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How big are you talkin' about? If you look at the wikipedia article for Philadelphia you will find a really long page.  I took the sentence for the Postal Service that appears at the bottom of the page and found that Google indexed it from wikipedia and many other websites - over 2/3 of which were omitted because they were similar. See SERPs Here. This tells you that Google routinely indexes content of that length.  You can try experiments for pages of even longer length to see how they are doing. I have a lot of long articles on my site (4000 words plus) and they pull a ton of long tail traffic.  And, I like these really long pages because I believe that the huge content impresses visitors and earns links. That's the SEO value of a big page in my opinion.

Thanks, our web company have set this up as a redirect the main website is .co.uk the .com should be redirected to this. You said that this is just the begining of potential problems is there more to it than just the redirect being problematic?

Thanks guys!

Thanks! Do you have any links to posts that state that or have details? I completely agree and I am going to push for a home page redesign, but I need some good, solid information before making the recommendation. All the articles that I've read mention it, but don't have a lot of details about it.

Hi, I think that accents do matter and can have a significant effect on rankings. I would suggest that you optimise different pages of your site for different variotions of the keyword (for example one with accent and one without accent), where the original content is a good fit for the keyword. This will then mean that you can broaden the range of keywords you rank for, Hope that helps, Alex

Sorry, didn't read properly. Yes you should still block those pages anyway though... internal search result pages will still cause you issues in one way or another, whether it's circular navigation or competing for keywords... I would block them anyway.

Just ask yourself one simple question: why am I adding this page to my site? Problem solved. If the answer is to provide more information on some specific topic, then you have a keyword, the topic. If it is to advertise a new product or service, then you have a keyword, the product or service. If you don't know the answer to the first question, ask yourself this question: do I already have a page with similar content on my website? Would this add anything new? If you aren't adding anything new, don't add the page. You don't want to cannibalize your keywords with multiple pages targeting the same topic. As far as keyword selection, there you go. To make sure they are optimized for a keyword, simply make a checklist. Is the keyword in: title? alt tag? h1 tag? strong tag? That's about it.

Hi Lora, Can you share what domain that is please? Casey

Great explanation.  Thank you!

Eric, Rand's post really carries weight due to how search engines evaluate content relationships, and topical focus.  It's inevitable that your page, with enough unique content on it, will be found for variations of whatever core phrase you target, so you might as well integrate a couple or a few highly related relevant phrases.  Not only does it make sense in regard to ease of optimization, but the fact that you're integrating a few additional highly refined phrases just reinforces the emphasis on the primary phrase, while not coming across as trying to stuff that single phrase. Search engines are very good these days at looking for those signals - the relationships of two topics.  Not just cross-page, but definitely on-page as well.

huh? A you  asking..... "If people use the backbutton to go back into the SERPs, will that reduce your rankings?"   My bet is YES.  But I have not heard clear statements from Google about that. Anybody know where we can read or watch what Matt Cutts or another inside person has to say about that?

Some of those headers might help you serve your page faster.  They might  save you and your users some bandwidth. I guess if you think that page load time is super important (most say it's a small factor) then you could argue those are important for SEO but genrally speaking Marcus is right.

Done, done, and done. I hope to work together again soon.

Thanks, Richard!

Ahmad, With Google now taking into account where page elements are located (they can identify header, footer nav segments etc) it is now much more worthwhile getting a link in the editorial content of a website rather than just a simple sitewide footer link. The search engines are now beginning to look at sidewides as a potential spammy signal and therefore I would say if you can get links within an editorial piece (which will likely reside on only 1 or 2 pages max on a site) then this will pass the most link juice / value ultimately. Having said that I don't think sitewide's are dead exactly as they can help bolster the foundations of a link profile, I just wouldn't build an entire link strategy from these types of links, or at least this is where your partners are coming from.

Yes, if a service is no longer active, we would 301 it to the landing page on the main domain.

I think that I would use the homepage to promote my most profitable, most brandable and most linkable content.  After adopting that philosophy I would increase/decrease the number of links on my homepage to see what produces the most visitor engagement and conversions. But, getting to your original question... if you are getting your butt kicked in the SERPs you need to go out after links and likes and produce more of the content that attracts them.  SEO is a battle of resources and those resources are linkable content and links/likes, etc.

As an SEO best practice, there should never be more than one version of any page URL.  Even with Canonical implementation, it's only a signal, not a directive, and not all search engines even pay attention to that.  While it's perfectly acceptable to offer filtering options for people to discover content, filters should be blocked from indexing at all cost.  Leaving it up to Google or any search engine to have to figure out which is the original content is not a best practice even though many sites do it, and even though Google says it's okay. Trying to get one page found simply by inserting different keywords in a URL is also a crap-shoot since that's the only thing that changes about the page itself.  Like buying a keyword exact match domain only to use it as a redirect to the real domain.