Welcome to the Q&A Forum

You scared me then Chris!

"It sounds like you're saying that your one ecommerce company has 25 Google local business listings--and growing?!  It's very possible that could come back and haunt you unless you in the form of merging or penalization."

Why? The business has a physical location in every town, so why should they not have a page for every location? This is what we were advised to do?

"If there was no other competition, you would almost certainly rank for your keywords along with the town name"

I have used this tactic before, for another nationwide business, but on a smaller scale and it worked. Ie; they ranked (middle of page 1) but for non competitive keywords and the page has strong backlinks. With this site, the competition is stronger and the pages will not have a strong backlink profile at first.

My biggest worry, is to cut all the existing pages and lose the 80% long tail the site currently pulls in. But what other way is there to tackle so much duplicate content?

I have a large ecommerce website which is structured very much for SEO as it existed a few years ago. With a landing page for every product/town nationwide (its a lot of pages).

Then along came Panda...

I began shrinking the site in Feb last year in an effort to tackle duplicate content. We had initially used a template only changing product/town name.

My first change was to reduce the amount of pages in half by merging the top two categories, as they are semantically similar enough to not need their own pages. This worked a treat, traffic didn't drop at all and the remaining pages are bringing in the desired search terms for both these products.

Next I have rewritten the content for every product to ensure they are now as individual as possible.

However with 46 products and each of those generating a product/area page we still have a heap of duplicate content. Now i want to reduce the town pages, I have already started writing content for my most important areas, again, to  make these pages as individual as possible.

The problem i have is that nobody can write enough unique content to target every town in the UK via an individual page (times by 46 products), so i want to reduce these too.

QUESTION: If I have a single page for "croydon", will mentioning other local surrounding areas on this page, such as Mitcham, be enough to rank this page for both towns?

I have approx 25 Google local place/map listings and grwoing, and am working from these areas outwards. I want to bring the site right down to about 150 main area pages to tackle all the duplicate content, but obviously don't want to lose my traffic for so many areas at once.

Any examples of big sites that have reduced in size since Panda would be great.

I have a headache... Thanks community.

Thank you both Lesley & Jim!

This tool is exactly what we needed! Fingers crossed now we have resolved the issues we had with all that duplicate content.

How long has the parameter tool been available?? I never even knew it existed!

We have an ecommerce website with 700 pages. Due to the implementation of filters, we are seeing upto 11,000 pages being indexed where the filter tag is apphended to the URL. This is causing duplicate content issues across the site.

We tried adding "nofollow" to all the filters, we have also tried adding canonical tags, which it seems are being ignored. So how can we fix this?

We are now toying with 2 other ideas to fix this issue;

1. adding "no index" to all filtered pages

2. making the filters uncrawble using javascript

Has anyone else encountered this issue? If so what did you do to combat this and was it successful?

Thanks Alan.I Take it by this you mean we should only 301 redirect pages with valuable links and forget the rest?

The pages dont have any links worth worrying about as its the "weaker" half of the site. We're more concerned over the site restructure and the affecting the general health of the site by losing so many pages at once.

We have a site that is suffering a duplicate content problem. To help resolve this we intend to reduce the amount of landing pages within the site. There are a HUGE amount of pages.

We have identified the potential to reduce the pages by half at first by combing the top level directories, as we believe they are semantically similar enough that they no longer warrant being seperated.
For instance: Mobile Phones & Mobile Tablets (Its not mobile devices).

We want to remove this directory path and 301 these pages to the others, then rewrite the content to include both phones and tablets on the same landing page.

Question: Would a massive amount of 301's (over 100,000) cause any harm to the general health of the website? Would it affect the authority? We are also considering just severing them from the site, leaving them indexed but not crawlable from the site, to try and maintain a smooth transition. We dont want traffic to tank.

Has anyone performed anything similar? Id be interested to hear all opinions. Thanks!

Yes Miriam, that is exactly what i meant, thank you for clarifying and many thanks for your response, it echo's my own gut feelings towards "clouding" the authority of the focus target pages, which are of course  obviously where we have the bricks and motar buildings.I really like your idea of adding a CTA to those other "nearby town" pages that funnels users and hopefully a little more "authority" towards those areas. A great suggestion.

Duplicate content was a major issue, But we've been working on making these pages as unique and relevant as possible to each individual area by adding relevevant copy about the business and industry in that area. It's been a long slog, as this site was (i believe) hit quite badly with Panda last october, but we're doing everything recommended to improve its user experience.

Thanks again for your advice Miriam, much appreciated.

We havent used Meta keywords for a couple of years but I read an interesting article yesterday that suggested using this field to list semantic keywords and synonyms that you couldnt fit naturally into the body content. Havent tried it yet, just thought it was an interesting concept.

