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That's an awfully interesting mobile URL =/ Ideally you should only have one URL. If that's not possible, you want to follow the same URL structure as closely as possible. If that's not possible, you'll want to add rel="alternate" on the desktop site to the corresponding mobile URL, and a canonical tag on the mobile site to the desktop site. https://developers.google.com/webmasters/smartphone-sites/details By the way, I'd strongly suggest detecting based on screen size or width rather than user-agent wherever possible.

I agree that redirecting would be of no interest. In such a case I would probably go for another strategy. I actually see this as an opportunity. register brandname2.pro or .net or similar, host it on another server do the same brandname1.com, different server Create a Wordpress blog or a very simple CMS on each server Create quality content for each of those blogs. Brand history, processes, whatever as long as it is interesting for someone who is really into that brand. I believe for $10K you can have some good quality content. Point links to relevant pages under parentcompany.com/brand-name1 and parentcompany.com/brand-name2 The results : more backlinks 3 different points of entry to your e-commerce website (I am thinking long trail here, and search engines evolutions) a better differenciation between the ecommerce website and the brands sites, because their short-term goals are different (buying vs. getting information), allowing you for instance to post content on brandname1.com which would appear strange on parentcompany.com, because the latter should be more streamlined with a very good UI and sales funnel. You can be more creative on the brand sites and you dont need to do A/B tests not worry too much about analytics etc. Of course it is  more work, but you would be getting a higher granularity for your brand. Regards Gil

Grayloon, were these responses enough of an answer for you, or are you still looking for more information?

Not totally sure. You may find it will help the root domain if the sub-domain links back to the root domain and you still let the pages get followed.

This is something a lot of websites do and something the crawlers can recognise. If you have say, a 150 word block that's the same on every page, and 400+ words of unique content elsewhere, you won't have any problems at all. There's no particular science to those numbers by the way, I'm just pulling them out of the air - but there's a helpful quote below from here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/beat-google-panda Here at SEOmoz, our PRO platform uses a 95% threshold to judge duplicate content. This means if 95% of all the code on your page matches another page, then it’s flagged as a duplicate. To check your own ratios, try this nifty duplicate content tool. What you suggest in the last paragraph is cloaking. You need to be very careful when you're serving different versions of the same page to crawlers and users.

Thank you for that response.  I wanted to follow up a little on it. The article you link to sounds good.  My concern, however, is that if I were to have a "view all" page then we could be talking about 1,000+ nodes on a single page.  This page would take much longer to load, which itself would become an SEO hit.  Though I do get why that's a suggestion, I have to wonder if that's the best solution for sites with large directories. The other article/post seems to mention both the "view all" method and the "noindex, follow" method which gives a little more validity to that option in my opinion.  I'm still trying to discern what the "best" method is, and it's starting to become clear that maybe there isn't exactly one industry standard for this.

You have a couple of options. You can try asking this question again in public Q&A, as the site has a lot more activity than it did in April. Another option is to use a private Q&A question and ask this where only SEOmoz staff and associates can see it. The advantage there is that the question is private and not indexed, and the staff/associates are under an NDA and won't disclose the contents of the question so you can use real URLs if needed.

I too have this same question so I hope others will weigh in here. Like Wissam, I too have relied on Google's Keyword tool and market Samurai (which in turn relies on Google's Keyword Tool) My concern is that despite what Google says, I fear that numbers don't accurately reflect organic search but are more reflective of Adword results. They say they have changed this but that may be in what terms they return in the tool suggestions, not so much in the numbers themselves. Also, I have read that Bing is making some inroads into Google market share for search. So I feel I should be paying attention to things outside the Google universe. Any suggestions or thoughts on next gen tools for keyword research would be appreciated.