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The most important factor here is the notion that you can go to one source for a high volume of links where the cost per link is next to nothing.  We can argue about what "next to nothing" means, however essentially if any link is not placed on a site or directory where the quality, uniqueness, authority, relevance or trust of that site / directory are strong, that individual link is suspect.

While it can be argued that a new site / directory doesn't yet have authority and thus such a site /directory can still be okay to get a link from, it means the other four signals need to be that much stronger to compensate for that lack of authority.

If the company claiming to offer these services is willing to provide you a spreadsheet listing all the directories they intend to get links for you, go ahead and look at some of those and judge for yourself.

Directories are held to an even higher standard in regard to relevance and trust because the overwhelming majority of "directories" out there are craptastic bogus scams created purely for SEO.

Of the hundreds of thousands of links I have reviewed during client audits this year, I can assure you only a small fraction of links from directories were real, and even a smaller fraction of those provided any value.

Do not get caught up in marketing nonsense.  Everything you listed in their claims about why you should trust them is a massive red flag to me that you'll get ripped off.

On a final note, while I am delighted that the previous answers here paved the warning way before I joined this discussion, I need to speak up about the potential for harm.  The potential for a penalty here is ALARMINGLY HIGH.

Relying on directory links from a company like the one that pitched you is EXTREMELY DANGEROUS in 2013. Most of the site owners who hire me to do a forensic audit have been penalized manually or algorithmically and most of those have had ugly directory link based inbound link profile madness.

Prestashop asks valid questions here.

The issue for me is why three separate sites? That seriously dilutes brand identify, and makes it infinitely more difficult to get any one of the sites to rank with the most strength in a sustainable manner.

If you're going to even consider one blog that all three sites link to, unless there's some extraordinary other factor, the proper solution is to have one site for all locations, and a location page devoted to each location.  Then have the blog within the site as well.  One site - serves all needs.  Every task done to improve any one location or any other aspect of the site would benefit all others.

You need to have a real knack for direct sales if you want to pursue it.  However if you do, in my experience with direct sales, the person who is empowered with having researched the prospect's company and competitive market will be more successful than the person who just uses generic sales tactics.

The trick is to know how much you're willing to do up front without having done any pre-qualification of prospects.  Two or three key metrics is probably all that makes sense at that point, with the offer to provide more if there's real interest in going to the next level.

Roger,

Categorization becomes too flat at the moment you lose high quality visitors.  Since the site started out flat, there's no way to tell what that point it.  The only way to determine if it's already too flat is to refine it.  I always recommend to clients that it's best to have no more than eight to ten top level categories, and only have sidebar navigation that links to sub-categories within the specific category you're in, or at most, those, then below them, two or three additional links to similar top level categories.

The reason for this method is because in the flat model, you have no way of communicating to search engines what the real relationship separation is.  This in turn dilutes the ability to drive more strength to the highest level categories. The end result then is a situation where your top level categories don't do as well for their most important keyword phrases, the sub-category page phrases also suffer, and in turn, individual product pages do as well.

every analytics program uses its own method of evaluating real vs. bot based visits.  Further, Google even states GA is not based on complete data but instead, is a snapshot. Which is their way of saying "we know our data methods may be flawed, like if someone doesn't have JavaScript enabled, we can't count them, but instead of just saying that, we give this fancy disclaimer buried away so most people will assume it's complete and accurate".

IF all you are doing is changing a graphic image banner, and if that is done solely based on country of origin evaluation there would be no negative SEO impact.

"contact info" ? You mean the contact info for the domain owner?

If such a tool exists, nobody's done much promotion of it.  Getting the contact info is a monumental task given how it could come in many different forms.  Maybe it's embedded on a "contact" page, or an "about" page, or a sub-page of the "about" section or in a footer, or header. Maybe the on-site contact info is for customer service, or sales, and not the "contact" you would want.

And what about sites with multiple contacts listed, in one or more ways on the site?  Which to grab?  And is it in a format that can be grabbed and properly loaded into a data table or spreadsheet column or series of columns? And what contact info? Name? Email? Phone number? Address?

Maybe it's in graphic format on the site.  Maybe it's in the domain lookup system and maybe that's set to private. It's just too complex a process.

Janice,

The proper solution would be to have the site set up at the server level to automatically rewrite URLs so they have one consistent pattern (typically all lower case).  And to make sure all links within the site pointing to other pages on the site use that preferred capitalization method.  While having Canonical tags can help alleviate the problem, they're not a best practices "only" solution.  So speak with the site administrator or programmer to get the rewrite functionality implemented.

Always think "is this natural looking?"  Meaning step out of your SEO perspective and think about a site owner who's never heard of SEO.

In a natural web, links exist that point to all sorts of pages, not all home page focused.  Why? Because if you've got a page two or three clicks deep with really great information that I want to share, I would link directly to it.  Because why would I want to force people I'm sharing it with to go to your home page and maybe or maybe not find it? Forcing through the home page is definitely NOT natural.

