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Matt Cutts answered a very similar question some time back in this video response.

In short, it's not a problem having these date/category pages, provided you've got them formatted correctly. Basically, just make sure that on each of these pages, you're only showing the heading and a small snippet; usually a paragraph or two and maybe an accompanying image.

If you're doing this, search engines have no issue understanding that it's essentially an aggregation page rather than duplicate content. If you're unlucky enough to be working with a CMS that just dumps then entire posts onto each category/tag page then you're definitely playing with fire!

If you're using Wordpress, often the simplest way to go about doing this is using the "more" tag which you'll find at the top of the text area when writing a post. Clicking that button will add into the HTML which cuts the snippet off at that point and provides a "read more" link to the full article. Here is a link to more info about it, note that current versions of wordpress do look different to these screenshots; you're looking for a button that just says "more", rather than the icon they use here.

The best way to deal with it is to update your template to automatically cut it off at a certain length for you, it just depends on whether you have access to a dev to make this change.

I completely agree with Bryan on this one on all counts.

As for how you go about structuring this content process, it really depends on just how limited your time is. If you go through each landing page and write a sufficient amount of content (my recommendation is always 1500+ words per primary landing page), is it going to take you weeks to get this done or are we talking more like 6 months?

Also, don't neglect the user experience in your planning process. If the vast majority of your users are arriving on the site looking for one particular thing, make sure they're going to land on a page rich in value; don't just give it an arbitrary 100 words to stave off the search engine Gods and move on!

Thankfully these days search engines (or at least Google) do a pretty good job of understanding both what your content is about and the intent of people searching for your service.

In this context, what that means is you don't have to try jamming both keywords everywhere you can. I would suggest having both in the content a handful of times for that little extra targeting but if your other quality signals (link profile, load speed, content quality, anchor profile etc) are stronger than your competition, it's entirely possible you could rank for "attorney" without ever mentioning the word.

The most recent example of this I've seen in action is a car hire company who ranked for some "car rental" terms without ever using any variation of the word "rental".

As for how you go about having both words in there a couple of times without it seeming awkward, it can be as simple as either switching back and forth between the terms (perhaps not the best idea in this vertical) or maybe even having a small section of content with a heading something like "Attorney or Lawyer, Is There a Difference?"

Embarrassingly, until I started working at a major law firm in my previous role, I didn't realise lawyer and solicitor were the same thing here in Australia so it's entirely possible this content will actually help others too, though this may be a regional thing.

It's not possible to give you specific instructions here with so little information but if you click on the errors, you will see some more information in there that will point you in the right direction.

As you can see in the screenshot attached, there's a "Linked From" tab. If you click that tab, you'll see a list of URLs you can find the broken link on, then it's just a case of looking at each of those pages and either fixing or removing the link(s).

Hope that helps!

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To be honest, this type of thing is definitely a weak point in my knowledge but if it were my site, I wouldn't be heading in this direction with it.

What you're essentially doing is obscuring duplicate content from search engines but presenting it to users which we know is a no-no. It may well be that search engines can't "see" that duplicate content just yet but that doesn't mean they won't in the next update.

More importantly, users aren't particularly engaged by seeing the same block of content over and over so it's kind of a waste of valuable screen real estate.

One other question to consider with this scenario: do users actually want to know about this manufacture process? This isn't a leading question. What I'm getting at is that content should always cover what the user wants to know, not what the business wants them to read about.

If this process is really just a sidenote for most users, risking content duplication to push it directly in front of them is a large and unnecessary risk.

Of course, if the process is a unique selling point that may actually persuade sales and/or build that rapport, disregard this point

Hi Jay,

Your first example is the best way to go about it. It makes for clear categorisation and, less importantly, it does have that keyword relevance as well.

In my opinion, your URL structure and nav structure should always be the same. It gives a clear, concise and logical path to follow and makes breadcrumbs easier to manage as well.

Hi Steven,

It's very hard to find definitive info about this update since, to my understanding, Google is yet to even confirm that it happened but from what I can gather, it was another revision of onsite quality. Search Engine Land has about the most helpful article I've managed to find on it yet.

To save you some legwork, one of Search Engine Land's previous posts on the topic (linked to in the one above) also provides a link to two Google resources on this topic. Note that they're old links more related to Panda but it does talk about what Google views as "quality" which is what this Phantom update is focussed on.

More guidance on building high-quality sites

Search Console Help: Create Valuable Content

There's a bit of reading there but hopefully it's helpful.

