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Hi Martin, Thanks for coming back to me. You are spot on... I think I have been sitting at the desk to long today.  Zoned out! Yep, webtools in google shows the URL in full so I can find it now. Thanks for your help

Thanks again Ryan. Yer, we can't seem to see any issues either, maybe we just need to wait and build up links to them...

Page Rank is old new and its better to judge a site on its Page and Domain Authority. If you wish to see a websites Page Rank and also its MOZrank download an add on for your browser called 'Searchstatus.' It only works in Firefox and Seamonkey so make sure your using the correct browser. Having the SEOMOZ toolbar and the Searchstatus add on, you have many factors to take into consideration when judging a website. Good luck with your ventures.

I see you point Egol and thanks for your input.

If your classifieds are categorized in any way then after a listing is expired I would always 301 redirect it up to the relevant category, but I think it would be more relevant to 301 it to the relevant category than trying to decipher a similar specific listing.  I would find a way to dynamically after a listing expires it implement a 301 redirect.  I don't believe canonicalization is going to help here unless you have other duplicate content issues with the site.  I would not worry about the size of an .htaccess file because it doesn't impact anything negatively.

Is your site verified in Google Webmaster Tools, and Bing's Webmaster Tools? If not, get it verified, then look at your account. There's a wealth of information there, including any notices from the search engines about anything they find that might be suspect (Google now even sends a note for buying/selling links), and you can get some better statistics about your site when it's verified. I would first look in your webmaster tools, and see if the engines have flagged anything for you. If so, then you know what to work on first. Second, step back and think about what purpose your website has for your business, is it meeting that purpose, and what are useful metrics for you. In May, Matt Cutts did a video response to a person asking why toolbar PR isn't updated more frequently (available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZ9pFUSVG9g) and mentioned that while they internally keep a close eye on correct PR, they're not as worried about what shows up in the toolbar. They have some flags if something with super-high PR goes down to super-low PR in the toolbar, but a move from 4 to 3 doesn't fall under that. So, it's probably good to be thinking about your site, but think beyond the toolbar PR.

Pagerank is affected by other factors than number of on page links, from an April 2010 SEOmoz blog article, "1 of 200+ ranking signals - Google's representatives have continually repeated that PageRank is just one of 'more than two hundred' signals the engine applies to the rankings equation."  Some of these signals go into Pagerank distribution itself: where the link appears on the page, spam signals, etc. Remember though that Google's Pagerank is intentionally vague.  You'll have better luck figuring your numbers with SEOmoz' scoring system.

Thank you Bevelwise that makes sense.

When you put it like that it does seem a bit messy. Thanks for your help Ryan

Recently google has really downplayed the importance of exact match domain names. If the domain name is newly registered it probably hasn't earned any links yet, and therefore wouldn't pass any SEO value.

If anyone looking for a similar tool, I think this tool will help. https://www.urlmapper.com/

Thanks a lot guys. Plenty of advice there for me to be looking at and cracking on with.

Thanks Keri, though it still shows as answered to me. We've submitted a reconsideration request and still waiting for any reaction. The situation hasn't changed yet - still same positions, same wrong pages.

Hi Chris Great insight, and you've confirmed some of my initial thoughts and feelings on the matter.  I don't want to rewrite purely for google's sake (although that was the tone of the question due to this being an SEO website!).  Many of the descriptions we have (from the feed) are rather poorly written, or block text which is hard to scan and read as a customer.  I want to make that clearer. I'm glad you've confirmed that picking a handful of products and doing those really well is a good idea... we're on the case! As for user generated content, yup, we're asking for reviews but probably need to encourage more in-depth ones. Thanks for taking the time to answer, it's much appreciated.

cheers mate

A few other things to note for having parameters in URLs: In Google Webmaster Tools and Bing Webmaster Tools, you can instruct the search engines to ignore certain parameters, so that they'll treat domain.com/topic?keyword and domain.com/topic as the same page (if ?keyword doesn't change the page content) You can also place the rel=canonical element on pages.  So you could set domain.com/topic?keyword to rel canonical to domain.com/topic to pass its pagerank along.