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I have a glossary on one of my websites.  It has been there about ten years and receives between 200 and 1000 visitors per day.  It ranks #1 for "[industry name] glossary", "[industry name] dictionary" and many similar terms and has held those rankings for many years.   It has about 1000 definitions, some that are very close or repeats as you describe. When I made this glossary I decided to place it on 26 pages - one for each letter of the alphabet.  During the first few years it was up, I was tempted to convert it to one page per definition as you propose but decided against that.  I was tempted because I thought that the glossary would rank for lots of different keywords and pull traffic for all of them. In the past two years, I have been really glad that I didn't create all of those pages.  Why?   Panda.   The Panda algo would probably not be kind to those pages.  They would contain an average of about 50 words.  That is too skimpy and I think that my site would be demoted for thin content. What I have done is write substantive article pages for many of the definitions.  These are 500 to 2000 words with photos, graphs, data, etc.  Each of these article pages receives a link from the glossary definition and these page rank really well for very difficult terms.  I only have a couple hundred of these articles but finish one or two more every month - so its growing - slowly. I have ignored the glossary for the past several years but this week I have been adding new words and adding images to many of the definitions where they would be helpful.   I am also adding links within the definitions to pages where I have articles about those topics.  The goal is go move glossary visitors into the rest of the site. Two of my friends have glossaries.  One made his on 26 pages like mine and is getting lots of traffic.  The other made separate pages for every definition, was doing great in the early years, but recently had Panda problems. Good luck with whatever you decide.

Thanks for the responses. Looks like bit of a tough road ahead, but long term will be much for the better in cleaning up the (off)site. The disavow exercise has been interesting in getting to review links in placed. There have been some strange links placed and very difficult to contact some websites to get them removed, but will try. All the very best

It's probably worth while running a Google ad words campaign just of the keyword Result research

Thanks @Nakul for your useful input to this question.  Yes, agreed.

Do you want this client to have full rights to the Spanish speaking Mexican market? If so then you can use hreflang, this will mean any time anyone is searching in Spanish in Mexico Google will show Flintel instead of Teletrac. If not then I would be very cautious of linking to each other Googlebot would see those as paid links unless they are all marked as nofollow. hreflang can always be undone and it can happen very quickly, I have made changes and seen dramatic results in 48hrs. Just make sure you set Teletrac as x-default so that all other traffic goes to Teletrac.

Backlink profile isnt spammy at all actually, and June/July were our best months ever in terms of organic search so I do not think we were hit with payday loan update. We started losing organic traffic in August. Are you sure that penalization requires a manually review?

i have used yoast plugins but it didn't help that much. I can't figure out if the problem is on page seo or off page seo.

Hi, These appear because of rich snippets. You need a breadcrumb rich snippet - either schema.org or microformats. There is another one but I'm having a brain fart and can't remember it... Hopefully someone else will! It doesn't work with ssl sites though - once we put our ssl I lost all my lovely rich snippets in the serps! Maybe big G will make a change on that though since they've announced that they will give a slight ranking boost to ssl sites... My fingers are crossed anyway! Hope this helps, Amelia

checked evrything and it has correct versions and its been there for a long time.i know they have lots of links. still no link data yet... Thanks

At some point the site will either get reported and it will be manually looked at, or the Panda algo will catch up with them. Making changes are hard to do when a site ranks well. So its really your call on that, but if you want to have a middle road, you could suggest building new pages and have them ready to go just in case they get hit by panda. Google does not mind internal duplication and unless it is really extreme they will not penalise you for it, I have spoken to Google's John Mueller about it multiple times, including just this Friday. Google will choose the page it thinks is the best fit and show that. There are no tools that I would recommend other than your own eyes. Look at the site from a customers point of view, if it does not make sense get rid of it. For the most part Google is better today than it ever was at ranking sites based on actually quality rather than making sure you have all 200 SEO signals ticked off and the site looks like garbage to a user. Which was only 2 years ago really. I would be very surprised if they rank higher for a keyword stuffed list. Google does not pay attention to them it is more interested in content with links embedded in that content. I would look at other reasons, maybe better internal linking through content. External Links are still a huge factor, maybe they have better links or better content overall across their site. But going back to your client, i would let them make the decision but I would make it clear to them what the risks are, if they make the choice then it cant come back on you either way.

