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I see it like this, its a bad experience to find that a item is out of stock, the 404 will remove you from the index. A site where you have a lot of products is probably not be ranking well for ever product page anyhow, I would be getting category pages to rank. and not be worried about a few lowly product pages

No but I've heard of it. I tried their Ninjagram program and it seemed like an okay tool, although I was quickly blocked by Instagram. Would be interested to see how this turns out. I think they have a free trial that you can use for a few hours.

Thanks both.

In terms of Google +, I need to swot up on this as I'll admit I don't have much of a clue!  Noticed a mozinar video about it, I think, so will look at that as a starting point. Cheers for this: http://pointblankseo.com/link-building-strategies.  I've had a brief look so far, but will look at the article more thoroughly when I get chance.

Thanks Marie. Sorry, yes, by "take effect", I meant see better results in the SERPS. I understand that I have been affected by Penguin (I had an audit carried out by Paul Macnamara, who you referred me onto.  He was great, BTW). So I guess it's just a waiting game.  I'm crossing my fingers very tightly! From Paul's audit, I do have a good base of links, and I am continuing to build them.  Also, for many keywords, the site actually ranked higher before any link building was ever done by the bad SEO company.  With these things in mind, I'm really, really, really hoping that my fortunes will change on the next Penguin refresh - whenever that might be!!  Will be very disappointed if not.  SUCH a frustrating thing as it feels very much out of my control. Thanks for taking the time to reply!

I agree with Lynn, but I'm a little confused about the intent. If you create the new URLs with product categories in them, you'll need to move the old URLs somehow, such as with 301-redirects. The new canonical tags won't help those old URLs, so you're potentially creating even more duplicate content by creating a new canonical version. Generally, I don't think adding categories to the URLs is a great idea. You can squeeze in a few more keywords, but the impact of that in 2013 is very small. As you said, you're also making the URLs longer and you're pushing back the unique keywords. So, Google is going to see more repetition toward the beginning of the URL and less unique information (as are users, although most people don't read URLs closely, IMO).

I haven't found standard shipping info text to be much of a problem in terms of duplicate content on product pages, but if you're concerned about it I would consider an iframe. While hiding the content in a non-crawlable .js file might work, it isn't advisable. First, Google PreviewBot can parse javascript on the page and see the content in many cases, as is necessary to generate the site preview and visual cache of a page. Second, anything that keeps Google from being able to properly render the page may be considered suspect. Please view this video by Matt Cutts: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9BWbruCiDc Essentially, he says "Don't block Google bot from css or javascript".

Sorry for the slow reply on this, Rmoov is good and there's a bunch of others in the blog post that you might find useful: http://moz.com/blog/ultimate-guide-to-google-penalty-removal Hope this helps, Craig

Good point, I think I probably need to err on the side of caution and not go overboard, as you say. Yes, already planning things like product Q&As and reviews to help with the product pages. Thanks for taking the time to answer.

Some of the social media icons can slow the page load down which is a conversion rate optimisation no no. So it is best to put at the bottom in my experience, so that it doen't hold up above the fold content loading. This is particuarly true as, unless you have uber cool content, don't expect too many interactions.  I would certainly include google+ though as you may get some SEO benefit.

Wow, Dr Pete replied to my question! Thank you - and, actually, thanks to everyone who took the time to post. UPDATE... Since my last posts, I have actually moved forward a little. I did have an audit undertaken by someone that specialises in traffic drops. It transpires that it's not very clear cut - definitely not entirely a clear link-based penalty situation - and the indications are that it's probably Panda with a touch of Penguin. Upshot is, I'm having the site redesigned to minimise duplicate/thin content issues (and generally improve the user experience) and I have engaged someone to do the link removal outreach/disavow. Still early days, but now I have some kind of game plan, I feel a little more optimistic. TBH, I'm still a little wary about the link removal/disavowal process, but we'll see... I had such varying quotes for this work, it's crazy. And, still need to crystallise in my mind how I'm going to earn new links.

Now been reindexed. Thank you.

Thanks, I think I'll just leave these for now as it's only three sub categories that have the 'tripling up' of links.  Appreciate you both taking the time to reply.

Hi, If there already is a canonical link then you can edit it using the layout update code I first mentioned. If you do not need to canonical to another page you can just leave it as it is (self referencing). As to if you want to do it or not, this really depends on how big of a problem it is for your search efforts and how many cats/products you will need to manually adjust. I would think that if you keep track of them in an excel and remember to check when you are updating that with a couple of hundred categories/products (of which only maybe a couple dozen or less might have to be manually edited?) then you should be able to manage it ok. Good luck!