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It really depends on the kind of content you have and where that will best serve user intent. Ultimately, the intent on product pages and the intent on help pages is nuanced and slightly different. Is a "tutorial" video going to satisfy the user who lands on a category page, likely looking to potentially make refine a selection and make a purchase? Although I haven't seen your videos, so it's hard to say for sure - I'd guess it's probably not ideal. In such an instance, the user probably wants to know more about the features and benefits of a product/category type, rather than "how to use X". Ideally you should re-edit and reframe the videos you have (or make new videos) to match the specific pages - so having one variation for the category page that fits the user intent there and then one for the help page section which better matches that user intent. My gut is to say that your current videos will work better in the help section, but I say this without knowledge of the site or videos, so please take that recommendation with a pinch of salt. I don't recommend following EGOL's suggestion in this thread, because I think it's a slightly old hat "SEO' mentality that puts the search engine factors above the user experience. Just because you won't get penalised for having the same video across multiple pages doesn't mean it's a great idea. Remember that video is just a media type, like text and image. You (probably) wouldn't think about duplicating blocks of text across multiple pages and for the same reasons, I don't think it's particularly wise to treat video any differently. Make sure you're creating content FOR the pages, rather than creating the content and then trying to work out where it fits afterwards. While it's possible that a video you create is relevant for multiple use-cases, in 99% of circumstances, said video would better serve each use case by at least being slightly re-edited for each page that it lives on. If you think that actually, the video is perfectly relevant for each page in question and doesn't need to be re-edited, then you should probably ask yourself whether you need two pages or whether you can consolidate the content into two pages. It's much better (from both a search engine and user perspective) to have one very strong, rich page targeted at a specific topic, rather than to have multiple thinner pages. I hope that's useful! Phil

I am struggling with the rel="canonical".  If each product had its own product PDF then it would be easy to use the  rel="canonical". However, some of the PDF manuals cover somewhere between 200-300 products. The only difference between some of the products is the physical size (like televisions i.e. 32" vs 37") so the same manual covers all the products within that range.  I am guessing using the same PDF manual for so many products is a duplicate content issue, but sadly they are really useful for users.  Maybe I could put all the pdfs on the product category pages. That said the MOZ tools are showing that we only have 200 duplicate pages out of 250,000, which I think is good. I agree with Mike, a summary of the PDF, FAQs and how to guides would be an advantage. I've already started adding this information for some of the more popular products but we don't have enough people to write content for every product.  A smaller site would be a lot easier. Anyone got any ideas? @Dave - thanks mate

yes that would be a bit more up to date. i just ignore it. though psychologically it's not nice to see stuff appear in red on the crawl report;)

Good work Cyto.

Hi David, Its tough to say without some more digging and information, it certainly looks like you have most of the common problem areas covered from what I can see. I will throw out an idea: I see you have a few 301 redirects in place switching from .html to non html versions. If this was done on a massive scale then possibly you have a google index with both versions of the pages in the index? If so it might not really be a big issue and over the next weeks/months the old .html versions will fall out of the index and your numbers will begin to look more normal again, Just a thought.

Result!

Ah patience, can't help you with that one! It may take a while for your links to appear in Open Site Explorer. There can be a lag of 1month+ due to the crawl/update cycle. You can find details of the next update here: https://seomoz.zendesk.com/entries/345964-linkscape-update-schedule You might be able to find fresher link using an alternative such as MajesticSEO or even google webmaster tools. I believe the best way to ensure that the mozscape index finds your site is to make sure you've got some links from sites already in the index with high domain authorities. Also, keep an eye on your google analytics and see where you might be getting referral traffic. If you know a site is passing good qualified visitors who convert then I'd see how you can develop the relationship with that site. (Also, find out why they're linking to you and see what other similar opportunities are out there.) Completely get the issues regarding the specific part numbers etc. I'm guessing you can't count on repeat business either? How much do you know about who your customers are? Apart from their very specific needs (finding a particular replacement part) can you target any content toward their more general needs/goals? Where do these people go for advice? Are there particular user groups/forums or other online/offline communities that you could target? Have you had any thoughts about how you can position yourself as the go-to place for these type of parts? What makes you different to the competition?

looks good. a) anchor texts are lining up with URLs b) gotta be good for user experience and conversion c) Distributing PR well I see no problems here! 100 link recommendation was from a long time ago, Google now has the resources and desire to follow everything they possible can.

In a way you would benefit from being on such sites because of possible click through's to your website. However, being on those sites may or may not give you a better ranking. It depends how your website is displayed and linked to. As if it is followed or no followed.

Hi I watched the video and it made some sense however both of my keywords have a similar CTR and I use dynamic keyword insertion to make my ads more relevant. Just seems a bit hit and miss to me. Thanks for the advice anyway.

Small world, I'm a lifelong Rovers fan. Give me a shout if you ever fancy catching up and chatting SEO (or the decay of BRFC). info@davidingramdesign.co.uk Cheers David

I would suggest simple solution After Header of your website , Middle content Start with [Impressive Word] Category Piece of Content about Category , main products , features... After that Product listing with order of Top Selling or Featured Products.. No one is interested in lengthy content in Category or even in Product Page (not even search engines).. instead of that I would suggest use that space with to list Last Buyers or visitors who visited this category has also visited this category kind of feature

Cheers. Do you know anyone doing one big international site well?

@Stephen, Seems like we have different experiences with using tabs. We used it on an ecommerce website and it improved the conversion rate. Now we're still testing other layouts but some usability tests showed us that the tabs are helping people find the information they are looking for very fast. The templates you refer to at unbounce.com aren't product detail pages, they are lead generation or click through pages and they indeed do need a specific design to increase conversions. I do agree with what you say about testing, that's the only way to make descisions based on facts. Testing is continuous process, there are always things to be optimized.

thanks for the response. not sure about the smileycat link. They all look good but none of the category pages have text on them for optimization.

While your #3 option is tempting, I can offer a few other ideas: install Microsoft Translate on your site. It is an improvement over Google Translate in a couple of key areas. The widget can auto-detect a user's language and translate pages automatically if you wish. If you site requires users to login, Google Translate will log the user out when a user requests a translation. The logout will occur on any and all pages. MS Translate allows users to remain logged in to your site. while you may not be able to translate to every language, you should determine which language is used by the largest percent of your customers and add that one language to your site as an option. The process may take time, but when it is complete you can then consider adding additional languages. If you can cover Russian, German, French and Spanish you will reach a lot more users. you can also try to simplify your pages. Imagine going to McDonald's in a foreign country. If you see a picture of a BigMac, a bag of fries and a coke then a price, you understand everything without a single word being read. Clearly it isn't that easy to do with your website but you can move a few steps in that direction.

thanks - this looks like it will do the job