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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?

Unfortunately, this issue has been up for debate over the past few years and there's no clear-cut answer. You might like to take a look at this staff-endorsed answer from 2012, which indicated that Google will look at how much unique content is above the fold. If your content is buried deep in the source code and duplicate copy comes first, then this _could _be an issue. If you can place your unique content higher up within the source code, then this wouldn't be a bad thing, but I have suspicion that chances are there's always more pressing things to optimise. Sorry there's no '100% yes!' on this, but IMO this has always been one of the vaguest areas of SEO; especially as we know G has become more adept at crawling in the past few years (javascript support, etc).

Thank you! Ahmet Çadırcı

That sounds like a reasonable approach. If you wanted to be extra careful you could also ad a robots follow,noindex tag to the header of the paginated pages since they all have very little unique content to add. A third option, which I would only use if people are linking into those paginated pages (very rare), is to rel canonical the paginated pages to the first page.

Could be coincidence, sometimes they index XML sitemaps.

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...

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

Thx. I am going to make non unique pages "noindex, nofollow" and I am going to get rid of "rel=next prev". This keeping "follow" on noindex pages is so minor and I think might hurt my site since it allows Google to read what is on those pages....(non unique duplicate looking content). I will update in a few months with the results.

good observation....

Hi Lee, In my 2nd message I included these URL's: Hahaione condos pages: http://www.honoluluhi5.com/oahu/honolulu/hawaii-kai/hahaione-condos/ Hahaione houses page: http://www.honoluluhi5.com/oahu/honolulu/hawaii-kai/hahaione-homes/ Obviously, 2 different URL's. Do you have any evidence or detailed blog posts showing that using same wording in breadcrumbs or inter-linking in general to different URL's is OK, as long as the URL and / or H1 clearly shows what the page is about? Again, my concern comes from the fact that I have been sold if I interlink with the anchor "Example" then I need to make sure "Example" always points to the same landing page, as search engine's otherwise will be left confused. I somehow think this line of thought is outdated, but any evidence or insight to clarify would be helpful

I don't see an upset for keeping rel=next prev, I see only an upside. Google doesn't have to listen to the noindex tag, although they almost always do. Furthermore, adding the rel=next prev tag only makes your code even more correctly developed, and since Google isn't the only service that looks for tags like this I would feel more comfortable with it present. From an accessibility standpoint, it makes sense to have the rel=next prev tag.

follow backlinks. site artchitecture and quality of content way above competition. I see businesses buying up 100+ keyword rich domains and ranking well for all domains. It tells me 2 things: 1) search engines are not always that clever, 2) I need to be patient, because of 1).

Hi Pete, I just wanted to confirm, based on what you wrote: "I don't think the picture- and video-heavy pages are going to rank all that well by themselves. It's just a question of whether those additional pages are diluting your MLS listing pages (by using similar regional keywords, etc.)." I did following: Deleted words "Home" and "Condo" from the title tag and H1 so the neighborhood name is still in title tag and H1, but no mention of home, condo, real estate etc. all written content has been moved from "guides" (where pictures and videos are) to lower part of MLS result pages and I imagine over a 1-2 month period the MLS result pages will get the SEO credit for this unique written content (despite no 301 redirect) I interlink from picture / video pages to MLS result pages with "neighborhood homes for sale" My hypothesis is that over the next few months as G gets a better idea of my website (as the site gets more popular - still only 5 months old) G will know what to rank for "neighborhood homes for sale" search terms. Makes sense?

but as long as I have a lot of great pictures indexed by Google wouldn't it be a waste to noindex such pages, even though I do not care about ranking for those pages? In other words, if I have "noindex, follow" wouldn't that mean Google will not count all the pictures on such pages and that could ultimately hurt more important pages on my site? I want to move these pictures to other page where the pictures do not load before users scroll. I will share with my web developers what you mentioned above. If you can think what the javascript is please do keep me posted

Automated means that my my web developers has an algorithm in places that calculates changes in al those statistical fields on an ongoing basis so users always have new up to date data. From the URL I included you can on top bar change neighborhood etc and the statistics will change. Great insight for user but since writing "median price per year", "$ Volume of active listings" etc are same across all pages I wonder how I should expect search engines to treat it. Any articles or experience to back up ideas highly appreciated.

Hi khi5 I analyzed your page. You are doing just fine. you are using CSS display none. You are not doing any cloaking. You are doing the right thing. 1. not fooling google 2.not fooling user 3.giving the user a better user experience. Don't worry you are not applying any "black hat" technique. You will not get penalized.

thx, Vadim.

Hey Khi5 — I just took a closer look at your webpage, as well as the related questions that you've asked before. I think an even bigger problem than "duplicate content" is "thin content". The main body of your page is 56 words, when the general rule of thumb is to put 300+ words of content. To answer you more specifically: No, I don't believe that search engines have the ability to identify very similar content, because they go by keyword. Even if the search engines DON'T categorize the content as duplicate, they're all competing with each other for the same keywords. The articles are all competing with each other in the same space. If you're trying to focus on "Honolulu" vs "Waikiki" vs <some other="" neighborhood="">, then your pages also need many more repeats of the keywords you're trying to win. </some> If the bulk of your page is unique (b/c you're writing about Honolulu as a category vs Waikiki as a specific neighborhood), then you don't have to worry about duplicate content; most of your content is unique tl;dr: > 300 words, repeat desired exact match keywords several times on a page; yes, create create unique content to make the pages more unique and specific Hope that helps more.

Hi I have used the URL removal tool in the past to remove URLs with success - as we know it helps speed things up. What you have done is right and if you are patient Google will start removing each page as it crawls it again. You might find this confirmation from Google reassuring in your situation - https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93710?hl=en Reading the article you posted of when not to use the tool I can't see that your pages fall into any of these categories - but either way I personally can't see using it causing an issue to be honest but its your call.