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Hi Jen

We are in the fortunate/crazy situation where we have a custom CMS so the actual redirects are not really a problem from a technical standpoint, it is just wondering if we should

The main site - the biggest and busiest - has a discussion board and a shop, and a blog which the others don't so the articles are about 10% of the indexed content, and about 11% are unique.. the other 2 sites, one has 0.003% unique articles and the other 1.829% ... sounds pretty bad when I put it like that!

We haven't seen a noticeable dip, just general disappointing performance, I think I will try and rope someone into doing a full CSI on the data

Have you seen anywhere that has recovered from a comparable situation? The pondering at this end was that the damage was already done, and that was that.

thanks

I am looking for some proof, or at least evidence to whether or not sites are being hurt by duplicate content.

The situation is, that there were 4 content rich newspaper/magazine style sites that were basically just reskins of each other. [ a tactic used under a previous regime ]  The least busy of the sites has since been discontinued & 301d to one of the others, but the traffic was so low on the discontinued site as to be lost in noise, so it is unclear if that was any benefit.

Now for the last ~2 years all the sites have had unique content going up, but there are still the archives of articles that are on all 3 remaining sites, now I would like to know whether to redirect, remove or rewrite the content, but it is a big decision - the number of duplicate articles? 263,114 !

Is there a chance this is hurting one or more of the sites? Is there anyway to prove it, short of actually doing the work?

All search engines or "just" google? If only google, did the number of indexed pages change during that time?  What about the number of query impressions verses clickthroughs?

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/index-status

https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/top-search-queries

Are there any  specific tips to how to gain traffic from very short lived search terms?

If the site you are SEO/SEMing want to go for search related to things like the latest celebrity breakup, or a fashion event that lasts less than a week

The onsite stuff seems pretty good as SEO onsite tools generally give it an A grade

Is it just a case of doing the same stuff as normal, but faster?

thanks for the tips. It is a little frustrating that the information I need has passed through seomoz's system but I guess they don't have the inclination or resources to show us the info

Xenu reckons it can handle 1m urls, we are in the position of not really knowing how many pages our site has!

The SEO Moz crawler has found a number of 500 error pages, and 404s etc which is very useful

however some of the urls are weird/broken formats we don't recognise and nobody remembers ever using - not weird enough to imply hacking, but something broken in the CMS

Is there anyway to find out where the crawler found these urls? I can patch up and redirect the end result as best I can but I would prefer to fix plug the leak

thanks

That's an impressive looking report, thanks for the tip

Sadly not quite what I meant, as far as I can see. (probably my weak explanation - sorry!)

It shows what people did after they visited our page, do you know of any source of info that can tell us who liked the page, or shared the page to get the traffic, or is FB a black box?

Great news, yesterday we had a nice big spike of referrals from facebook, GA shows them all going to a certain article (an online magazine type site), but only shows them as coming from /l.php (Report: Traffic sources->referrals->facebook.com - secondary dimension landing page)

Nobody in the office did anything with facebook and that article, so it must be a visitor; any ideas how we can find out any more details about who or why?

It would be great to be able to reproduce as in the 4th April saw more FB traffic to us than March!

The SEO Moz crawler has found a number of 500 error pages, and 404s etc which is very useful

however some of the urls are weird/broken formats we don't recognise and nobody remembers ever using - not weird enough to imply hacking, but something broken in the CMS

Is there anyway to find out where the crawler found these urls? I can patch up and redirect the end result as best I can but I would prefer to fix plug the leak

thanks