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Don't rush into this.  You gotta do it smart.

When you change your site the goal should be to improve it and make it more competitive.

That is done by carefully improving the structure and the optimization... and also preserving your link assets with 301 redirects.  Also avoiding problems like changing the URLs without redirecting.

If you don't know how to do these things it is essential to get a competent person to help you or to do it for you.  There are lots of good instructions for moving a site on the web.

Now... your 30K pages....  Those could suck a lot of strength from your site.  These could produce a duplicate content problem (Panda).

I would not be surprised if your rankings dropped after adding them.  To minimize ranking loss you want to have very few links into them from the rest of your site and all of those pages linking out generously to the rest of your site.

To minimize panda problems you might combine some of these listings, placing several on a page.  This page count reduction can reduce the rankings loss.

The problem with that is having enough links into those pages to get them indexed and hold them in the index.  So if you put all of them up at the same time you will need fifty to sixty really strong links that hit nodes deep in the site.  These links will channel spiders deep into the site and force them to chew their way out through those pages, indexing them as they go.

These links must be permanent or be held in place until other links are developed.  If you remove them then google spider action will fall on those pages and google will forget them.

If you don't have experience with big sites find someone who has that experience who can help you design  the structure of these new pages.

(not recommending myself... I only work on my own sites)

I am ready to shout "NO" anytime I see anyone talking about using a subdomain... but you have made me consider it.

I have a site (not nearly as large as yours) that has a lot of press releases given to us by government agencies and industry sites.  (These are not SEO press releases, they are from people who have a message to get out.)  For a few years these were about 2/3 of the content that we published. They ranked really well - often above the original source and we added a bit of unique commentary to each of them.

In October '11 we took a Panda hit.  Fortunately we simply dropped a couple positions on tons of pages - not a huge loss like some people see.

To escape we did noindex / follow to the most popular releases and threw the rest overboard.   That cut off search traffic (which hit our income) but kept the content on our site for visitors.  Google rankings returned partially a couple months later and then a couple months after that everything was back to normal - but income was down a little.

After reading your post, I am thinking about starting a subdomain for these press releases.  Hopefully that will isolate the main site from any damage that the duplicate content might cause and allow them to pull a little traffic from search.

About "index pages"....  If I do this I will keep them on my main site because most of my content is there (my own unique content).  Since Panda I have become highly selective about which press releases I publish and they are now a minority of new content.

Thanks for the idea.

Good luck with your site.

I'm ranking for 'bodybuilding schema' with two separate pages...

Nice work!  This is giving you twice as much exposure in the SERPs and pushing your competitors down.

Is this a problem? I heard that's it's better to only have one page ranking per keyword.

I hope that my competitors believe this.  

It should be dependent upon page length.

I completely ignore such rules and simply write naturally.

Occurrences per page and density are hogwash.

I improve pages all of the time and have great results.   Traffic always goes up and rankings often go up.  (A drop is very very rare.)

Adding content to an existing page can significantly increase your longtail keyword traffic.

These are what I use as a guide

-- don't do anything that will change the title tag (unless you are targeting different keywords)

-- don't do anything that will change the onpage optimization (unless you are targeting different keywords)

-- don't change image file names or alt attributes

-- add as much new content as possible

-- revise existing content without fear

-- add additional images whenever you have them

Read these answers knowing that this is what I do and how I think.   On lots of these answers I don't know what google does and what google prefers.   I am betting on my gut rather than on something that somebody somewhere said sometime in the past which might be very different now.  I only trust what a very small number of people say and realize that google changes their mind about lots of stuff that they said in the past and don't tell anybody anything.

Make sense?  lol

Currently it's "How To: Build a Custom Ergonomic Computer Desk - Blog - Projects, Ideas, Inspiration, Kee Klamp, Fittings"

I'd say that is waaaayyyyy too long.  I keep mine at about 62 characters or less.   Without doing a detailed analysis of traffic that the page is currently pulling I would probably shorten to...

How To: Build a Custom Ergonomic Computer Desk

What about changing the image file names and adding alt tags when they are nonsense or garbage?

Lots of my pages get over half of their traffic from image search.  I would not change the image file name or the alt attribute unless I thought that there was a significant upside.

These can be part of the optimization of the page.

I do replace images when I have something better or update a graph, map or photo.  However, I always maintain the file name and alt attribute.

Sometimes content update requires images to be deleted and I do that with reluctance.

OMG!

My image tags look like this....

"keyword" is something simple... probably two or three absolutely relevant keywords that describe the image.

giving the files real names and putting them on my own CDN

All of my images are on the same server as the website, in the same folder as the article.... like this...

egolsite.com/article-name/image-name.jpg

Some people have told me to move my images to cloud hosting or a free service instead of my server but I don't want to make it look like I am not serving my own content.  I don't know if that makes any difference at all but I gladly pay to transfer terrabytes of images per month to keep them on my own servers.  If someone hotlinks one of my images does that help my domain's authority?  I don't know... but I got 'em there where I can see what's happening.

But what if I wanted to add a nice "finish" picture to to the top?  Would that cause any issues?

I assume you are talking about a nice big image at top of page that will make visitors salivate?  If that is what you are talking about then I would say... do it by all means and do it often.

What about making these changes incrementally?

Don't fart around.  Go for it.

My homepage looks like the homepage of the LATimes.com.

Tons of text.

Intentional.

Those tons of text pull in thousands long tail visitors.

So, if I removed all of that text and slapped up an image I would loose a lot of visitors, a lot of income and a lot of SEO benefit that those visitors produce through likes links tweets and shares.

Nobody is going to "bolt" anything onto my site.   I would tell the designer... "This text is an essential part of the design... non negotiable.  Use your creativity to make it look great."

