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Marie, I was thinking, do you think the new Google's Disavow Links Tool could help me with my affiliate's inbound links? I mean, in case I could be damaged by that kind of link profile...

Yes, I think will be easier to change our own contents and tell them to add the canonical tag to our page. Thanks!

Actually you can see the subsequent pages still in the index, just enter on Google:

site:virtualsheetmusic.com inurl:downloads/Indici/Guitar.html

and you will see what I mean. I see though that most of those pages have been cached before I put the canonical tag, so I guess it is just a matter of time.
 Am I correct? I mean, if a page has a canonical tag that points to a different page it should NOT be in the index, right?

Thank you for looking!

Sorry Marie, I forgot to answer your inquiry about music2print.com: that's one of our affiliates! That's another issue we could suffer for... how do you suggest to tackle the affiliate-possible-duplicate content? Thanks!

Yes EGOL, I understand that my only way is to really thicken and differentiate the pages with real and unique content. I will try that and keep you posted! Thank you for your help again.

Marie, look at the following page, it is the main (first) page of our guitar index:

http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/downloads/Indici/Guitar.html

Now, if you want to browse the guitar repertoire to the second page of the index, you click the page "2" or "next" link right? And then the second page appears:

http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/downloads/Indici/Guitar.html?cp=2&lpg=20

And so on... well, those subsequent pages are the ones I was talking about: they have the rel=prev and rel-next tags together with the canonical tag that refers to the main (first) index page, but many of those subsequent pages are still in the index, Shouldn't they disappear and only the first page kept in the index?

As for what you wrote about how I can expect a recover from Panda, it makes sense and I really hope this new integration of Panda into the main algorithm will gradually speed things up. Thank you for your opinion on that.

I think my approach will be to keep noindexing those pages that really don't bring any business first and in the meantime improve all the others one by one. To nonidex all pages and start releasing just the optimized ones one by one scares me too much!

Thank you Marie, yes, the canonical should tell Google what you said, but I don't understand why the other pages (subsequent index pages) are still in the index despite the canonical tag. Am I missing something?

About the thin content and how that affect the whole site, I have no more doubts, that's clear and I will tackle that page by page. I am just wondering if my presence on Google is going to improve little by little over time while I tackle the problem page-by-page, or will my site score get better only when everything will be clean and improved? To deindex everything and start rewriting with the best products first. as EGOL suggested really scares me since we live with the site and we could ending up making no money at all for too long.

Yes, I see, it's great to know you could recover pretty easily. I will keep working on the contents then, even though I guess is going to be a long way... thanks!

Thank you Egol for reinforcing what Marie said, but still I can't figure out why some of my best pages, with many reviews and unique content, have dropped from the top rankings (from 1st page to 13th page) the last November:

http://www.seomoz.org/q/what-can-do-to-put-these-pages-back-in-the-top-results

Thank you again.

Wow, thank you so much Marie for your extended reply and information, it is like gold for me!

Some thoughts about what you wrote:

For example, take this page:

http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/downloads/Indici/Guitar.html

There is almost no text on that page that is unique to that page.  Why should it be in the search results?  I did a search for the text on the top of the page and saw that it was repeated on thousands of your pages.  The rest of the text is all from other pages as well.  If there is nothing on this page that is unique and adds value, then it needs to be noindexed.

I actually used to not care about subsequent pages in indexes such as the Guitar one because I thought that what  Google needed was just the new rel=prev and rel=next tags to figure out that the important page was the first one only, but then I got scared by Panda and 5 weeks ago I put the canonical tag on subsequent pages pointing to the main page. So, I don't understand why you still find the subsequent pages on the index... shouldn't the canonical tag help on that?

