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Many thanks to everyone for their comments and help on this. I will def. take all on board and will have a read of your blog post as well Andy. I did see lots of 500, 522 errors in GWT but that could be related to my CDN (Cloudflare) so will investigate that as well. hopefully things will sort itself out. Many thanks Pete

Thanks for you answer. The first place google bot goes is the sitemap, yes, but is it true or not that finding a page in the sitemap and not being able to reach the same page when crawling the website makes google devaluate the page juice? About the footer I would just put a link to each subfolder, so just 3 or 4 links, what I don't know is if small links in the footer are enough to make google bot happy, or if it would still devaluate the page juice of the pages. Since they wouldn't have much interlinkage in the main website.

Hi there, I looked at your site, looks good. I also ran your site through I tool I recently discovered (it might be an old tool but still). http://nibbler.silktide.com/en_US/reports/www.clickdesk.com It gives you a report about your site looking at coding, social media accounts and reach, localization features etc. It might not be the best software or not a bible of internet marketing but it does give you quite a interesting view on things. I recently solved a lot of problems with different websites which helped me rank better but internet marketing is not an exact science as you just might know. Hope it helps some Regards Jarno

HTTPS is one of the ranking factors and is in testing phase. However, in the near future, it might become a vital factor. Since you are going for a re-branding, now is the time to take the decision. Regards

Google has a policy for this - what you're doing is not advisable - you should be annotating the URLs. You can read the correct approach to take here: https://developers.google.com/webmasters/mobile-sites/mobile-seo/configurations/separate-urls

You should try DYNO Mapper. It is a visual sitemap genreator that is good for mapping websites that are up to 25,000 pages. It is a paid tool, but their rates are pretty affordable. It generates sitemaps that include Google Analytics integration, content audit tools, and collaboration tools. 110649952

I would give DYNO Mapper a try. It's great Sitemap Generator that includes link / inventory information, Google Analytics integration, and comments for collaboration. It can import xml or scan urls pretty accurately. It is probably more useful for planning architecture than exporting for Google,

Many thanks LindaLV Pete

Hi Leonie-Kramer, Thanks for this, I was leaning the way of canonicals, but will try out the URL parameters first as I think this provides a great way of telling google that the content is filtering for users, but thanks for the answer, will go this route if Google still see to be struggling with Duplicates.

To avoid any risk of being penalized you need to be very careful to do not cloak. For example, in my experience if you tweak content serving different version of the page to javascript enabled browser and browser without JS is fine. But if you change something when you detect the http request is coming from googlebot, even if you change just a title, google gets very very angry. Link building is not affected, do not encourage people to link using hashbang. I don't remember about canonical, I don't think so, but just check the google docs I linked earlier. But, as I said earlier, I strongly suggest to do not use hashbang, and redesign the app to use ajax the way I described earlier.

There are two main ways to do something like this. 1. The easiest way to organize them would be to build a page on your site that has a list of your presentations, and then each presentation you can link to as either a .PDF or .PPTX file (or both). 2. If you really want to take it to the next level, build out each presentation as a page in HTML. Have each slide displayed as a graphic, where they end user can click for the full page view. Place your comments / what you'd say during the talk below each slide, listed on one long page. This is a lot like the Moz whiteboard video talk, where the transcript from the video is below on the page. I hope this helps! -- Jeff

Thanks Andy, Appreciate your feedback.

Are you asking about a page that has a canonical link which is the same as the URL of the page? That is quite common, and not a problem. (Take a look at the source code of this page--you will see Moz has used a canonical that is the same as the URL.)

The underlying thing is that they are the few sites that are doing it, so in the absence of a better option, Google shows these sites instead. Think of ehow.com or ask.com, they don't provide a great experience to the user, but you will notice on those types of searches, there are not any better options out there. When I say dynamic, I don't mean it as it is created on the fly. The URL has parameters that the server sees and knows to fetch the corresponding city from the server. I am not 100% positive, but from past experience I am willing to bet there is some kind of auto-fill tag like %CITY% that the server will plug in the city from the URL parameter. The rest of the copy never changes Example: http://www.travelsite.com/flights-from-boston-to-new-york-bos-to-lga Copy on page: blah blah blah Boston to New York blah blah blah. If you were to change either of the cities the copy would remain the same but the city would update. Crawlers will crawl the page after it has loaded, so as long as the "dynamic" content is loaded prior to that the crawler doesn't know any different. If my memory serves pages only need to be 5-10% different in copy to not be counted as duplicate content. So if your title, H1 and a few words in the sentence and some links are different that just about does it. Now this doesn't make it a great user experience and as StreamMarket stated below, eventually Google will take notice of this and will move them down in ranking. Of course, this also means that other sites (Airlines) need to do a better job at creating pages like this but are user focused and not search engine focused.

Hi yeah I meant fetch and render.

This could be due to many reasons. If the drop is has come quickly, chances are that you have been penalised by the new google algo, i would imagine either keyword stuffing on-site or spammy backlinks would be the issue. These seem to be getting alot of sites since the update - which i think went live early october. There are software packages that you can get to tell you when you were hit with google penalties. Best to just google that find one that explains your sites situation and then address the problems. ie. better on-site and remove bad links. Thanks

long time ago I saw that on a client website - as german we could block bingbot in robots.txt with no risk to loose traffic. I don't know why but the server was highly stressed by bing bot.  So yes I saw something like that - a little bit more than a year ago - but I wasn't interested in the "why?" - I just blocked the bot.

Thanks for cleaning that up, Dennis.  That is great advice.

For the most part I'm going to restrict my answer to the technical part of your question but do have a think about whether the pages are actually duplicates. If they represent different franchises of companies then they may well be relevant content pages. Think in terms of resources. You can't assume the query string will remain undiscovered by Google. It only takes someone linking with the query string attached for it to be found. Over time many of the near-duplicates may be discovered in this way. You can instruct Google on how to handle URL parameters.