underglass - 7:40 pm on Nov 24, 2010 (gmt 0)

Thank you both for the input.

Tedster: There were about 40 left navigation links on about 5000 pages. These pointed to category pages. In the site hierarchy, the next most important pages. But I saw that some of the blog, sub-category, and category pages had almost double the amount of internal links pointing to them as the homepage (according to webmaster tools - WT).

Now there are 28 that point from my homepage. These point to category pages. These category pages then drill down into sub-category pages. (Widget Store - Blue Widgets - Cheap Blue Widgets).

Tantalus - No to the robots.txt. After all the changes, I checked to see if I needed to make adjustments, but I did not see any needed ones.

Yes, there were canonical issues and I attempted to fix them with 301s. I think I have a duplicate content issue on category pages that display hundreds of cheap blue widgets. Each pages shows 30 or so cheap blue widgets but there can be up to 30 of these pages. Since they are created via a template, I am unable to meta-block the duplicate ones. Weirdly enough, until recently, Google was indexing them, and Yahoo and Bing are still sending me traffic via them.


I do not want these pages to rank since they are display pages. I use titles but no meta tags, no unique content, etc. I have other pages that are SEO'd and unique.

In the last 30 or so days, I have not seen a drop in any of my major keywords. Usually Google is quick on the drop. At least for me they are.