Based on that very specific notion, search engines reward a site with more value that has links pointing to a diversity of pages within the site than they do to a site with links ONLY pointing to the home page.

Of course SEO is extremely complex with hundreds of factors, so some sites MIGHT rank even if all links point to their home page.  But that's where you can actually get a competitive advantage, and leap-frog ahead of them if you follow the "what's natural" approach.  You can get higher rankings with less pages and less links going the "what's natural" way.

Do NOT, however, ignore all the other key SEO factors (link quality, high relevance of the page that has the link in it to the page it's linking to, and all the rest of the factors that need to be considered related to link building).

Nitin

You're dealing with multiple considerations and multiple issues in this setup.

First, it's a matter of link distribution.  When you link to x pages from page 1, this informs search engines "we think these are important destination pages".  If you change those links every day, or on every refresh, and if crawlers also encounter those changes, it's going to strain that communication.

This is something that happens naturally on news sites - news changes on a regular basis. So it's not completely invalid and alien to search algorithms to see or deal with.  And thus it's not likely their systems would consider this black hat.

The scale and frequency of the changes is more of a concern because of that constantly changing link value distribution issue.

Either X cities are really "top" cities, or they are not.

Next, that link value distribution is further weakened by the volume of links.  25 links per section, three sections - that's 75 links. Added to the links at the top of the page, the "scrolling" links in the main content area of the home page, and the actual "footer" links (black background) so it dilutes link equity even further.  (Think "going too thin" with too many links).

On category pages it's "only" 50 links in two sub-footer sections. Yet the total number of links even on a category page is a concern.

And on category pages, all those links dilute the primary focus of any main category page. If a category page is "Cell Phone Accessories in Bangalore", then all of those links in the "Top Cities" section dilute the location.  All the links in the "Trending Searches" section dilute the non-geo focus.

What we end up with here then is an attempt to "link to all the things".  This is never a best practice strategy.

Best practice strategies require a refined experience across the board.  Consistency of signals, combined with not over-straining link equity distribution, and combined with refined, non-diluted topical focus are the best path to the most success long-term.

So in the example of where I said initially that news sites change the actual links shown when new news comes along, the best news sites do that while not constantly changing the primary categories featured, and where the overwhelming majority of links on a single category page are not diluted with lots of links to other categories. Consistency is critical.

SO - where any one or a handful of these issues might themselves not be a critical flaw scale big problem, the cumulative negative impact just harms the site's ability to communicate a quality consistent message.

The combined problem here then needs to be recognized as exponentially more problematic because of the scale of what you are doing across the entire site.

You are asking some very challenging questions, and using some very limited metric comparisons to try to figure it all out. SEO is not so easy.  If it was, many sites would be in a continual state of leap-frog as they out-do each other in similar ways.

Here are just a few questions / considerations to add to your process:

1. Regardless of the number of instances of one or more keywords on a page, what is the total volume of highly relevant content on a given page? How helpful is that information in answering questions your specific target visitors are needing to have answered?  How helpful is it in being able to allow visitors to achieve a goal they came to your site to achieve?

2. How well organized is your content in regard to very similar pages being grouped together in both navigation and URL structure?  Since my reading of your question implies the competitor site is much more "tight" in its singular focus, this is a critical factor for your site to evaluate.

3. If their site is much more 'tight' in it's singular focus, how much is dilution a factor on the other pages of your site regarding topical focus and goal intent? If there is any serious dilution happening, you'd likely need even more content within that section you are comparing, to overcome that site's strength in refined singular focus.

4. What technical issues may exist on your site that you may not have considered?  Crawl efficiency, page processing speed, canonical or duplicate content confusion? There are many other questions I could list with just this one consideration.  Even if the competitor site has some worse signals among these, if any of yours are problematic enough, that alone can be a contributing factor.

5. How much higher is the quality of the inbound link footprint for your competitor in comparison to your inbound links footprint? Just having more links isn't at all a valid consideration if you don't dig deep into the quality issue?  If they have 10% of the inbound link volume, yet half or most of their inbound links are from very highly authoritative sites and you have less of those, that is another massive consideration.

Those are just starting point considerations.

Beth,

Unfortunately when you've got a lot of products where the only difference between SKUs is color and item number, it means you need to artificially implement uniqueness.  This requires becoming creative with product names and descriptions.  Since I see you've already got product names covered fairly well, let's talk about descriptions.

If you go to a sample page, such as for the Charlotte Cut Beads, look at the page both from a "length of description" aspect as well as an "overall content" aspect.

That very short description is quite likely to be seen as at least partly, if not mostly duplicate from other descriptions on the site.  And at the same time, the total weight of unique content compared the the entirety of the page (with the header, side navigation and footer being replicated across many pages on the site) and you have a bigger problem in hoping to get this designated as a unique page.

Even though it may seem like a burden to have to produce paragraphs of content for a single product page, without that extended unique description for every product, you'll always have problems.

You may be better off changing how your site works than trying to struggle with the current issues.

