Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Dan I had missed that reply; cheers for the heads up (my email notification never came through). I'll talk to the devs about implementing to target all bots. Thanks!

Agree with Martijn.  Technically, Google does not want any pages in the sitemap that 4xx or 3xx or have any other result than a 200. I would say this, if your site is being rebuilt, having a sitemap that is accurate and that updates when you update the site is a basic requirement.   The fact that there is a high cost for fixing this issue is baloney. It sounds like the devs did not build the site correctly the first time if they do not have a way to update the sitemap automatically. You could generate the sitemap yourself You can use tools like http://tools.seochat.com/tools/online-crawl-google-sitemap-generator/ Or read tutorials on how to use Screaming Frog to create a sitemap http://www.hmtweb.com/marketing-blog/dirty-sitemaps-how-to-download-crawl/ Frankly, the annual cost of Screaming Frog (about $150 a year) gets you so much more than just sitemaps.  Buy Screaming Frog, have it generate your sitemap and ask the devs to upload it.  If you have a site with several thousand pages, just running Screaming Frog monthly would help you find issues on your site that is well worth the cost.    Search "Screaming Frog" here in the forums and you can see that this is one of the "swiss army knives" of technical SEO.

Many thanks for taking the time to reply. Ryan - I am talking to CMS Source about these options; it's not possible with the current configuration but it looks like we may be able to change this with a bit of development work. Sean - Thanks, I had considered the canonical, which would at least prevent a duplicate content issue although I think we need to take measures to stop this admin. subdomain being accessible which this won't help with. Lynn - Thanks, I'll do that as an interim measure. Thanks Kate

I think that the blog has nice content. Many of the posts are competing for queries where there is very little search volume. Go to this page... http://www.naturalworldsafaris.com/blog.aspx?destination=india   read the titles of the posts.   Are people are searching for those topics? I think that the blog posts will get more traffic if their titles align with search volume or if their topics align with search volume.

OK, I think I understand what you are asking now. Canonicals are for identical or near-identical pages. I don't know that those two pages would be considered to be identical, even after you added the arctic listings to the Canada page, especially as the above-the-fold content is different. Keep in mind that the "penalty" for duplicate content is that Google will choose only one page to show, depending on which one it thinks is most relevant. And if you have one page that gets a lot more traffic and engagement, that is likely to be the one Google chooses, anyway. If I were you, I'd probably make sure the description sections at the top of those pages each has a good bit of unique content and maybe I'd change the titles and h1s to make them a little more different from each other (if you can do that) then I'd just leave it at that and see what Google makes of it. If it seems that your higher traffic page starts to lose traffic, you can always add the canonicals then, and resubmit the URL through Fetch as Google in Webmaster Tools.

I think that over the past few weeks search traffic itself has declined a little, that is what I meant. I don't think the age will matter. It will help in the users eyes to show longevity. I have reviews from 1999 on my site

Hi Cyrus, Thanks for taking the time to answer. It seems that there is no firm answer on this one - interesting to see you felt there wasn't necessarily an issue of duplicated content but that grouping these pages into themes with a hub page would be of benefit (assuming I've understood your suggestions). The issue is that in some ways the pages and content is similar, so the trips are focused on the beaches and wildlife of Kenya - a lot of the difference is in the accommodation and level of luxury, which is dealt with in the on page copy. I think we will have to revisit how we handle page titles. We only fairly recently changed those pages to ensure that all content in the individual tabs is visible to search engines (previously they were only able to crawl the content in the overview tabs, the content of other tabs was effectively hidden). I have checked this in Google Webmaster Tools and it all displays fine / all the tabbed content is found within the html. Many thanks Kate

You've taken good steps so far and kudos for continuing to put time and effort into the cause. Great collective feedback. Additionally, have you run a keyword density tool on the home page? Your other top level pages are good candidates as well. Check All Text and Headlines. Other SEO's can chime in but rule of thumb has been no higher than 4% keyword density on a page. A high density in Headlines could indicate an issue as Headlines has historically been a key component in Google's algorithm. I haven't studied at this granular level but others may have. All the best.

I hope you found the answer you were looking for Kate, Good luck! Any chance any of you reading this would take a look and give some advice on my very similar situation? http://moz.com/community/q/site-wide-footer-links-exception-any-advice

Thanks Doug, that's really helpful. Good to see that phrase has bounced back up as well. We've been looking at our backlinks as we are aware there are a lot of bad, irrelevant directory sites that we are clearing up. Historically the old sites were in a pattern of steadily declining organic traffic, from the end of 2012. This has transferred to the new site (keywords slipping a few places, less long tail traffic). We think this may be due to a poor backlink profile. We will also look into doing some outreach to the linking domains on the old site and see if we can get these moved over to the new site rather than just relying on the redirects. Thanks again!