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EGOL hit it - but I'd just add NOT ALL PDFs are.  All too often I see client sites loaded with PDF documents that are nothing more than scanned images of print pages.

Domain Authority is evaluation of the site's overall SEO trust across the plethora of signals that go into SEO, as interpreted by the SEOmoz system.  Building up internal strength, along with external signals specific to your most important keyword phrases, as well as for the brand identity itself, will, over time, increase overall Domain Authority.

So everything from depth of quality content on individual high level pages where that depth reinforces tight topical focus, to increased user engagement in social media, to increasing the overall inbound link footprint in both size and quality will all contribute to that outcome.

If I understand your question correctly, you literally have duplicate content across the entire list of locations ("just the city variable changes on the page.").

If that's correct understanding, the best solution is to ensure that you have enough unique content for each location so list to ensure a comparison of location to location shows enough unique content compared to duplicate content.

Alternately, you would need to find a way to combine the least important locations into a smaller number of pages but the more locations you try to optimize a single page for, the more difficult the work becomes.

Also - if the only change is the domain name, (URLs are otherwise identical, content is otherwise identical), then you may see more of a hit at Bing than Google simply because Bing emphasizes age of content a bit more.

Also I'd highly suggest a comprehensive link building initiative as the new domain goes live so while you're working to get as many existing links pointing directly (to bypass 301s on those 3rd party authority signals), you'll also want to have a variety of new quality links to show that "this new domain really is still authoritative and trustworthy".  That should help ensure any hit you take is not as long as it would otherwise be.

I'd also encourage a press release sent out through PRWeb.com or PRNewswire.com, and social push announcing the change.  All these are as much for signals confirming it's a legit transfer as they are for other SEO reasons.

I would suggest creating a transitional custom page solution.  In this scenario, you keep the page itself but instead of the product information, you show a custom message such as "We're sorry but this product has been discontinued".  Then below that, you might present one, two or a few similar products for the visitor to consider, along with an invitation to browse the category that product was in.

If this is going to be done, I would suggest building in a time-frame for using this method, such as x months.  At the end of that time-period, I would implement a 301 "permanently moved" redirect pointing that page to the next highest most relevant page, such as the sub-category or category the product falls within.  This way, you give users options and an opportunity to still buy from you, in a respectful way.

Alternately, if you don't have any products that are essentially like the discontinued product, I would implement a 301 redirect right away, again to that next higher most relevant page, and I would suggest including a custom message at the top of that page's main content area, communicating how that product has been discontinued, if your programmer has the skill to implement that custom message based on the source of the visit...

2 on my team - we do mostly audits, with a portion of time also devoted to client training and related consulting.  Most of our clients (all the way up to some of the biggest sites imaginable), only have one to a few people on their in-house teams.

Dave,

You're facing a difficult challenge - satisfy the needs of SEO, or user experience.  In light of all that Google has done going back to their May Day update last year and right through the Panda/Farmer update, duplicate content, as well as "thin" content, is more of a concern than ever.

Just having unique titles on each page is not enough.  It's the entire weight of uniqueness.

Since you're not intending to go to individual pages for each verse, as long as you've got multiple methods of getting tocontent that is found by other methods, only one method should be designated as the primary search engine preferred method.  All others should be blocked from being indexed.

From there, users can choose to explore other methods of finding content as they bookmark your site if they find it of help to their goals.

Unfortunately, this does of course, mean that you're going to end up with many less pages indexed.  However every page that is indexed will become stronger in their individual rankings, and that in turn will boost all of the pages above them, and the entire site over time.

And here's another issue - when I go to any of the URLs you posted above, your site automatically tacks on "?lang=eng" using 301 Redirects.  This means any inbound links you have pointing to the non-appended URLs are not providing maximum value to your site, since they point to pages designated as permanently moved.

Was the hit from Penguin, or a manual penalty?  If it was not a manual penalty, then in theory, you might be safe enough to keep some of those to maintain some diversity.

I would caution you though that there's no way to know what threshold exists for how many need to be cleaned up in order to address the penalty vs. how many can remain while working on obtaining higher quality links.

This is further complicated by the notion that if it was not a manual penalty, some of the losses could be to current on-site failings that were caught up in other algorithm changes before, around the same time as or immediately after Penguin.

For example, what if there were 5 problems with the on-site SEO, and the Penguin update caused a "trigger" due to link anchors?  And what if it turns out that you might only need to do some link clean-up but simultaneously also do some on-site work?

There's just no way to know in advance.  Especially without a full evaluation across the board.

Very interesting concept though.

And for the record, there truly is no secret percentage formula regarding brand instances in anchors.  With hundreds of factors to SEO, one site could have only 20% anchors with the brand in them and still have higher trust than a competitor site that has more brand anchors but weakness in other signals.

Ralph,

You're correct in your thinking.  Add in cultural reference differences, and it's a no-brainer as far as I'm concerned.  It's wise to keep them separate both for SEO and user experience.

Dave,

Thanks for the clarification.  You're definitely in a rare circumstance as compared to most web sites.

In reality, since it's the Bible, there is going to be a duplicate content issue regardless, given how many sites currently and how many more will most likely publish the same content now and in the future.  From Eternalministries.org to KingJamesBibleOnline.org, concordance.biblebrowser.com, and so many other sites are all offering this content.

If you can find a way to offer your content in a unique way, and within your own site, offer different versions of it (individual verses compared to entire chapters), then ideally yes, you'd want it all indexed.

How you do that without adding your own unique text above or below each page's direct biblical content is the issue though.

