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Yes, I've removed all the "shortcuts" of bad thin content now. But I'm a little confused by your comment: But anyone who looks closely at these cookie cutter pages will see that  the wording is awkward, the photos don't match the names or the colors listed, and problems  like Oren & Bar Mitzvah sneak in. Do you see something in particular that is bringing this to your attention?

Not exactly. When it comes to different countries, like the example domains you listed above. (.com and .ca) Google allows for mirrored or duplicate sites by country. When it comes to multiple sites in the same country, Google will give value to the first use of the content, then no value to the 2nd use. In the example you gave of San Diego and Atlanta, it is important to create unique content, citations and backlinks that are localized to that site's location. I have a client that has two separate appliance companies in the same area and two separate websites. I've used some of the same general content on both, but have content that is unique to both, along with unique links, and they both rank really well.

It's generally accepted that most authority survives a 301 redirect, but it's certainly not all. How worth it it is is up to you, but you would see some boost in authority if those sites were to update their links to point directly at the newer domain. Hard to say whether that'd be enough to give you a genuine boost, though.

Just wanted to +1 EGOL's answer. I would add the PDFs to your sitemap; it shouldn't take much work to index them and they should definitely capture organic traffic.

Thanks for getting back to me. I must have misread.

Hi there! I believe that Google is simply recommending that you make sure to have the new URL map, the old URL map, and a list of all your inbound links. Looks like how they're meant to be used comes up in the next steps. For example, the next page includes these steps (which I have completely removed from their contexts, so make sure to do things in the order Google outlines): On the destination site, submit the two sitemaps you prepared previously containing the old and new URLs. This helps our crawlers discover the redirects from the old URLs to the new URLs, and facilitates the site move. and External links: Try to contact the sites in the saved list of sites linking to your current content, asking them to update their links to your new site. The old and new sitemaps will be used by Google when first indexing your old site, and the list of external links is there to help you maintain your link profile. Does that make sense?

Hi Simon, WordPress isn't great at handling slideshows and paginated pages in order for SEO. What would be best to do is have a developer look into this and make sure that canonical URLs are added to the page in order to respect the duplicate content. There are as far as I know no out of the box solutions for this.

Thanks Miriam, much appreciated.  I'll check it out see how I get on

thank you David! br E.

Unfortunately, I've seen a lot of opinions on what happened and not a lot of solid evidence (including my own, which is inconclusive, sadly). Google tightened up on something content-related, it seems, but we're not sure what. It's hard to speak in generalarities, but if I had to start somewhere, I'd be looking for Panda-like signals. Do you have content that could be considered thin, and/or are you facing duplication either within your site or across competitors sites? Is your site generally too big, in terms of indexed pages, for your authority (i.e. the strength of your link profile)? It may simply be that Google turned up the volume on a few factors. If this is content-related, the good news is that fixes should generally impact your rankings fairly quickly. This doesn't seem to be a Penguin-like situation.

Wow. That's an excellent assessment by Miriam. Kinda hard to add to that! I looked at citations using the same example as Miriam. You have more than the top 2 ranking sites and 35 less than #3. The quality of your citations is excellent and I see a few that actually use the words "santa barbara" in their name. I agree that it would be worthwhile trying to acquire more, and more specific to Santa Barbara, to see if that helps. Whitespark offers a good service to help you ID some of those, or you could inventory the citations of the top 3 and see if they have some you're missing. I have those if you want me to send them to you.

Thanks Rhonda! It sounds like this thread will benefit many people then.

You're right - I'm worrying about something that isn't yet a problem. Thank you

Hey there Brandon! Sorry to hear your local listings haven't completely updated. We recommend writing in to help@moz.com so we can check out what's going on! In some cases there is a technical issue with the data push that we can clear up, but sometimes it is a delay issue with our partner sites. If you write in with your listing details we'll be happy to take a look! As for the duplicates, closing them involves a manual review process on our partners' side that, to be honest, can take a while to complete. We can check these out for you, as well, if you write in. Thanks!

Doh!  That was exactly it - thanks so much - you ROCK!!  

No problem Kerry - just wanted to check you managed to do it and it fixed things? Matt

Thank you! That worked

Snowflake, When you migrate to HTTP's i believe you have to add the new protocol to Search Console. Google looks at HTTP and HTTPs as 2 different sites, which is why you might be seeing your index count going down under your HTTP account in SC. If you add the HTTPs version of your website to search console, you may see that those pages have been indexed under the HTTPs protocol. Check it out, wait a few weeks and see what happens. Secure Your Site With HTTPS - Search Console Help https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/6073543?hl=en

It is definitely possible to maintain two separate websites. It sounds as if they don't do the same thing, so technically the content will be different. The websites use a different template, and from what I can tell they don't have any duplicate content issues. Since the sites are related, it would be natural for the two websites to link to each other. But you don't want to run into any search engine penalties from having them link to each other. In order to do that, you'll need to make sure that the link profiles of each website are completely different. What I would focus on is the links to each website, and have a plan to acquire good, trusted links to each of them. One is product related, so you'll want to focus on where you can get your products listed. The other is a service type business, so getting the site links that are appropriate for that site would be helpful.

Perfect! Thanks for your help Kristen