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BM7 This really is what Alan says, but the good news is there is help available . I will ask our VP of dev in the a.m. for the answer. I will have him PM you from here as he doesn't have an account. He is a master of these type issues. Or you can PM me with an email address and I will have him reach out to you. Best, Robert

Matt Cutts answered that on a YouTube video a couple of years back at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qigo05nAqKw. I've copied the transcript of his answer below. In general, we don't promise that site colon queries will rank in the exact same order that other pages would rank in. So we do use a few different factors. We do use some version, roughly, of page rank, but it's not exactly in page rank order. We also look a little bit at, for example, maybe how short the URL is, and those tend to be URLs at the root page or one directory down, and those tend to be the pages that would attract the most links anyway. So it's kind of a combination to sort of trying to surface the pages that we think are useful, either according to page rank, or interesting in terms of being relatively short, so it's something that's pretty important or pretty close to your root page. But I wouldn't necessarily say that, and it's not the case, that it's strictly in page rank order or anything like that, at least the last time that I checked. So it's a relatively good proxy of the pages that might be kind of interesting, but I wouldn't treat it as a perfect list. You can always go through your server logs and figure out which pages are driving the most traffic, and sometimes those are going to be deep URLs, for example, that might get a very specific link or that rank for some other reason.

I would use a dash "-" Jelly-Donut and 301 to that page. Essentially only use a canonical when there is a direct reason for the similar content to be there like a dynamic database search and a "similar; SEO version. Or Pagination. Give the Jelly%20Donuts/mmmNice.php will no longer be needed and an exact duplicate of its new location a 301 is best here. -Phil

Hi Tom, Thanks for that answer, unfortunately what I expected. I am currently just rel=canonical-ing to one of the items like the good ol' Google 'Green T Shirt' example. If I reduce the item detail to the differences between the items, it then becomes 'thin content' in the template, so it's bad both directions. Looks like 'Spun' individual item descriptions seems the preferred method, but there is only so much you can say about what is essentially the same unit with just different types of output controller but otherwise with identical features. IMHO a situation many will have that Google just doesn't understand (or perhaps want to understand ). Thanks again.

I can't decide about Yahoo.  I've tried to spot patters in ranking change when we've added or expired a listing, but have never been able to see anything conclusive.  It's also an absolutely textbook paid link (it's not like it sends traffic),. You say it yourself; "Forget about Yahoo search, it pushes authority and trust to all SE's" - therefore we're doing it just to manipulate rankings.  I can't believe Matt Cutts (or anyone else in search quality) has never asked the question "Should we allow Yahoo listings to pass authority - they're just paid links?".  It does have manual review in it's favour, but otherwise it is hard to justify. Might be interesting to run an experiment where someone tries to alter a site's position using only well known, manually reviewed directories.

Hi BM7, I'm going to open up a ticket on this to have our engineers take a closer look at your site.  Once we have an overall response, I'll post it here for other community members to view.   Cheers!