Hi Gayane,

It really comes down to a question of budget. Having a site for each location will allow you to be the most geo-targeted but if you have 5 different locations, that essentially means 5 SEO budgets. 5 lots of content (all having to be completely unique), 5x the link profiles and 5x the monitoring, planning and general campaign management.

In reality, the best option for most of us is to use a single site for all areas. Since Google looks at a lot of domain-wide metrics these days, it means if you're boosting content and links to your Las Vegas page, your LA page is going to benefit from that to an extent as well.

Rather than go into detail with ideas on how to do it, check out Rand's Whiteboard Friday on the topic.

I hope that helps!

Yep, you're on the right track Jason.

Since search engines view a subdomain as a separate entity, building valuable content and natural traffic/links to it means you're essentially driving all that referral traffic and strength to another website.

Interesting Giorgio, I hadn't seen that WBF before.

Absolutely no disrespect to Ruth but that's the first WBF I've disagreed with. The scraper risk is something I'm willing to take a gamble on for the benefits of relative links and the other points are moot if your website is setup correctly (htaccess deals with the potential for different versions of your domain and IMO canonicalization should always be used).

Going by that WBF, if your site is set up correctly with redirects and canonicalization, the only benefit here is if a scraper copies your site and there's a very slim chance of this actually happening.

It's a frustrating problem to have,  huh?

Rand did do a Whiteboard Friday on this general topic a while back which is fairly relevant here. As Dmitrii mentioned, option 1 is definitely the best option since the others mean content duplication of some form.

My best suggestion on this one would be to add a very short and enticing intro (I'm talking 1 or 2 lines) about that manufacture process and if they're interested, they can follow the link to the page all about it. Just make sure this link uses target="_blank" so it opens in a new tab for them. At least this way when they close that tab, they're right back to the product page they were on.

It is a risk but far safer than duplicating that same content across a bunch of products!

So, using Rand's advice from that WBF, you can pad out the content of your products very well and very uniquely and that line or 2 of text used as a "hook" to draw them to the other page is insignificant. Duplicate content is all about a ratio so if you have 2 lines of duplication amongst 500 words of unique and valuable text, it's not likely to be an issue.

Probably not the solution you were looking for but I hope it helps!

Exactly how to implement it will depend on your CMS but basically, all you need to do is update the hyperlinks from showing the entire link path to a simple, relative one like the examples below.

Absolute Anchor Text

Relative Anchor Text

With hyperlinks, if you don't specify the full address path including http://www then the current website path will be added to the beginning. In this example, since there is no full and complete path before /contact, it's correctly assumed that the link is to point to http://www.example.com/contact.

This is important because it means no matter what changes you make to your domain (www to non-wwww, moving to https, moving the site to a new domain etc) the links will always work perfectly. If you use an absolute path, the minute your change anything about your domain, all the links break because they're manually pointed to the old one.

Here's a bit more info on the topic if the above is a little confusing. It's not a link to my site, just the first I found in a Google search

No problem, happy to help.

If you actually sell the various types of shoes as well and the repairs/cleaning are almost a side-service then yes, your original example is ok since the "dress shoes" nav item would presumably take you to a landing page about dress shoes.

Unless you're getting a large volume of targetted searches for things like "dress shoe repairs", I'd probably just have "Repairs" and "Cleaning" as their own top-level nav items that lead to a single landing page each that covers all 3 types of shoes.

This would be sufficient for the more general terms like "shoe repairs".

The nav would look more like:

Shoes   |   Boots   |   Sandals   |   Shoe Cleaning   |   Repairs

With the relevant drop-downs under the first 3 items only.

No problem Cesar.

With 1500 pages, the most time-efficient thing to do right now is to keep and/or write your own for the most important landing pages and use a different template format for the others.

It's not reasonable to go writing 1500 page titles and meta descriptions right now but for at least your primary landing pages (if it's ecommerce then your category and subcategory pages), you should be writing them manually.

As for the other pages, using a templated approach is your best bet for the time being but the breadcrumb style will still give you quite a lot of duplication which is a bit of a worry. If you have 200 products under a single subcategory, that's 202 pages that all have the same keyword(s) in the title:

Category
     Category - Subcategory
     Category - Subcategory - Product 1
     Category - Subcategory - Product 2
     Category - Subcategory - Product 3
etc

A better-templated approach for an ecommerce site is to use basic product info and your brand as the page title.