I know lots of designers who are adamant about their opinions.... but very few to none of them have done A/B testing to determine the impact of their designs on visitors, conversions or search engines.

Lots of redesigns tank when they go up.   Traffic drops or conversions drop or rankings drop.   Or a combination of these.

I am all ears to hear about case studies... but don't have a lot of faith in untested opinions.

I let my visitors inform me of how the design is working.  They are the voice that counts.

I would simply edit the title tag and the H1.

I think that approaching product descriptions with a number in mind is a recipe for poor performance.

Some products are clearly known and understood by most people and require very little explanation.  On my sites these might receive 200 words (but there might be three to six of these products on a single page for comparison).

I have some products that sold slowly with 500 words and four nice images... .but when I added a video, 500 additional words and a link to an article of 2000 words and several images my sales multiplied.  These are products that could be popular but not many people know about them or took them seriously in the past.

Some people would call these "boring" products. 

I'd like to work with the top 20 products (top by sales last year).

This is a good idea.  Work where you might make a big impact.

How do I add lots of content without the customer looking at all of those words and not reading it and leaving?

The products that I write about would be absolutely boring and of no interest to most people.   However, those who are interested in the products read this content, watch the videos and stay several minutes on the page.  When some of these people write to us or call on the phone we can tell that they have read the content and watch the video.  They key is to know the products that you are writing about well and explain them thoroughly.  If you can't do that they you are not the right person for this writing job.  If you are working on the 20 most popular products there should be a lot to say about them.

Right now most of the information is in bullet points, I don't see how to keep the customer's interest.

Bullets work great for presenting product features.

Photos may help but I don't think that's enough.

Great photos are kickass in my opinion.

I'm assuming adding content would result in more long tails and more sales.

Absolutely you will get more long tails.  You will get more sales if you know what you are talking about and answer the most common questions that people ask about the product.   If you don't know what you are talking about or what people are asking then you are not the right person for this writing job.   Bullshit will not increase your sales.  You have to answer questions and explain the value in the product.

Photos that show product features in detail.

Photos that show the product being used.

Visit some websites that sell the same products that you sell.  Look at their photos and then produce photos that are kickass better.

A good answer to this question can only be given after an analysis of your rankings, your traffic, your targeted keywords, keywords that you are not targeting, and other factors.

So, anybody who gives you answers on the skimpy information provided or without spending considerable time looking at your data is guessing.

You have access to this information.  Spend some time studying it and see what you can find.

Based upon your post I am guessing that you have about 200 different filters and your pages link to them.  If you have a strong site the 200 links are not a problem.

That could be a good approach, but removing the filter pages links and replacing them with links to category pages that each click to filter pages could allow you to target valuable keywords.

Your conversions might drop with that approach and might not.   You might get more linkjuice into category pages by dropping filter page links from filter pages... that might improve rankings of category pages but could hit conversions.

As you see, the question is more complex than the number of links on a page.

That's what I can offer. Good luck.

blooming bows

bloomingbows.com

http://www.bloomingbows.com

These anchor links would not bother me very much because they are either the domain name or the domain name in words.   Local PR companies and guest blogs scare me a lot more.

If this was my site I would be working on writing very unique product descriptions that are of substantive length.

I would also explore dropping individual product pages for product groups such as "bitty bows" to a single page.  Before I did that I would be looking to see if they were pulling in traffic (pre drop).  If they are not pulling traffic then those product pages would be merged to show many of these similar products on a single page.

Doing that will reduce the  number of pages on the site and make each remaining page more substantive.  An alternative would be to use rel=canonical to attribute the individual pages to the category page, again, I would know my analytics and traffic sources before doing that.

IMO it is impossible to give good content modification advice without data from analytics.

I agree with Mike.... and beefing up those descriptions can bring in a lot more long-tail traffic if done smartly.

In my opinion, a phone number in the title tag is a waste of very valuable characters.

I would use that space to compose a title tag that is rich in keywords and elicits clicks.

An extra keyword might qualify you to appear in additional SERPs.

You can also bring people in by posting a kickass price.... offer to tell them the "secrets" of your trade.... tell them it "ships today".

Shout your value proposition or your interesting content.

My personal favorite is "free beer" ... guaranteed to increase your CTR.  Try it and see.

I don't know what keyword you are targeting but I will say that there are many that I would not attempt because I don't have the resources to compete.

However, I very often have attacked a difficult term, never achieved it, but dominated nearly all of the longtail - enough that it was very worthwhile.

I like media/s suggestion to attack multiple keywords.

Any recommendations?

If this was my site I would not worry about it.

Plastic Flower Pots for the house and garden with free delivery

Is more UX friendly then Plastic Flower Pots - Free Delivery!.

I would use what you propose only if I thought that adding the word "house" or "garden" was going to increase the keyword reach of the optimization.  I would not add them unless I had keyword frequency that convinces me that they will qualify the page for a much larger number of queries.

People do not "read" the SERPs.  They "scan" the SERPs.

For that reason I believe that

**Plastic Flower Pots - Free Delivery!  **

will be read and understood by more people.  The free delivery is not lost ad the end of the title tag.

I also believe that this shorter title tag is stronger optimization.

Why doesn't Google head more in the direction of descriptive titles rather then shorter the better?

IMO, shorter is better for the searcher and for google.

Which of these slaps the scanning searcher's face with the product and free delivery?

Plastic Flower Pots for the house and garden with free delivery

****Plastic Flower Pots - Free Delivery!  ****

I believe that "free delivery" is lost in the longer version.

Why do people worship SEOmoz metrics and are willing to move Heaven and Earth to improve them?

They don't determine your rankings and nobody is going to pay you for getting a good score.

There is more talk in Q&A about improving metrics than there is about improving websites.

Sometimes I think that these metrics are a decoy that keeps people from building a great website.