Rand Fishkin made a white board Fri thingy discussing a way to improve this situation with categories. The idea is that you can flatten our your architecture with the use of categories. Rand's category solution works great for blogs, but might not always work well for large lead gen sites. If you have 500K pages, you're NOT going to get everything indexed unless your Wikipedia. It doesn't matter how you set things up. It's all about passing the juice to the ROI pages.
With most large web sites you end up with tons of deep pages about specific businesses, people or products. In some cases you can pull in a lot of brand name traffic on these pages. Whether it's someone's name, a product or a business name. The pages that contain this info are often paginated. This pagination can cause a lot of issues for SEOs. They often create duplicate titles and some duplicate content.
However, most of these sites do not rank for large brand names or popular products. Unless you're Amazon or Wikipedia you're ranking for more obscure names. Therefore, I would recommend creating categories based on business size or product popularity.
With lead gen, I would create categories for small, medium, large and pink link the large category. I save this PR for other areas and pass even more juice to the kinds of businesses I actually rank for. If you have a social media site, try creating categories based on the popularity of the person. Odds are, you're not going to rank for "Bill Gates" or "Guy Kawasaki."
Find where your ranking tips and pink link you're loser categories. I haven't actually tried this yet, but will very soon, and will report back.
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