Ver. 3 Duplicate Content Update

I followed the original poster's suggestions and saw our rank go *way* up, so I'm thinking there may be some truth in it!

earlyimp wrote: John, the file "viewCat_h.asp" no longer exists in version 3. Make sure you have the 301 Permanent Redirect files on your store. If not, here they are: 2007-04-03_004928_ProductCart_v3_Upgrade_301_Redirects.zip This is a MUST.

Yes the version I have does have the redirects in them. However, my sitemap generator, will still include them as I have hard coded links in my static pages. Unfortunately, Alot of them. and global search and replace with the tools I have will not work because of the new url's format. If the pagestyle=H was before the idcategory I  might have been able to. { if you want to develop a regular expression that would find and replace all the possible variations, a number of us might find it helpful, I might even go find an d buy a tool that can remotely search and replace using regular expressions if I can find one } . but it looks like a weeks/months/never project. I had alot of those links, they had provided at least my category pages with PR of 3 or 4 and got some of my product pages showing up. [ btw terms with less than a million results are rarely significant money terms and placing for anything less then 500K demonstrates very little.]

earlyimp wrote: Also, review your navigation and all other static/dynamic pages that link to old, v2.76 files. Even if the 301 Redirects will tell search engines to index the new file, it's cleaner not to have links to the old files to begin with.

See above.

But I have posted a separate topic on redirects, I do not think they are working properly. I will probably post on webmaster world too and report back any helpful responses.

earlyimp wrote: As for duplicate payment penalty: I would not lose your sleep over it. The Google Webmaster pages are very clear on that. Here is what I thought was a good article on the topic: http://www.practicalecommerce.com/articles/444/SEO-The-Dupli cate-Content-Penalty/

I read that and the related webmaster world posts couple months ago and just revisited them to refresh my memory and see if I might gather a  fresh perspective.

As a webmaster/business owner that has obtained a significant amount of my livelihood from organic search, it does not matter if it is a filter or a penalty if it reduces traffic by 40%-80%, it can and it has.
 
They still shout loud and clear to me, if you have product pages with similar products, empty review pages,  pages with  similar content just sorted differently , (gift registries?), etc...   Do not sleep, Do not pass go, Do NOT COLLECT a paycheck -- go directly to jail, until you fix it. Then probably spend six plus months in supplemental hell anyway.

The overriding impression from the 6 pages of comments referenced on the above links, is that in December the statements by Google reps, were a storm warning about duplicate content coming to the forefront of Googles agenda. I believe and many others do that the winds picked up about the end of February and have been increasing.

I just finished a full crawl of my new ver 3 cart.

I noticed some new urls (at least I think they are new or are replaced but still generating valid pages that googlebot can find) that may cause you problems with duplicate content.

If you do not think this is a serious SEO issue spend some time on webmasterworld

Disallow: /ProductCart/pc/viewPrd.asp?idcategory=0&
Disallow: /ProductCart/pc/viewPrd.asp?idcategory=&
Disallow: /ProductCart/pc/showsearchresults.asp?
Disallow: /ProductCart/pc/viewCat_h.asp?
Disallow: /ProductCart/pc/viewCat_H.asp?
Disallow: /ProductCart/pc/showSearchResults.asp?
Disallow: /ProductCart/pc/ViewCart.asp

Anyone know of any I missed?