And I get it now more than before: we really need to make our product pages more unique and compelling and we'll do that. Our best pages have many users reviews, but looks like that's not enough... look at what I am discussing on this thread about our best product pages with many and unique user reviews on them:

http://www.seomoz.org/q/what-can-do-to-put-these-pages-back-in-the-top-results

Those pages are dropped from page 1 to over page 10! Why?! Everything looks non-sense if you look at the data and how some thinner pages rank better than thicker ones. IN other words, despite what you write makes perfectly sense to me and I will try to pursue it, if I analyze Google results and my pages rankings, I cannot understand what Google wants from me (i.e. Why it's penalizing my good pages?).

And so, my last question is: have you idea when I will begin to see some improvements? So far I haven't seen any good results from my last action of dropping over 50,000 thin pages from the index, which I must say, it is not much encouraging!

Thank you again very much again.

Hello here,

my website virtualsheetmusic.com has been hit several times by Panda since its inception back in February 2011, and so we decided 5 weeks ago to get rid of about 60,000 thin, almost duplicate pages via noindex metatags and canonical (we have no removed physically those pages from our site giving back a 404 because our users may search for those items on our own website), so we expected this last Panda update (#25) to give us some traffic back... instead we lost an additional 10-12% traffic from Google and now it looks even really badly targeted.

Let me say how disappointing is this after so much work!

I must admit that we still have many pages that may look thin and duplicate content and we are considering to remove those too (but those are actually giving us sales from Google!), but I expected from this last Panda to recover a little bit and improve our positions on the index. Instead nothing, we have been hit again, and badly.

I am pretty desperate, and I am afraid to have lost the compass here. I am particularly afraid that the removal of over 60,000 pages via noindex metatags from the index, for some unknown reason, has been more damaging than beneficial.

What do you think? Is it just a matter of time? Am I on the right path? Do we need to wait just a little bit more and keep removing (via noindex metatags) duplicate content and improve all the rest as usual?

Thank you in advance for any thoughts.

Yes, my website  was hit pretty hard (again), and it is pretty weird considering we begun a big cleanup of duplicated contents 5- weeks ago, and we actually expected to have some good results from this last update!

Yes, I guess that was the last panda, my website also was hit hard, and it is pretty weird considering we begun a big cleanup of duplicated contents 5- weeks ago, and actually we expected to have some good results from this last update!

Thank you Peter, that's exactly what I though... maybe Google got confused about the fact I am the "original" content compared with our own affiliate's. I will try that, but I still can't find a clear explanation of such a penalization.

Thank you Mememax for your response.

Here are my answers to your points:

1. I don't recall any change since September for all of our product pages that could have caused this issue. What we have worked in the past month for product pages is:

a. Adding markup code for rich snippets.

b. Applied rel-canonical to all tabs of our product pages (see point 2 below).

Of course back links could be an issue with the fact we have hundreds of affiliates linking back to our product pages, but I thought Google is enough smart to understand that (any link has inside the "af=" parameter). Maybe adding a "rel=nofollow" tag would help, but it is hard to control that from our side. But I have never worked on "link building" (all links are natural with the only exception of affiliate's).

2. As for the tabs, as I wrote above, I have consolidated product page tabs via rel-canonical.

3. The image well indexed in Google is still there, on the INFO tab (the default product page). Is that what you meant?

Thank you again!

Hello here,

here is an interesting question for you. The following 2 webpages from our website have been ranking well on Google (usually on the 1st or 2nd page) for the past 12 years. They are among our oldest, highly relevant product pages on our site:

http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/score/Moonlight.html

http://www.virtualsheetmusic.com/score/Eliza.html

And we could always find them with the keyword "moonlight sonata sheet music" or "fur elise sheet music". Now, since the last November these pages don't show up anymore despite they are still present in the index.

It is pretty hard to understand why those pages don't show up in the search results for those keywords as they used to, above all if you consider that those are among our best, most popular and unique product pages!

But instead to struggle to understand why we lost presence (Panda? Some unknown sort of penalization?), has anyone any suggestions to help us to have those pages back in the top results? What do you suggest to do in such kind of cases?

Any ideas and thoughts are very welcome!

Thank you in advance.