Given this challenge,this is why I offered the concept of not indexing variations.  Even if you weren't hit by the Panda update, any time Google has to evaluate multiple pages  across sites where the content is either identical or "mostly" identical, someone's content is going to suffer to one degree or another.  Any time it's a conflict within a single site, some versions are going to be given less ranking value than others.

So unfortunately it's not a simple, straight forward situation where duplication avoidance can be guaranteed to provide the maximum reach, nor is there a simple way to boost multiple versions in a way to guarantee that they'll all be found, let alone show up above "competitor" sites.

This is why I initially offered what are essentially SEO best practices for addressing duplicate content.

If you don't want to lose the traffic you have now that come in by multiple means, the only other way to bolster what you've got already is to focus on high quality long term link building, and social media.

The link building would need to focus on obtaining high quality links pointing to deep content.  (Specific chapter pages and specific verse pages), where the anchor text used in those links varies between chapter or verse specific words, broader bible related phrases, and the LDS brand.

On the other hand, by implementing canonical tags, you will definitely reduce at least a number of visits that currently come in by variation URLs.  Will that be compensated for by an equal or greater number of visits to the new "preferred" URL?  In this rather unique situation there's no way to truly know.  It is a risk.

Which brings me back to the concept that you'd potentially be better off finding ways to add truly unique content around the biblical entries.  It's the only on-site method I can think of that would allow you to continue to have multiple paths indexed. Combined with unique page Titles, chapter/verse targeted links and social media, it could very well make the difference.

With what, over 1100 chapters, and 31,000 verses, that's a lot of footwork.  Then again, it's a labor of love, and every journey is made up of thousands of steps.

Unless there's a valid user reason to keep the outdated pages in place, my recommendation would be to implement a 301 redirect from the previous year to the current year's page.  It's the cleanest user experience and sends proper ranking value to the current year.  If no event takes place in a given year the 301 redirect should be to the main page for that event.

Gianluca

Thanks for jumping in on this one.  So if I'm reading your answer correctly, the bottom line here that there really should be one site per country, regardless of language spoken, correct?

Canonical is most effective in reducing the number of pages indexed.  Doesn't address any issues related to unique content to the degree you need to add a lot more unique content to each page you do want indexed.

why would you have so many blogs?  it's creating a false link network.  None of the ranking that any one of them could possibly get would even come close to the ranking strength the main site would get if you keep it all self contained.  Then there's the problem with partial duplicate content conflicts, the need to maintain them all, and the potential complete failure down the road if you ever need to change domain names or technology platform on any of them.

It's about the least effective solution I've seen (and I do see a lot of people do it) done by people who think they know SEO yet where I consistently run circles around them by using a much cleaner self-contained approach.

Now if you wanted to have separate subdomains or entirely separate root domains for each of several topics, where each one has completely unique content dedicated to the topical focus of that subdomain or root domain, you MIGHT get some benefit out of that, but in reality, that path is for very rare and extremely complex needs only and not to be attempted if you don't know your stuff at the highest levels...

Better to keep it all self contained - every inbound link to any page, article or section not only benefits that page/article/section, but the entire site gets a boost.  And users don't become confused.

You can thank my combined 11 years SEO after 7 years web dev project management, with a background in information security and business ownership

If it does NOT bounce back, check to see if you've got too many inbound links targeting the phrase in question.  I've seen a site get surgically whacked this way.  Fortunately the site owner controlled many of the source sites and as soon as they changed those anchors, they bounced back.

Joel,

Ryan is spot on.  I've worked with many Realtors over the years, and I've also seen many others who think a templated social network service is a great way to get lead gen going. The problem is many-fold.

For all the "template" based systems that claim to be "easy" to set up, they're not.  Unless you want a highly unprofessional looking site from your target market's perspective.

Even if the visual aesthetics are pleasing, social network solutions outside Facebook are rarely, if ever, going to be found by your target market easily.  They're isolated from the world, and you need to build up inbound links and off-site signals to get them ranked with more effort than you would imagine, because they're disjointed and lack clean topical focus the way a site and its blog would be.

So unless you're going to spend the time / invest the effort to first build & design a very high quality a templated social network, and then can easily and for relatively little cost then promote it through traditional or gorilla marketing to drive enough traffic that eventually enough of those people actually want to participate, there's no viable reason I've ever found for me to be willing to recommend them as an intelligent, sound business decision.

If you had a company with dozens, hundreds, or thousands of people in the organization and you wanted to create a platform for internal dialogue, I'd say it's a consideration.  That's the only other circumstance I can advocate for them.

My best suggestion is to give it a bit of time to see what happens.  How long has the site been up?  If it's been a short while (relatively speaking) it can take longer to stabilize.

Alternately, have you done a site: check to see if it's at least still in the index?

I'm not sure what you mean by "a manufacturer appointed website". Does this mean you have no choice but to maintain a site they provide and where you have no control over it's look, feel, or content?

If you are planning on setting up a new domain and transferring your current domain name to that, what domain name would the existing site have?  A 2nd newly obtained domain name? Or one available through the MFR?

Are you required by the MFR to use their provided site as your primary forward-facing promotional point of contact on the web?

These are all important points to help determine how you proceed.

If you make the new site nofollow, what would you use the new site for?

Having the need to maintain / promote two separate sites is always more challenging than focusing all your efforts on one site and really should be avoided at all costs if possible.

Unfortunately, all we can do sometimes is to keep marching forward and observe.  If no improvement comes at some point, then more answers need to be sought out.