For example, when I go to the Charlotte Cuts category page, maybe you should have this be the single page people go to so they can choose which products to add to their cart - eliminating the final individual product "details" page (since there really are no "details" on those.

Then, I'd recommend adding a couple paragraphs of well written and optimized content for that category page.

adding emphasis on the danger.

Duplicate product descriptions are the single most problematic issue ecommerce sites face from an SEO perspective.  Not only are most canned descriptions so short as to cause product pages to be considered thin on content, copied/borrowed descriptions are more likely to be spread across countless sites.

While it may seem like an inordinate amount of time/cost, unique quality descriptions that are long enough to truly identify product pages as being worthy will go a long way to proving a site deserves ranking, trust.

I just answered this but forgot to log-in so when I submitted, it was lost.  Long answer but worth the retyping!

Some people might disagree with me however I've personally always recommended not implementing the noindex,follow.  By allowing them to all be indexed, when executed properly, you can gain significant ground.  But it takes a lot of footwork.

Case example: online retailer.  Eight main categories, over 100 sub-categories, tens of thousands of product SKUs.  After implementing my pagination recommendation, total pages indexed skyrocketed (not only were sub-category pages now indexed, but more individual product pages were also indexed and ranked.  Categories and sub-category primary keyword phrases all rose in ranking and organic visits went up exponentially.

Keys:

Every page Title, URL and h1 needs to be unique.  Even if all you do is append them with "Page X".

To ensure pages aren't then deemed duplicate content, don't just list product thumbnails - optimize their alt attributes, add a caption.  Ideally, have unique descriptive content on each pagination page as well.  Not required if you have enough products on each, but can help.

Every product detail page should have quality unique content - enough to ensure those are not seen as duplicates due to the common shared header, nav, sidebar and footers.

The biggest challenge will be building quality inbound links to as many of those sub-category pages (and even pagination pages within each, if possible), and to as many individual product pages as you can.

When you do that, every page in each section will be given more ranking weight both down the funnel and back up.

Google employees have communicated at various times:

• It's never a good idea to hide content
• It all depends on your intent
• You're free to do what you want and we're free to penalize you if we want

So pick your choice and run with it.  As EGOL suggests, if you try it out, let us know how it works out for you.  Me, I always recommend that clients avoid the display:none method at all costs.  But that's just my preference from a "better safe than sorry" perspective.

EGOL,

Thank you for emphasizing the quality (helpfulness/human value). I only briefly mentioned it in my response, yet it really does need to be a top priority.

Jordan,

Others might have a different view, however that's exactly what I recommend to clients.  but only if you've got other html link based ways for bots to get to all the content in a direct manner, and have a good sitemap.xml file to reinforce that.

I am happy to see that you have a sound overall site architecture, however I see no robots.txt file at your root so I'm not sure what's up with that.  Also your sitemap.xml file only has 43 URLs in it.  that's a problem not because google can't find content by other means, it's just that I've found Google likes that reinforcement, and Bing especially does a better job discovering content with a proper sitemap.xml submitted through their webmaster system (they're less efficient at discovering content by other means).

I'd also suggest you have a big push ahead in dealing with near-duplicate content.

For example:

http://www.durafaucet.com/mk850-orb.html

http://www.durafaucet.com/kitchen-faucets/mk850.html

Sure, these are unique products.  Except there's already so little unique content on either page that the common content compounded by the site-wide replication of top, sidebar and footer content means the total weight of uniqueness is on the very minor end of the spectrum.

And then there's the issue of a complete lack of inbound link authority - OpenSiteExplorer.org might be wrong, but currently shows almost no inbound links.  Not only will you need inbound links to the home page, but also to as many inner pages as is realistic in terms of implementation capabilities go.  This is especially true for category level pages. (including a variety of inbound link anchor text - brand, domain, keyword phrase and generic text).

So if you don't address those type of issues, removing all the dupes that show up in search now won't result in as much long-term value as you'll need.

Brad,

I recommend posting it to your own site first then waiting a bit to distribute.  On that page, I'd include a Google "original source" tag. http://www.google.com/support/news_pub/bin/answer.py?answer=191283

By doing it this way, you help to ensure that your version has the best chance of being credited properly.  It's not a guarantee - as most challenges in SEO are not, however it's what I recommend to clients because it's the best anyone can do.

Unless someone else here knows of a specific case study, since I've never once heard of such a penalty, I'm going to rely on the SEO best practices model which dictates that user experience is the primary focus.

Since it can confuse users to send them off-site within the same browser if they don't intend to actually leave (just wanting to check something else out while still wanting to read your content after), best practices always dictate that you open another site in a new window.  Never open your OWN site in another window, only 3rd party sites...

In 2011, true SEO professionals could care less what you put in your meta Keywords field, since that field has not been used as an SEO method in a long long time.  All they need do is look at your page Titles.  Or they can run a bot to scrape your page Titles, h1 tags, link URLs, internal and inbound link anchor text, image alt attributes, to generate a neat spreadsheet.  All automatically.