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My ecommerce website has menus which contain 'featured product sub-categories'.  These are shown alongside the other product sub-category links.  Each 'featured product category' includes a link, an image (with link) and some text.

All menu content is visible to search engines.

These menus look nice and probably encourage CTR (not tested!) but are they bad for SEO?

The website uses Magento version 1.4. which actually does have the canonical link back to the base URL feature. This was in place already before I started even messing around with making these changes.

I will revert the categories back to 'index, follow'.  Some questions about this:

• Is it best to do it all at once (or will this look odd/'unnatural' somehow from Google's perspective)
• How long will it take for these pages to re-rank?  They were made noindex in April, so would it be like starting again as if these were totally brand new pages?

Another SEO has recommended another approach, which is to identify the 'best' URL (from SEO point of view) and add the canonical link to the rest. Is there a way to implement/manage this easily in Magento?  I can't seem to find a solution online on this.

I have an ecommerce site built using Magento and urgently need advice on best practice for handling multiple product categories (where products appear in more than one category on the site creating multiple URLs to the same page).

In April this year, based on advice from my SEO who felt that duplicate content issues were causing my rankings to be held back, I changed about 25% of the product categories to 'noindex, follow'. This has made organic traffic fall (obviously) as these pages fell out of Google's index.  But, contrary to what I was hoping for, it didn't then improve rankings - not one iota, nothing - which was the ONLY reason why I did this. This has had a real negative impact on sales, so I'm starting to think this was actually an a terrible idea.

Should I change them back?

And to ask a wider question, what is best practice for this particular scenario?