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Technically this just creates a link farm, of which the search engines can easily draw the connections.  They know that you, linking to them, and them linking to these other sites are all connected.  Give them 6 months and they will have all the lines drawn between your dots

Not the best long term strategy.... but I also know that this still works in the real world (so I've heard.....:)  Short term you can get some valuable link juice there, and will probably see some benefits.  But know that you could get smacked down one day.

Ahh... the ultimate IA question that still doesnt have a clear anwer from the search engines.  A ton of talk about this at the recent SMX Advanced at Seattle (as is with almost every one).  I will try and summarize the common sentiment that i gathered from other pros.  I will not claim that this is the correct way, but for now this is what i heard a bunch of people agree on:

1. No index, follow the pagination links for all except page 1
2. Do not block/hand it with robots.txt (in your case, you realyl cant since you have no identifying parameters in your url)
3. If you had paginated parameters in the url you can also manage those in the Google & Bing  WMT by telling the SE to ignore those certain parameters.
4. Canonical to page 1 was a strategy that some retailers were using, and other want to try.  Google reps tried to say this is not the way to do it, but others claim success from it.
5. If you have a "View All" link that would display all the products in a longer form on a single page, canonical to that page (if its reasonable)

Notes: Depending on how your results/pages are generated, you will need to remember that they probably arent passing "juice".  Any dynamic content is usually not "flow through" links from an SEO perspective (or even crawled sometimes).

The better approach to not orphaning your product pages is finding ways to link to them from other sources besides the results pages.  For larger sites, its a hassle, buts thats a challenge we all face    Here are some SEO tips for attacking the "orphan" issue:

1. If you have product feeds, create a "deal" or "price change" feed.  Create a twitter account that people can sign up for to follow these new deals or price changes on products.  Push in your feed into tweets, and these will link to your product page, hence creating an in-link for search engines to follow.
2. Can do the same with blogs or facebook, but not on a mass scale.  Something a bit more useful for users like "top 10 deals of the week) and link to 10 products, or "Favorites for gifts" or something. over time, you can keep track of which product you recommend, and make sure you eventually hit all your products.  Again, the point is creating at least 1 inbound link for search engines to follow.
3. Create a static internal "product index page" (this is not for your sitemap page FYI) where either by category or some other structure, you make a static link to every product page you have on the site.  Developers can have these links dynamically updated/inserted with some extra effort which will avoid manually needing to be updated.
4. Create a xml sitemap index.  Instead of everything being clumped into 1 xml sitemap for your site, try creating a sitemap index and with your product pages in their own sitemap.  This may help with indexing those pages.

Hope that helps?  Anyone else want to chime in?

I am starting a Google doc today, and will start populating directory links with information.  Anyone that wants to help put the new list together, shoot me a personal message from my profile here and i will share the doc with you!

I will probably start a new Q&A post specifically for this so we can collaborate and have a dedicated section- so keep your eyes out and join the discussion.

Along those same lines, does anyone else know of any good services that will provide physical business addresses in certain locations?  I know of some virtual office providers, but only found ones that do major cities, not smaller ones.

I like the idea of crowd sourcing the directory list.   I agree with the "Dont take it down".  Lets all be honest here... we mostly use the directory listings for one-way link building, and whether it actually sends traffic or not- dont really care.  I know if it did send traffic, it would be crappy traffic.

I would be more than happy to contribute to a PRO generated list, only available to PRO members.  That would be a nice perk, and a great value add.  i think we all want to know what directories work for each other   This is probably the only place i would fee ok sharing.

Cant go the PO box route.  They are cracking down on local listings.  You need a physical address. Its not a problem to share the address if you have different suite # or something in.  There are also some companies out there that you can pay to give you a virtual office address in major cities, and you could technically use that.  Remember that you will need to verify the listing, and sometimes Google will not let you do it via the phone, they will only do the postcard route, so you will need to monitor the mail to that location.

Linkscape and the Juicy Link Finder.  I actually wish that some of these tools were combined, since JuicyLink Finder, Linkscape and Competitive Link Finder tools are all similar in nature.  I guess i just really wish someone would put all these tools into one single place so i could find and analyze all from one UI.

agree

noindex the extra pages.  thats where you should focus your SEO and link building as well, so it all goes to the same url.  It wont do you any good to have that duplicated content, regardless of canocical tags.

As a follow-up or further info:  Its been about 5 months since the change.  I do get some traffic from these indexed pages (not a ton, but enough that i would like to not block if there is no negative impact).  The SE interaction seems to be confusion- they index the content, but also recognize that something may not be right.  So I am wondering if anyone else has done something similar or is trying this.

Admitidly this is what i wanted the new url structure to do- as an experiment.  Just looking for anyone else who has/is doing similar

I know that google does not want to index "search result" pages for a lot of reasons (dup content, dynamic urls, blah blah).  I recently optimized the entire IA of my sites to have search friendly urls, whcih includes search result pages.  So, my search result pages changed from:

• /search?12345&productblue=true&id789

to

• /product/search/blue_widgets/womens/large

As a result, google started indexing these pages thinking they were static (no opposition from me :)), but i started getting WMT messages saying they are finding a "high number of urls being indexed" on these sites.  Should I just block them altogether, or let it work itself out?

I assume that you mean when you change your keyword to include a city+cate (city+state+keyword) it changes your ranking.

Without looking at your site and the keyword specifically, then its hard to tell.  In myour case i would focus on getting inbound links with the city+state combo in the anchor text.  Local business directory listings, local sites would be really useful place to start.  Blogs are also still useful for local listings.

nice tool Luke.  I have never seen that one before.  Takes the whole search query finding one step further.

FIrst off, let me answer your most burning question- is there an easier way to get high quality links without hours of work on the backend? No.  A handful of directories (business, web, local) are still worthwhile to pay/submit to, but thats where the easy part stops.

I am not familiar with linkmarket, but i did take a look at thier website- doesnt look fantastic. Sounds like too much reciprocal linking going on.  May be useful for a handful of links, but i wouldnt use that as your primary link building source.

Although it takes hours on your own, here is a good way to organize your effort to make it a little less sporadic:

1. Get an entire potential link list together before you begin.  I create a spreadsheet for each site, and then start hitting a mixture of tools; SEOmoz link finding tools, i use a product called Web CEO that has an ok link/partner finding tool that spits out a long list of potential websites to get links from.  Then you manually start searching, I really liked this link finding parameter post on Search Engine Land post that gives some good search operators to use.  Take a bunch of these combined tools with your own searching, and compile the list together in excel.  Hopefully you get at least a couple hundred options.
2. Craft a link request email template- but MAKE SURE YOU CUSTOMIZE/PERSONALIZE it!! Ask for specific pages to get a link from, know the website, make sure you sound like a real person.
3. Dedicate 1 afternoon a week (a few hours at least) to start going down your list.  Without dedicating a specific time, it wont happen.  I know from experience.
4. Track contacts/responses.  In your excel sheet, track the date that you requested a link, track any response, and finally the date you got a link.
5. Be willing to reciprocate.  Its only fair to provide a link back.  Not as useful, but you should take them all.
6. Participate in online communities.  Even when some places "no follow" links (blogs, forums, news sites) I have found that those links still play into your recognized "domain authority" in an intagable way.  Dont ignore those.

Hope that gives you a start!