We are seeing this every day for lots of searches in the UK. I did some reading up on "domain clustering" and found that Google recently reverted its algo regarding how many results it displays for a particular search term. It used to be no more than four, then it changed to 7, which is an older practice. Compare this with competition from Amazon, Ebay, the .com and .nz results for transactional searches, and the bias towards brands and most small businesses in the UK dont stand a chance of competing in organic search anymore. I for one know of several small businesses that are down 70% because of this, dropping from position 1-3 to position 8-12. Hence the PPC conspiracy theory. "Google did it on purpose to push us all into using PPC".

We have a large website that targets the whole UK. It has landing pages for every town in the UK. For the towns that this particular business has a bricks and mortar hq, we have set up a local/places page.

We then added the corresponding places adress to the appropriate town page on the website. This is just a handful compared to the 3,000,000 towns our site aims to rank for.

Question: Would it help or hinder our SEO efforts to add the local addresses to other town pages in close proximity to the original?

For instance say we have a places address for croydon in London. Would it hurt to add this address to pages that target towns near croydon, such as Mitcham.

All opinions greatly appreciated. Cheers!

Hi Scott,

My intial thoughts were over-optimisation penalty, its just on the second level pages, which are main category pages. The category+Town pages are ranking just fine. We removed two sets of footer links and made the navigation more user friendly with tabbed navigation instead. We fixed the breadcrumb as it wasnt clickable, so the second level pages had barely any internal links. We rewrote content for all pages applying semantics liberally. We added other content to the pages and improved the social signals overall to the domain. We finally did a 301 redirect on the second level pages to new URL's hoping to lose any penalty....but still nothing. Not even ranking in the top 500 for core keyword yet add a stemmed keyword as a prefix and BAM there we are at position 5. Im running out of ideas.

I'd also be interested to hear peoples thoughts on 301 redirects internally.

My website is structured like this:

Home > Categories > Categories+Town

The homepage and the Categories+Town page all rank for intended keywords, yet the "over-optimised" category pages do not rank at all, they are still indexed, just not ranking for the core keywords.

Will creating new URL's and 301 redirecting the old pages internally pass on any penalty that may be in place, algorithmic or otherwise?

Thanks Oliver. That first article is the kind of advice i was looking for!Funnily enough, i did have the slideshare idea, and think that will be a great secondary strategy to get the most from the content and a way to market the original content.

George, this is what my gut instinct is telling me to do. It makes sense and if it works we can turn it into a series. If i choose to do this, do you feel we should provide an embed code like we would with an infographic? If so, any idea what would be the best practice for the backlink?

EGOL,  yeah...I kinda got a bit over excited about the idea. But now i have a list of comic sites that publish im feeling inspired to try this again in a more serious manner. And ive learned a valuable lesson.

Cheers everyone!

We have been creating written content for a client over the last year with great success. Locating websites across the internet to publish our articles was not difficult, just a little time consuming.

Now we have decided to take this a step further by creating a comic strip for the same client. The only problem is, we are having great difficulty finding a site that would be suitable for publishing this content.

Its not an infographic, or slideshow, or video and its not a written article.

The usual search operators are no good as this is our first attempt and REAL comic geeks are so serious about the art im scared we'd be pulled apart.

Does anyone know of any resources which would publish this type of visual content?

Thanks for your help!

Hayley

Heres the scenario...

We recently took on a new client who's previous seo company had partaken in some dodgy link building tactics.

They appear to have done some blog comment spam, very poorly.

The situation we are now in is this:

We have a site with an internal page deemed more important than the homepage (the homepage has 60 linking root domains and the internal page 879). It looks as though the previous seo company submitted a disavow request, theres a message in webmaster tools from a few weeks back saying it had been received, but no further correspondence.

I have doubts as to whether this disavow request was done correctly... Plus im not sure that Google has issued the site a warning yet as they are ranking position one for the keyword on the internal page.

Our clients want us to handle this in the correct manner, whether it be to simply ignore it and wait for Google to send a warning about the links, remove the offending internal page and leave a 404, or try to disavow the links that google doesnt know about yet from 800+ websites.

Suggestions for the best practice for dealing with this situation?

Any advice is much appreciated,

Thanks, Hayley.

We have a website that has a whole heap of internal links. After re-structuring the footer links to the main categories we are now looking at the best way to display the internal links from each category (approx 20-50 links from each).

At present they are simply listed on the corresponding category page, however this doesnt look great so we want to display them in a way that is user friendly and also seo friendly.

Any suggestions and examples appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

Its taken from "The knowledge Graph"

You can find out more about it here: http://www.google.com/insidesearch/features/search/knowledge.html

Dont want to say which directory im looking at just now because 
im worried this will turn into a discussion about directory 
submissions whereas i just need an answer to this question.

The code in the html looks something like this:

<link href="[http://www.example.com/weddings](view-source:http://www.whatisseolinkbuilding.com/shopping/weddings)" rel="<a class="attribute-value">canonical</a>"/>

Its entered into the head of each page within that section 
referencing the first page as canonical.