Generic page titles and similar URLs

Will a single generic title and nearly identical URLs keep se's out?

[cfx211]

The boutique catalog section of our site shares the same base URL as a larger general shopping section of our site. Both are dynamically generated asp pages and the only difference between the 2 comes later in the query string. For example

catalog/product_name.asp?product=1234&cat=1&section=100 would be the shopping section

catalog/product_name.asp?product=5678&cat=2&section=200 would be the boutique section

The section val would be the differentiator between the 2 parts of the site. Cat would be each subsection.

Now what is even worse is that our site is currently using one generic page title for every page with that URL base (shopping and boutique).

The home page of our boutique has a PR of 6, but all of the pages after it are unranked.

Do you think those pages are unranked because the titles are the same and the URLs are so similar? There are probably about 20k pages involved.

If we change the titles to product name/shopping name and product name/boutique name do you think that will be enough to get the boutique product pages ranked?

I have just recently started focusing on search strategies for our company and we have a lot of high PR being very misdirected that I need to straighten out.

Great site, I have found it very useful.

[AkanDian rain]

I wouldn't think shared titles would stop search engines. Just my humble opinion.

[cfx211]

Let me clarify. I don't think this is stopping engines from crawling these pages, but I want to believe that having the same titles and very similar urls is keeping them from getting listed and ranked.

[Marcia]

It's ranking that counts, not crawling. Page titles are one of the most important factors in ranking well, and having keywords in the URL helps, too. Those URLs aren't helping any, which can be verified by seeing how many of the top 20 on most searches are long and dynamic vs. plain vanilla.

If you want pages to rank for the individual products on them they need page titles specifically written to relate to what's on the pages.

[martin]

cfx,

create a custom 404 handler that is an ASP page. On the first line put something like

Response.Header('Status: 200')

I don't remember exactly what it was, but make sure the page requested returns 200 OK status.

Now start using more human URLs, like /shopping/foo, /botique/bar, etc. Congratulations, now make it compatible with old links and you're OK.