For example, _iPhone 6s Replacement Screen - VX902 | FoneScreenz _

In this example it includes the name of the product on that page, and a product code which would both be variables, as well as the business name (FYI the product code and business are fabricated). This covers users searching by either product name or the specific code and is descriptive enough that it will do just fine.

Basically, the template would look something like:

[Product Name] - [Product Code] | Business Name

If by "content pages" you mean blog posts on your site, I'd suggest not doing this at all. It's not great for your SEO but it won't directly hurt your rankings.

What EGOL said is correct in that providing helpful links in your articles is an excellent idea and something you should definitely be doing, but there's a very big difference between helpful links and self-promotion. Blog posts are meant to be informative and that's why the good ones get shared but dropping a sales pitch in there changes the tone from "here is helpful information you're looking for, share it around" to "here's my product, you should buy it". A link to your products is usually going to feel like a sales pitch, no matter what anchor text you use.

To put yourself in your readers' shoes, imagine if I started dropping links to my product pages here - suddenly my entire comment would feel pretty shady, right?

Linking to your other posts and external sources is a great idea but in most instances, linking to your own products is reason enough for me to stop reading. Of course, there are exceptions to this - the question to ask if whether or not that link is genuinely helpful.

Absolutely. Unique or stock, all images should be treated exactly the same way

It's always hard to say for certain without inspecting to the two domains but it may be that your client is optimised for that one city while the other site is more broad and suggests they have or regularly deal with multiple locations.

Local SEO won't inherently hurt your national search results but if you only have a single location and the entire site seems to focus around that and surrounding suburbs, it would make little sense for search engines to rank you for locations in other areas, especially other states.

Even if the client is limited to a single office, there are plenty of ways to spread their digital presence and begin pushing them up for other locations.

I was going to describe in more detail until I remembered that Rand did a great Whiteboard Friday on this topic about 12 months ago that does a better job of explaining it than I could in a comment. Hope that helps!

Updating them all at once isn't inherently bad, it's more about the quality of the updated ones that may see a negative impact.

When you say a breadcrumb structure, I immediately think of something like this: "Letterboxes - Steel - Small | Site Name" - is that what they're looking to move to? Handcrafted ones can be made far more compelling and often less spammy but it depends on the context of your site really and how many pages you're talking about.

Regardless of the number of pages, you should at least be writing them manually for the key landing pages - remember, the main reason for a page title is to attract that click from the right type of user in the SERPs.

If you'd like to share some examples of the proposed ones I can probably be much more helpful

Search engines do quite a good job of understanding what your site/pages/content is about these days so forcing the exact-match everywhere isn't really necessary. Rather than focussing on the H1s for the minute, I think a revision of your nav/site structure may be a better solution; apologies for going almost immediately off topic but it does still answer your question.

A great nav is going to be as "flat" as practical and designed to take the user from page-load to conversion in as fewer steps as possible.

Likewise, if these are core services that you offer, the closer those pages are to the top of your nav the better, no need to bury them several layers deep and miss out on some of that internal strength.

You'll know your target audience better than me but I'd be more inclined to structure it like this:

Shoe Cleaning
     Dress Shoes
     Work Shoes
     Play Shoes

Shoe Repair
    Dress Shoes
    Work Shoes
    Play Shoes

In most cases you'd even be better off dropping the "shoes" from these sub-items but a menu item of "dress" or "work" is a little confusing in this context.

The reason I'd suggest doing it this way is to satisfy user intent. I'd expect that most of your users have come to your site looking for one particular thing - either shoe repairs or shoe cleaning. It's entirely likely that if they're getting their shoes repaired, they may also be interested in getting them cleaned at the same time, but they arrive on your site with the intent of gathering information on your repairs so getting these should be as clear as possible.

It can depend on the type of site you're running I suppose but generally I see too many benefits to fresh user generated content to go closing them.

If you had topics that were particularly seasonal and no benefit could be had from yourself or users after a certain date (maybe an obsolete product that you don't want new buyers to confuse with the latest version) it may be worth closing comments and providing a link to a discussion on the new product.

You're on the right track in that user-generated content is a great thing for your brand/product, user engagement and SEO in general so the more legitimate interaction you have the better. Fresh content is what search engines look for and genuine discussion gives users a reason to frequently return to your site, allowing you to build that rapport.

As far as quantity of unique text, Oleg is right in that this becomes almost a pure UX question. Whatever works best for user intent is what you should be doing in this case. I personally prefer minimal pagination, especially on mobile but I'm just 1 user and may not even be your target audience.