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Here's a pretty comprehensive ideas of various link building tactics you can try: http://pointblankseo.com/link-building-strategies

Thanks.

Thanks Paddy! - great answer

Hi I'm not entirely sure, but I think I can see what you're getting at. You're used to working with sites focussed on a particular niche, but now you have a site to work on that encompasses a variety of categories. "Does this influence the ranking possibilities?" - it's the same: you can rank each page of a site for its target keywords with relevant content, good site architecture and link authority. Think about large sites that rank for a huge variety of terms - e.g. Amazon. There's a good post on Site Architecture here, and another one more specifically about "content hubs" here. I hope that's helpful and that I've understood your meaning correctly

I think that it is tough to answer the question posed in title of your post other than to say "a lot".  But I don't think that having a tight "overall site semantic theme" and selling a lot of products are mutually exclusive. For instance, Home Depot's Title Tag is "Home Improvement Made Easy with New Lower Prices", so that is a massive site where essentially everything is tailored towards fulfilling that one idea, which is extremely broad. Drill down to product descriptions and they describe individual products and their usefulness in the context of the rest of the home/ other products that they sell.

Thank you to everyone who helped clarify this issue. I thought about becoming an editor, although, from what I read, the SEO value of having a DMOZ link may not be as strong as it once was... Great info!

Hi. I was curious to know if you were able to find all the urls that needed to be removed, if they were effectively removed, and if your traffic came back. I'm assuming you were dealing with Panda issues.

You are absolutely right.  But if you think that you have duplicate content issues, then Screaming Frog can help you tease that out. That is also why I suggested the SEOmoz tool, since it is supposed to mimick a SE spider, it can give you a pretty good idea of any issues that you might have. Using the advanced operator of site:domain makes sense, but if there are issues there like eyepaq said, it is going to be tough sledding. My suggestion would be to download take a closer look at what GWT is telling you.  Are there duplicates there?  Is your CMS auto-generating URL's?  That is probably going to be your best bet IMO. Best of luck!

In his case - he wants to get rid of some duplicate content only. I see what you mean but if he is not in the situation listed in http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1269119 then it might be the best bet / fastest bet. For me personally it worked so far very well - if no robots.txt is used as that won't help on the long run as the removal tool has an expiration date of several months. The down side of the removal tools is the same expiration date - as if you change your mind you will have some issues getting the page sinto the index.

Thanks.... was starting to wonder whether I needed a space or something... I have this without a space: with a space: Shouldnt make much difference but as it's taking time for Google to notice just curious...

Very good answer Elias. Thank you.

Thank you!

Bad, the sitmap is telling SE's to index, the noindex is telling them not to. Bing for one will ignore your sitemap if it is more then 2% incorrect. As chis said, why noindex, this means that all links pointing to the no-indexed pages are wasting their link juice

Simalar question here: http://www.seomoz.org/q/competitor-scraped-ecommerce-product-overview Short answer, e-commerce site copying products descriptions from other sites is common place, and there is little you can do about it, but I believed google will know that its your content as it will most likely be crawled on your site before your competitors have a chance to find, copy, post and then get crawled.

So, a meta "no-index, follow" tag would be the best advise, here?

Thanks Tom.... Very valuable info. A bit of background: we are running an e-commerce site - so I'm dealing with various forms of dupe content: Descriptions that are copy pasted from manufacturers - e.g, replicas elsewhere - we are addressing this by writing our own content. Dupe content between pages due to the products only change in colour or size - I am going to make these configurable products, so group them into one page. URL params - this is a nightmare! Basically faceted navigation that is causing the same page to show very near similar content under different URL's. Anyway, slowly fixing these - just seems like Google is painfully slow to respond to our work on improving things. Hence the question...

If you are talking about the meta robots tag below, Google shouldn't index any pages set to noindex no matter where the link comes from.

Thank you Carson. I will check those pages to see if they contain and UGC on the product review sections - and will follow your other recommendation also.

Thanks again Mike... Our URL structure I think meets Google's requirements - but there is yet no breadcrumbs appearing... does that appear depeding on domain reputation?

Hi BJS, normally the most important page of a website is the homepage not just because it is the homepage but because is the most linked page interanlly where all the juice flows, so the pages which are nearest the homepage are supposed to be the most important too. The farest they are from your homepage, so the more hidden they are the least important they are. Moreover if a page is widely linked internally the more important it should be just because if many products belongs to a category, the most this category is linked through breadcrumbs and the more content it has. Don't be concerned about having products deep in structure is normal that for the most competitive kw categories are the pages which are focusing on those terms because these are the most useful pages for users to filter and find what they're looking for.