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thank you for the insight. Let me ask you a related question: I own a website in a non-related field. The website is not doing anything for me, but is a trusted quality site. Can I redirect that website's homepage to my other website's homepage and otherwise just close that site down? Or, since the 2 websites have nothing in common (1 is about oranges the other about apples so to speak) would this be a move that could be considered manipulative and I shouldn't be doing?

thank you. So what you saying is: Google will not mind 301 re-directing 1 entire website to the homepage of another domain within the same industry? The website does not have a worthwhile link profile (not spammy either), but I thought that given the site is rather old and has developed a certain level of trust (I guess) it may be worthwhile doing the 301 redirect.

Any thoughts?

My colleague owns a domain (A) for about 10 years that he does not use. The domain's content is the same as my company's website (B) content. 
Question: Can I 301 redirect domain A to domain B's homepage or is it better he just closes down his website since this would not be SEO best practices?

thank you

How much does Google value placement of unique content in the source code vs where it is visually displayed? I have a case where my unqiue content visually displays high on page for the user, but in the source code the unique quality content is below duplicate type content that appear across many other domains (think e-commerce category thumbs on left side of screen and 80% right side of screen unique stuff).

I have the impression I am at a disadvantage because these pages have the unique / quality content lower in source code. Any thoughts on this?

thx for the feedback. I created a "/map/" folder in the URL and added to robots.txt. Again, they are simply a "Map view" option for users and has no or limited unique content, and no plans of changing that since the main page has all the unique content and indexed.

I have a Page X with lots of unique content. This page has a "Map view" option, which displays some of the info from Page X, but a lot is ommitted. Questions:

1. Should I add canonical even though Map View URL does not display a lot of info from Page X or adding to robots.txt or noindex, follow? I don't see any back links coming to Map View URL

2. Should Map View page have unique H1, title tag, meta des?

thx, again. That is my big concern: should I put in the effort to move the content higher on page. It is year 2014 and Google does not give real estate websites or e-commerce sites any clue as to how they want us to deal with duplicate issues (content appearing across a bunch of other websites). I am using "noindex, follow" for the "MLS result pages" where I do not have unique content added, and when I have unique content on Page 1, then I keep entire serious of paginated pages (sometime Page 1 - 100) indexed but add rel=next prev.

Any thoughts on that?

th, Everett. Appreciate the input. Take a look here: http://www.honoluluhi5.com/oahu/honolulu/metro/waikiki-condos/ - if I move all my "unique content" (currently below the thumbs and large map) up to location where the map is and get rid of that map, you are saying that most likely that will be seen as being located more "above the fold"?

I have a page with 2 scroll features. First 1/3 of the page (from left) has thumb pictures (not original content) and a vertical scroll next to. Remaining 2/3 of the page has a lot of unique content and a vertical scroll next to it.

Question: Visually on a computer, the unique content is right next to the thumbs, but in the source code the original content shows after these thumbs. Does that mean search engines will see this content as "below the fold" and actually, placing this content below the thumbs (requiring a lot of scrolling to get to the original content) would in a search engine's mind be the exact same location of the content, as the source code shows the same location?

I am trying to understand if search engines base their analysis on source code or also visual location of content? thx

thx. but my image XML sitemap shows. I am puzzled why 1 sitemap shows, the other does not….

XML Sitemap works properly in GWT, but when I run a search in Google for "site:example.com/sitemap.xml" it does not show. However, my XML image sitemap show when I run the same search in Google. Is this potentially an issue on my end and is there a solution?

trung.ngo - check out this article I posted http://www.blindfiveyearold.com/crawl-optimization

that's where I got my "inspiration" from to consider using robots.txt instead...

I am thinking if I exclude more thin pages from being crawled (robots.txt) that may be better than my current "noindex, follow" - the thin pages are already "noindex, follow".

You are saying "unless there's evidence that the pages are taking up too much of the crawl bandwidth, it doesn't seem like too much of an issue to me." - but how would I know this? Fair to assume for a website with 5,000 pages this is probably not an issue?

I am concerned with the "noindex, follow" Google may think "ahh, we have seen all this stuff before. Thanks for keeping out of our index, but we are still going to devalue your original content indexed pages because we crawl and see all this thin stuff." I am thinking with the robots.txt it would potentially be a stronger signal that could help my indexed pages. Or you think it is a minor and probably not relevant?

Hi Keri, There are some good comments but none really answer this question and that is why I am trying to approach from different angles. Maybe you can shed some light on this:
AJ Kohn wrote this great article: http://www.blindfiveyearold.com/crawl-optimization - he talks about using robots.txt to exclude thin content in order to increase frequency with qhich indexed content gets crawled, supposedly helping rankings. In this great whiteboard Friday, Rand suggests using "noindex, follow" - http://moz.com/blog/handling-duplicate-content-across-large-numbers-of-urls.

