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Hi Ryan - great response - thanks for taking time out to respond.  Having looked into this in a bit more detail I tend to agree with you that the 500 links on a page could well be an issue, but the bigger issue I see is duplicate content.  I suspect that this is what is causing these pages to be delisted or just not rank well in searches.

We are trying to cover off the longer tail search terms when people wish to search for a conversion type that at the present time we may not rank well for.  We offer about 850 different conversion types and wanted to put in place a method to cover off all of these search terms.  We considered our approach which was to use a template and have item descriptions for each of the conversion types was the best way forward - but it seems likely that this falls foul of the duplicant content filters that Google has in place.

So another thought I had for this was to have (in the case of 3g2) 8 different 3g2 unique descriptions - that way 3g2 will be described differently on each page so shouldn't fall foul of this same issue.  However i'm not even sure if this would work as i'm not sure if we use the same template (HTML) for each of these 8 pages whether that would flag to Google that it is duplicate content ?  Not sure what you think to this ?

Another thought we had around this was we could offer how to articles for each of the 850 different conversion types - this would be completely unique content and different for each conversion type.  Not sure if this would be a better way of doing this ?

Any thoughts you have would be greatly appreciated.

Further to my question above ...

I wonder whether we are being penalised as part of a duplicate content filter ?  Our site offers File Conversion and we are trying to rank well for the 850 or so different conversion types that we offer.

We have chosen to do this by offering these pages e.g.

http://www.zamzar.com/convert/doc-to-bmp/

http://www.zamzar.com/convert/doc-to-docx/

http://www.zamzar.com/convert/doc-to-gif/

http://www.zamzar.com/convert/doc-to-html/

http://www.zamzar.com/convert/doc-to-pdf/

You will note that the doc format remains the same description on each page and the to conversion (BMP, DOCX, GIF, HTML and PDF) changes at the bottom of the page.  Running each of these pages through the Similar Page Checker SEO tool results in a 79% duplicate content percentage.  This could go some way to explain why we have suddenly dropped in the SERPS ?

Anyone got any thoughts around this - or how we could restructure this,  We are looking to add value to our users whilst at the same time ranking well for our longer tail.

Appreciate your time - thanks.

Nothing black hat - we've grown all of our links organically - we have actually never asked for links back to the site.

I'm actually wondering whether we have been penalised at all - searching for "gvi to aac" returns some of our other similar pages.  Could it be that these pages are just too similar in style - albeit the content is very different on each page ?

Appreciate all the responses so far from this community.

Thanks for your replay - the Steve Jobs link is just for a day as a dedication to the inspirational Steve Jobs.  That will revert back to the Zamzar home page link tomorrow.

In terms of searching for our title in quotes I also see 0 results - I do however see it when I search for "3g2 to aac" zamzar - this comes back as the first result.

Would you expect to see our page when searching for our exact title ?  Would this be an indication of being penalised ?  If so any ideas what could have caused this ?