Gissit - 1:42 pm on Nov 14, 2006 (gmt 0)

Hi
Sorry but I have to disagree. I have a site that has 4000 pages indexed and only three of these are not supplemental. If I run a search on category-model-product-few key words of desc (no phrases or anything to specific) I list at #1 of 35 with a supplemental page, none of the pages below are supplemental. I actually pick up a fair ammount of traffic from these long tail searches.

The reason most of the site is supplemental?
Zen has a few issues with /index.php etc needed a 301 to sort them but the real problems came from when I set up the Zen Cart shop a couple of years back on the site and in my ignorance added a load of links on the front page pointing deeper to various parts. Some of these links were through the site search facility and these actually generate a different URL than the standard navigation to the same item would. Where I had added direct links to content and then made later changes to categories the links still worked but the standard navigation URL changed. The effect of this is that there are at least four URL's that point to each product category and each individual item. Duplicate content gone mad...

This was not a problem initially and I had aroud 20,000 indexed pages for only 700 products, no wonder G has had to try to rationalise what it keeps where...

I sorted out the errant linking yesterday (been busy with a new site and not too worried about this one until now) and now need to 301 all the bad links back to where they belong. A quick lesson in regular expressions should sort that out I hope, but I am not expecting instant results. With all that said, the site still ranks top 20 for competitive keywords (1.3 million results in SERPS) despite the bulk of it being supplemental.