Thanks for responding. I think you're absolutely right, we need to take those precautions and then deal with the bad backlinks. I will try the disavow tool as well. Thanks!

I never mentioned anything about Pigeon?

The reason it shows is probably because your Analytics code is also copied and therefor showing up. in the long term this could give a small problem with duplicated content. while if your site stays a better, more popular site it won't affect you hugely, but try to contact the domain owner, or the hoster of this fraud website. and that way try to get the site taken down.

The result set for this query is very interesting, lots of diversity in query intent: you have have definitions, brands who specialize in pos systems, reviews of pos systems, and brands who have pos systems, but whose primary focus is not the pos system itself. While the Shopkeep page you linked to does not have the most links or highest authority of the pages in the first page of results, it is the strongest domain from in the 'brands who specialize in pos systems' category noted above. My hypothesis is that Google believes the primary user intent for the query is to purchase a pos system, therefore, is giving favor to the most credible brand whose business appears to focus primarily on pos systems. If you look broader than just the page in OSE, you'll see that 'shopkeep pos' is the second-most used anchor text for inbound links to the whole site, representing a total of 29,145 links from 91 different domains. This would support the above hypothesis that Google finds the brand to be highly credible for pos systems because it is so often used alongside the brand name. Hope that sparks some ideas for further research! -Trung

a year ago i had a realated search to "webdesign" with the brand name. So when you searched for Webdesign then you got the brand name in the Searches Related section. That happend because nearly every site had Webdesign in the title-tag, and the most links to the pages had the title as anchor - so they had webdesign in the anchor text. (The brand name never appeared in suggest when u typed in webdesign)  When u search for the brand the competitors popping up to. As well as Webdesign. The competitors never moved away, it just poped up more related search querries. So it is not usefull to spent the time on that topic. (possible but not so usefull in that case) I think that popping competitors are not so bad, if you are the better one But tell that a client..

Thanks everyone. All great advice and exactly what I'm doing and have planned. So the advice I hear here is, be patient, and tell them they need to be too! I'm curious what you all think about this page: http://www.beverlys.com/fabric.html The word fabric is there 71 times. I know "density" isn't supposed to matter, but over optimization does. Could that be construed as such even though there is a valid reason for those to be there? Their top 3 competitors' fabric pages are different:  http://www.joann.com/fabric/ 48 times https://www.fabric.com/ 29 times http://www.hancockfabrics.com/ 30 times

Sounds great. Thanks Chris

Luie Chris mentIons effort is needed.  But also time and patience. Could you tell us how long the pages are online. did you submit site maps and such.

Thanks. I had the feeling i was probably getting a bit carried away. I've been working so long at the link removals now, and I'm worried if I leave anything spammy we'll be stuck with this Penguin penalty forever, but I'll just ignore these links.

Hi Tom, thanks for you reply. I had you same concern about informing Google I have suspicious links in my profile although we aren't  currently suffering from a Google penalty. Unfortunately, what today made literately me scared was that I found brand new echoes that I couldn't find in Google cached and it seems like they have been adding new link a daily basis for days.  I can count around hundreds made from this site http://haeri26.kr/ since mid August, so I don't know what expect in the future. Moreover, as I changed site structure and made changes in the keywords I expected the current fluctuation for the tracked keywords' rankings, how can I be sure these are common ranking fluctuations and not a kind penalisation? To details a bit the fluctuation experienced: it was first a drop of around 15/20 positions, but in less than week I saw a fast recovery - usually improving the initial benchmark - soon followed by a new sad drop of a couple of pages for all the keywords. I'm scared an external agency we got rid in July is getting its childish revenge in this way. Thanks, P.