware of the flat link stucture, if not I think this page though old is a must. http://www.webworkshop.net/pagerank.html Its a long read, but very imformative

Thanks guys, I totally forgot seomoz has it on a sub folder!

I have heard people caim they can not, but i know they can, i dont know that they do, but i know they can. in uni we learnt how you can send code in images by altering pixels and how to detect if the image has changed and conctains code. Each image is just a long code. its a simple check sum

The only links you want to be paying for are advertising ones if that's the route you're taking. If your tool is equally as good then they'll usually be more than happy to link to it!

Thanks for responding back and letting us know the cause. It's helpful to know to ask about this the next time this question comes up -- and it has come up before (though I believe it was a different cause).

I'd recommend not using the canonical tag here for the following reasons: It's not what the tag is designed for.  By using canonical tag you're saying to search engines, "this page is the same as this other page so just ignore it."  Not true in this case. It seems like the pages you're noindexing are good candidates for it: they aren't pages that would be a good experience for users to land on from a search. IFor product pages that are no longer available, I'd use a 301 redirect to point users to the home page or a similar product - that's a way better experience for users who click on links to those pages (remember, it's about the users as much as search engines), and you preserve link juice.  I'd also just double-check and see if your "view cart" and similar pages are accruing many links; my guess is they aren't.  I'd keep those noindexed via robots.txt just because it would be very odd for a user to click on a search result and land there.  A good user experience is more important than the (my guess is very small) amount of link juice you might lose by not having them indexed.

We'll be using IIS, but I suppose it works the same way. It's my hope to get this done with one small change and not have to update an entire database of thousands of pages. Can that not be done?

Thank you everyone for the help. I feel confident that we can just continue on like we are, and if I notice any issues, then I can try your suggestions of the keyword order and also following the examples of that blog post. Thanks again!

That was my thought process as well. Thanks Alan!

Monica, Thanks so much for your help. I was having trouble finding any further information through my own research, maybe I can get some clues from Google News. I will also be experimenting and maybe can share my findings. I appreciate it -Joe

You should not be overly worried about your rankings, especially in the short term. Just write great content which users will love and you will see the website come up on searches again. All said, keep an eye on your Google webmaster tools. If your website has been penalized for some reason, Google execs maybe kind enough to let you know about that. SEOmoz tools should give you a good idea on crawl errors and on page metrics so that you can keep a close look at them.

I totally agree with the notion that User Experience dictates keeping it in a regular site template. And an html page devoted to being a sitemap is supposed to be for users, not search engines.  The days of having one page with nothing but links should be over in everyone's mind anyhow.  If all a page does is provide links, with no content around them, the SEO value of all those links is minor now. Then we can talk about how much value those sitemap on-page links have anyhow -  if you've got fifty or five hundred links on that page, they're not passing very much value for SEO, regardless of whether there's top navigation, or anything else on the page.

Whether you include the sub-nav in the site-wide navigation as drop-downs or not, make sure that you also have that sub-nav as on-page links (such as in a side-bar) specific to each section.  So that only that sections page links will then be on all of the pages just within that section, without the drop-down needing to be used. This ensures proper attribution and relationship queues for SEO. Having said that, this issue is widely debated in the industry.  I've seen arguments on both sides claiming they have proof that one or the other of your choices was better.  Personally, I've always taken the approach that SEO should always be balanced with usability.  So when this question comes up I don't tell clients to kill the site-wide drop-downs.  Instead, I focus on other refinement (like the section by section dedicated side-bar links, and proper breadcrumbs, and in-content links, and so forth).  And that has always gotten my clients solid results.

That isn't always a bad idea. I would just say to make sure you are dealing with trusted sites before trading for links. All links are not created equal. Too many untrusted links reflect poorly on your site, regardless of how they are built!