I am trying to get more light on this (people who have experience with this), but struggle to get answers.

Does anyone have any testing evidence what is better to use for pages with thin content, yet important pages to keep on a website? I am referring to content shared across multiple websites (such as e-commerce, real estate etc). Imagine a website with 300 high quality pages indexed and 5,000 thin product type pages, which are pages that would not generate relevant search traffic. Question goes: Does the interlinking value achieved by "noindex, follow" outweigh the negative of Google having to crawl all those "noindex" pages? With robots.txt one has Google's crawling focus on just the important pages that are indexed and that may give ranking a boost. Any experiments with insight to this would be great.

I do get the story about "make the pages unique", "get customer reviews and comments" etc....but the above question is the important question here.

thx, Alan. Within real estate MLS - if I index all "MLS result pages" (ex: http://www.honoluluhi5.com/oahu/honolulu/metro/waikiki-condos/) I will have about 5,000 such MLS result pages (I mean 5,000 such category pages with each category often having more than 1 page). I have added unique quality content on Page 1 of about 300 such MLS result pages and I have added rel=next prev. For the other 4,700 pages I currently have "noindex, follow".

Question: is it OK to have such a large amount of pages with "noindex, follow" on or do I run the risk Google thinks "hmmm….though we do not index, seems like a lot of crap on this website….let us lower ranking even for the quality pages." Would I simply be better off letting everything index? I am concerned if I let those pages index that will dilute the value of my high quality pages. I am thinking if I completely delete those low relevancy pages from my website it would be ideal (in order for Google to see my site's value) but users looking to buy real estate would not see as many listings as on other websites and that could be a concern.

Any insight appreciated. thx

http://www.honoluluhi5.com/moana-pacific-i-2901-kakaako-condo-for-sale-201417440/  - I have 3000+ of such property pages which is shared amongst real estate firms across the web. Currently I have "noindex, follow". You would remove that tag and just let the pages index?

I am using rel=next prev. So maybe I should just drop the "noindex, follow" part, though many experts recommend using that tag. However, issue with these things (rel=next prev or "noindex, follow) is that Google will read the pages and may think "hmm....We've seen these real estate listings on many other sites and we therefore consider this low quality content..."

But you are saying don't use noindex type tags as it could be interpreted as sculpting?

ex: http://www.honoluluhi5.com/oahu/honolulu/metro/waikiki-condos/

As you scroll down you will see a lot of high quality and unique content, including aerial photos which are my company's. I have 300+ pages like that - unique and very high quality. I am in process of reducing size of may by 75% and move the unique content up much higher on the page, since I fear the unique content is placed too low on page and that could impact ranking.

Also, I currently have "noindex, follow" on page 2 to n since all those real estate listings are duplicate content since it is shared across 100+ Real estate companies across the web. I am thinking maybe I should make that those pages 2 - n "noindex, nofollow" so Google does not waste time reading those pages.

Any thoughts highly appreciated... thanks very much

I have a lot of categories (like e-commerce sites) and many have page 1 - 50 for each category (view all not possible). Lots of the content on these pages are present across the web on other websites (duplicate stuff). I have added quality unique content to page 1 and added "noindex, follow" to page 2-50 and rel=next prev tags to the pages.

Questions:

1. By including the "follow" part, Google will read content and links on pages 2-50 and they may think "we have seen this stuff across the web….low quality content and though we see a noindex tag, we will consider even page 1 thin content, because we are able to read pages 2-50 and see the thin content." So even though I have "noindex, follow" the 'follow' part causes the issue (in that Google feels it is a lot of low quality content) - is this possible and if I had added "nofollow" instead that may solve the issue and page 1 would increase chance of looking more unique?

2. Why don't I add "noindex, nofollow" to page 2 - 50? In this way I ensure Google does not read the content on page 2 - 50 and my site may come across as more unique than if it had the "follow" tag. I do understand that in such case (with nofollow tag on page 2-50) there is no link juice flowing from pages 2 - 50 to the main pages (assuming there are breadcrumbs or other links to the indexed pages), but I consider this minimal value from an SEO perspective.

3. I have heard using "follow" is generally lower risk than "nofollow" - does this mean a website with a lot of "noindex, nofollow" tags may hurt the indexed pages because it comes across as a site Google can't trust since 95% of pages have such "noindex, nofollow" tag? I would like to understand what "risk" factors there may be.

thank you very much