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This is a tough situation. I tend to agree with Ricky - these are exactly the kinds of pages that have been hit by Panda, and there's real risk. In the old days, the biggest risk was that the pages would just stop getting traffic. Now, the impact could hit the rest of the site as well, and it's a lot more dangerous. The problem is that it's working for now, and you're asking them to give up traffic in the short-term to avoid losing it in the long-term. Again, I think the long-term risk is serious (and it's not that easy to recover from), but the short-term pain to the client is very real. What's the scope of the 300 pages compared to the rest of the site (are we talking a 400 page site or a 40,000 page site)? How many of these city pages are getting real traffic? My best alternative solution is to pin down the 10-20% of the city pages getting most of the traffic, temporarily NOINDEX the rest, and then beef up those well-trafficked city pages with unique content (so, maybe you're talking about 30 pages). Then, build out from there. Give these pages real value - it's not only good for SEO, but it will probably improve conversion, too. The other problem with pages that just swap out a city is that they're often low quality - they may draw traffic in, but then have high bounce rates and low conversion. If you can show that you can improve the value, even with some traffic loss, it's easier to win this fight.

Make sure the site is coded in UTF-8, then you can use ü. UTF-8 supports all special characters, incl. chinese, russian etc. and makes life easier with compatibility in general.

Thanks dude, that's the answer I need.

Thanks Kyle. Particularly grateful for the Disallow format, they are the only URL's using an underscore so will work for me.   WIll be checking why these are being created. Do I need to remove them using the Removal Tool in Google, is there a format for doing this on block ? Thanks again, Alan

Hi Matt, Thanks for the response and the information. Here's some answers of mine and more info: The domain contains no keywords and is a specialist, relatively unknown brand. The robots.txt file is still active—forgive me. It's just that for around 2 weeks after launch it was still disallowing indexing of any files and folders on the domain. In the search results for the Google UK search engine, I can't see the site appear anywhere in the first 10 pages when typing the domain.com as a query I've just now checked in the search results for the Google Brasil (it's a Brazilian company with a brazilian domain), and I can now see the homepage appear in the #1 position, but I cannot see any other pages ranking for the site until the 5th page of the SERPs. This is a new site with unique content - Why do you think that the UK search engine isn't picking anything up?  - Is it an issue that only the first position is showing a page for the domain being queried in the Brazilian search engine? I really appreciate your help in advance.

Google has been changing/rewriting title tags in some situations for a while you may find this article interesting - http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2049990/Google-Changing-Titles-in-Search-Results-SEOs-Not-Happy

According to Google - "How often does Google crawl the web? Google's spiders regularly crawl the web to rebuild our index. Crawls are based on many factors such as PageRank, links to a page, and crawling constraints such as the number of parameters in a URL. Any number of factors can affect the crawl frequency of individual sites. Our crawl process is algorithmic; computer programs determine which sites to crawl, how often, and how many pages to fetch from each site. We don't accept payment to crawl a site more frequently. For tips on maintaining a crawler-friendly website, please visit our Webmaster Guidelines." Hope this helps. Mike

Thanks! I have some pages that contein h1, h2, h3 and h4. And I have other pages that dont't have h3 but they do have H2 and H4. Is it a seo mistake? Thanks!

Rachel, If your ecommerce cms/platform allows you to use variants that would be one way to avoid showing up with near identical content for the same product. The different thickness bag is simply a variation of the product just like you might have a yellow, black, red, and blue version of the same pair of shoes. Usually a variant is implemented with a dropdown button on the product page.

Submit a sitemap.xml file in Google and Bing WMT and see if that helps. http://brokenlinkcheck.com found 155 pages so it's getting crawled.

Ahh, that explains it - thanks Mike Iain.

I forgot to include, keywords do not need to be exclusive to an individual page, they can be targeted on multiple pages, but having the specific landing page will likely be the most effective area on the site for concentrated on-page SEO tactics.

Thanks David Yeager! You have answered very well to solve my question.

Hi Henrik, I'm afraid that Google's crawlers are much more sophisticated than our since they have much greater resources than we do, so they may not consider those URLs to be an issue, but we are always working to make our crawler better. Unfortunately, at this time there is no way to remove crawling for certain URLs in our tool without using the robots.txt file. I'm sorry for any inconvenience that may cause. Please let me know if you have any other questions. -Chiaryn

I apologize, but I'm going to paint a slightly more grim picture. While there's nothing wrong with 301s, in theory, large-scale URL changes on a new site do carry very real risk, even with a flawless 301 implementation. The 301s won't pass all authority (there is some small loss), and if your site is new enough or not on Google's radar quite enough, you could experience short-term ranking loss while everything gets sorted out. At very large scale, and for the wrong reasons, a massive 301 implementation could even raise red flags with Google. I guess I'd ask two big questions: (1) Why are you changing your URLs so soon? If it's to tweak out some tiny bit of keyword usage and SEO gain, I'd almost never do it on a 2-month-old site. If it's to fix a problem, that's different. (2) Are the category filter pages active in the new structure/design? I'm not clear on why you wouldn't 301-redirect them. My gut feeling is that you're trying to solve a problem with the current URLs, and the solution depends a lot on understanding that problem. Change for change's sake carries a lot of risk for a new site, IMO.

Even though you include a lengthy disclaimer, even hinting to someone new at SEO that you could/should noindex a category page on an eCommerce site is a little dangerous. Still, great answer Tom.

Well, how many .ws sites or .pw sites are out there that you know of? For that matter, how many .net sites are well known? But here's the kicker: what would Google gain by favoring .com over any other TLD? We're entering a bold new era in TLDs, where you can now created your own TLD extension. So if you want to create the .seo TLD you can do it (just gotta be able to pay the steep ICANN fees and have a way to manage it). So .com is going to have a lot more competition. Again, .com is very popular with people. It's generally easier to remember a .com just because people naturally put .com at the end. nobody has ever presented a case that I know of where a site lost purely because they didn't have a .com

Never mind- It looks like Google was basing it on just 2 days, which turned out to be Easter and I guess people already had their Easter candy!

Actually I have Thesis 1 so I edited my post. I just get confused because when I purchased it, it was called Thesis 2.0. I did think about upgrading to Thesis 2 and I already purchased that box from thesistut but I activated thesis 2 and yikes, it is really different and will be a lot of work to change.

it could be clashing with another plugin