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In good conscious I cant think of how that would be a good ongoing process to move forward with. What I would do is start an overhaul and merge scenario where you identify the most valuable unique content within the site and start merging less valuable content pages with stronger ones. As well as 301 any old pages to like items or the home page as well as make sure 404's and 410'are in place as well.

With that many pages I know it can be a daunting task to think about but if you truly care for the site and it seems that you do I would not take this approach as it can lead to further damage down the road. I would be trying to make sure I do not get hit again by P & P.

In the end if it seems like a spammy or fishy tactic it probably is or will be at some point.

Good luck my friend

I would just 301 that URL to similar products that are as close as possible and or the home page of the site as this would be a better user experience than returning a 404. Although If some URLs on your site 404, this fact alone does not hurt you or count against you in Google’s search results.

You could 410 them as 410's tend to drop out of the index faster.  If the page  has gotten a lot of traffic, then I might want to NOINDEX it. All in all there isn't a real one size fits all thing here, especially for eCommerce.

Great info Marie, and that's why I love this community. Yeah I think the moral of this story is that if you think your site needs an overhaul it probably does. I think that Panda and Penguin have the names so are always the first to be spoken about, but your post did something great it brought me back to the little things that I missed in the above post. The devil is in the details I guess.

Well I would never definitelyrule out a Penguin/Panda hit. They should stay on your mind always and you should always be running regular audits to keep up with things and stay clean. the fact that you ignored the site for 9 months which in our world is like 2 years absolutely had an effect on your rankings.

Since you are back now and focused on the site, I would take a lot of the focus off of rankings and move energies towards usability, unique content, brand engagement and   semantic markup. Ranking is losing its luster as searches are now tailored to the user so when you rank you really rank differently for different locations and different people.

Our buddies at Google want ranking to be an unintentional effort so instead of I want to rank for "Children's Toys" it's Oh I rank for "Children's Toys" hooray. This is evident by Chrome moving to secure search and soon the "Not Provided" will take over the land and leave us all to focus on the stuff that matters...the visitor and the journey we take them on.

No problem I love this stuff!

Yeah that's what I've been positioning for. I do love the agency I work for they support me and pretty much let me do what is best for our clients so im good but a pay jump will definately be coming..as I grow in the community

the company profile is filled with my info since I lead the charge in building a community that really knows me and not so much the agency so maybe there is leverage there..HAHA

Sometimes you can create multiple articles from the same idea as SEO covers such a broad spectrum of areas. Content should be about having fun and seeing how much value you can add to your niche. It will amaze you how many details that relate to your business or project can turn into valuable pieces of content. And forget about blasting out your content, just worry about building relationships. If you are adding value to a community and are relevant then shares and links will grow naturally. Remember slow and steady wins the race..

If you work for an Agency and build a strong profile here at SEOMOZ, what happens if I leave and get a new opportunity but my profile is tied to my last business? How do I transfer all the hard work I've done being involved and gaining those super awesome MOZPOINTS to my new spot?

The old agency can just swoop in and the new guy will benefit from my work in the community. Is there anyway to safeguard your name.

I don't believe there is any ranking benefit at all. The only benefits are as stated above the ability to corroborate spam signals and or verify ownership info. As a general rule I would make sure that all info anywhere on the web regarding you has consistency and an established NAP (Name,Address, Phone) format. My grandfather told me to always where a belt and suspenders if you want to be prepared for anything. And I apply that to my views on consistency.

At our agency we run outreach programs and are very clear who we represent and are very open to the person on the other end and 99% of the time they are fine with the scenario as it's understood that real, clean organic outreach is an immense job that should be handled by experts, which is usually not the client. So that part is OK.

The whole anonymous thing rubs me a bit wrong only because if you are anyone trying to show credibility usually you want your expertise out their as industries look for thought leaders to build communities around. I understand wanting privacy but really..are the Paparazzi gonna show up at your door for the blog post you wrote? I think their privacy is safe all in all.

It really varies as searches are tailored for the user more and more, consequentially ranking has become less of a horn tooter because when someone tells me they rank for such and such I ask "where do rank and for whom?" Cause you may not rank for me the same way. I wouldn't shy away from Local as Semantic Search is fast becoming Hyper-Local unless there was an immense amount of data supporting otherwise.

I consult on a few eCommerce sites and over the last few months I have led them in doing a complete overhaul of their product descriptions and their linking structure. Their issue was they had so many products and for years just relied on description feeds to populate the content on each product. So after getting them to understand the whole valuable unique content idea we got to work. That's a check for panda safety now for the penguin.

Yeah no benefit at all they should just have the on-site blog and focus on building engagement around it. If their posts have value and are unique they will be fine in the end

I would monetize a few with some unique and valuable blogs mixed with some affiliate marketing then add landing pages to the rest as for sale and or park them. If you want to just try to sell all you can try Sedo.com they are pretty good and the fees are fair.