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It really is worth doing something about that. If you have a menu, people expect to be staying on the same site.

As SEOhanna said, a single page that covers all of the locations and clearly shows external links would be a big help and would help with this spam score.

-Andy

Hi,

Keyword cannibalisation is a problem that many sites face and it is normally down to pages not being targeted enough, or being too similar to one another.

The example that you used there, Graphic Design and Web Design, if either is talking about the other, makes too many references or doesn't include the words and phrases that Google would expect to see, then you are likely to face this problem.

Rand went over this a while ago and suggested that if the wrong pages are ranking for the wrong pages, then you need to devalue the wrong pages by removing those words and phrases that are causing you these issues.

I hope this helps.

-Andy

Hi Bob,

Those sound terribly long. What is the thinking behind such big articles? These can often work against you because people see how big they are and then don't read it - this can have a number of negative impacts.

Do you think that people are going to be reading the whole thing? Have you got tracking in place to monitor what people are doing on the page? (use HotJar).

-Andy

If you haven't seen a drop because of this, then it means they are either being ignored by Google, or they are just not worth worrying about. Penguin has evolved and Google are now pretty good at just ignoring links that are 'crappy'.

There might come a point where too many of these does cause you problems though, so if they aren't doing anything either way, perhaps disavow the domain for peace of mind?

-Andy

There have been some interesting articles surfacing recently on this with the last study I read (this week) showing that simply updating the date with "Last Updated" and updating the article, refreshed something that was a year old and that had dropped from the first page to the second, and had reached position 1 again.

This is definitely something that anyone with a blog should look to do.

-Andy

Hi Rhys,

No, you can't dictate which links are shown. As Google says, they are automated, but there are ways to influence this such as internal linking, but this can be hard work to get just right. You can get some ideas here, but be careful what you do as this could go wrong if you over-do something.

-Andy

Hi Lida,

Going to be a very awkward one to diagnose without seeing the sites and testing.

Is this on a Wordpress powered site? Is the content in the page source rather than actually on the page?

-Andy

Hi Chase,

Not really because Google doesn't want people to hit holding pages before being redirected on again.

Personally, even if there were a way to do this, I would be looking for a more subtle solution or even promoting a blog post that explains the change?

-Andy

Hi,

I would definitely be looking at what the winners for these phrases are doing. I never advocate copying exactly what someone else is doing, but it can certainly save you many hours of head scratching and worrying.

It does sound like you need to spend some time coming up with a structure for the site that will work, but remember to make the pages as descriptive as possible, but don't stuff keywords and try not to have them sound like they were written by a robot.

You also need to be careful that you aren't creating pages that are too similar as this will also compromise your work and try not to make everything too 'boilerplate'.

-Andy

Hi Rob,

1. Will updating the sitemap for this test have a big impact? Google has already picked up the new URL's so that's not the issue. Furthermore, the 301 redirect on the old pages should tell Google to show the new page instead, right?

No, updating the sitemap won't speed the indexing up (but you should do this as a matter of course), but a 301 redirect should tell Google that there is a new page in place.

2. Is it normal that search impressions will slowly shift from the old page towards the new page? How long should I expect it to take before the new pages are consistently shown over the old pages in the SERPS?

I have asked John Mueller this in the past and he said "as long as it takes - just have patience".

Basically, sit tight because sometimes it can take hours, other times it can take weeks and months.

I would need to be taking a more in depth look to see if there was anything else going on.

-Andy

Very much outdated - Google want's links that are earned and while there is no harm in having banners on a site, I wouldn't be using it for linkbuilding.

-Andy

Hi Bob,

I do agree with Krzysztof that an audit would help see what it going on, but something else to keep in mind is that if a side does get hit with a penalty, then they rarely just go back to where they were beforehand.

Check the dates in a little more detail to see what they correspond with.

-Andy

Hi,

No, I wouldn't do this as a link building strategy.

Link building needs to be thought about carefully and just putting badges on sites is unlikely to do anything because they will probably end up at the bottom of a page - and that kind of link generally gets ignored by Google.

Sorry, not a good one to go after.

-Andy

That's great to hear Marcel

-Andy

Hi Andrew,

Re. your comment:

My main concern is that in the eyes of Google I'd be stripping a lot of content off the domain all at once, and then replacing it with these shell pages containing nothing (in terms of SEO) but meta, a headline, navigation links, and an iFrame.

... you are right to be concerned about this. It is going to look, as you say, like a very thin page with no value-add for anyone visiting, or Google.

If the pages served no real purpose to Google, you could always robots them out, but what is being suggested isn't a particularly good idea if you are still wanting them to rank in the SERPs.

-Andy

It's gets everything from Google but it doesn't give you search volume - just different types of questions / searches.

-Andy

Correct - Bing and Google are as far as you need to go

I do know you can submit to Yahoo but don't know anyone who ever needed to do that.

DuckDuckGo crawls other search engines to gather its data, so nothing needed to be done there.

-Andy

Option 2 sounds like the logical option - I don't think a flat structure would make sense for what you have to work with.

Interlink your content from other pages and don't try to be clever with structures here - it's whatever makes the most sense to what you are trying to do.

Of course, it is ideal to try not to place any content too far down the tree but if you have no options in what you can and can't do with changing the structure itself, then I would work with what I have.

-Andy

There are no others that will really use it - assuming you aren't talking country specific search engines such as Baidu.

Once you submit it to Google and Bing, that is pretty much where you organic traffic is going to come from.

-Andy

First of all, one of the best tools to use to find questions is http://answerthepublic.com/ butMOZ also have a very nice tool as well now.

In terms of what I would consider best, it is whatever is going to sit well on the site and make the most sense to be there.

Tread carefully with longer content on your product pages and make sure that however it is done, it doesn't ruin the user experience. I would say you might have to do a bit of both.

-Andy