The generic pages probably aren't the core of the problem, but if you think they're useless, maybe dump them - perhaps they're diluting the effectiveness of the more important pages on your site, hard to say.

Your ranking problems are maybe because you're in a very competitive field? If that's the case, you could think of adding fresh, pertinent content on a regular basis, and aim at becoming the absolute authority for your market. That should bring in unsolicted links on a steady basis and make you look good to the SE's.

Interlinking within a site is not a problem.

You may well have duplicate content issues on many pages; this is not necessarily a problem for you, so long as key pages are being indexed; but 'good housekeeping' says to remove as many as you can.

Plus the issue is becoming so widespread these days, that while not a penalty now, I'd make no bets about the future!

i've found it works best to target a brand or category style landing page... not the bad kind.

Keep the individual products as subcategory links off of there. Maybe throw in a few purchasable "featured items" and a good unique description for that brand or category and make sure each product page links back to the brand or category and home.

If you don't have good and unique descriptions for each item then keep them short and do display the part number. You wouldnt believe how many people search for exactly what the want.

ie: widget 123456

home> brand or category > subcategory > product

of course that's just what has worked for us ...

This sounds more like it might be a site structure problem then a "link development" issue.

and a lot of the other pages are just the same generic message that states that the product is unvailable or might be in stock

I'd start by having products that ARE in stock, and/or at least being definative about whether they are or not.

I'd say that Google has correctly concluded that your site isn't very useful. How useful is a site that can't even tell you if products are in stock or not?

Go to WC3.com or whatever it is and get your HTML checked, as it could be you have links that work for a human with a mouse but not for a search engine.

I just got it to crawl my own site and from 100 pages it found 16 dead links - but they're not dead to a user. To a machine, think 'dodo'.

P.