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As long as each page has useful, unique content, shouldn't be an issue. e.g. I create a page for each town that a restaurant delivers to. I include some random facts about the town (large companies, population, etc - stuff you can grab from city-data.com), directions from that town to the restaurant, some popular dishes and a paragraph of unique text tailored for visitors from that town. Google has an issue with you scraping a database of every city in USA, templating out some content and tweaking your same keyword across all of those pages.

Just what we were looking for. Thank you very much Lynn!

It's my pleasure, and good luck with this, Silkstream!

Just as an update to where we was with this I have seen this article this morning where many others are seeing significant activity around the 20th 21st but still doesn't appear to be clear what is causing this. Still it is an interesting read and update. http://searchengineland.com/google-update-their-ranking-algorithms-some-webmasters-believe-so-234185 Hope it helps

Hi again This means that because you have multiple sitemaps, Google is going to crawl those at different times possibly and at different rates, hence some of your sitemaps taking a day longer. I really wouldn't look into it too much, and just be assured that Google is crawling your sitemaps fine and indexing. If you notice major discrepancies in what you submitted and what's being indexed, then I would refer to this Google resource on how to fix issues or errors you find in your sitemap crawl. Hope this helps! Good luck!

Thanks Lesley, I'm not sure that this is what I was looking for though. It looks more like a way to markup what brand particular products are, rather than an organisational brand?

Thank you!

Didnt want to say on a public forum after the MBG fiasco. Look for us on social media and we can chat more

"What else can I do to improve on its position in the SERPS?" Backlinks, backlinks, backlinks. Validation, validation, validation. There are a ton of citation sources available, and I would submit to as many of them (that are reputable) as you can. One thing to remember is: don't only link to the homepage if you want the subpages to get some good ol' Google love. "Would a hyphenated domain make any difference at all?" If you already have a good domain in place, I would not go changing that. The existing domain name probably has domain age and history, along with backlinks in place. Only if the existing domain had a spam or penalty issue would I change the domain. Be patient. The changes will not come fast. Google has to validate your new information from each source, and that can take a while. To speed it up a bit, link out to your social and ciation sites (using a nofollow or not, up to you) as they will link back. Once you have the new links in place, submit the URL with the outgoing links in GWT using fetch as Google. If it is a legit business, submit to major data providers such as Axiom, since Google uses them for data validation. You will need a tax ID and some other information tho.

Hey Karen, yeah I checked with the developer who laughed at the "line of code" but said yeah its something we could look into doing. Although I may not need to now as Panda 4.0 seems to have done the site a massive favour this morning

Good point, Gianluca! I hadn't thought of that.

Hi Silkstream, Yep - it's almost always a relief to know what you're experiencing is part of a mass bug rather than an individual problem. Google tends to respond to system-wide problems with more speed and care than they do to edge cases. So glad I was able to answer your question and give you some peace of mind!

Thank you. That thought process did occur to me at the time of adding the robots txt, however that was back in March and the impressions drop has happened this week. I have updated the robots.txt to show the new disallow command rather than "/search". I also just installed my last back-up which was just before i added Google comments. Thanks for your help!

My pleasure, Silkstream. I can understand how what you are doing feels risky, but in fact, you are likely preventing fallout from worse risks in the future. SEO is a process, always evolving, and helping your client change with the times is a good thing to do! Good luck with the work.

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!

Yes that's correct The pages will be found just as quick thought there new links as they would have been though their old links with 301's

So glad to be of help Silkstream, and that's good that you're working hard to remedy the duplicate content issue. Sounds like a really big project. Good luck with all the steps!

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!

Normally if Google didn't send any warning of unnaatural linking to your site you're not supposed to send a disavowing request since this just raise the attention goole is paying to your site, however I unserstand you want to prevent any issue by acting before any warning message. About the disavow request, if that've been received google should have take that into consideration. You said that that page was an offending page so you want to 404 it. I think that if you're getting rid of that page returning a 404 you're preventing that (bad) value to be added to your domain. I think that this is a correct approach. Just be sure that those 879 links are all bad because you don't want to lose all that value. If there are good links pointing there just ask those webmasters to point to your homepage instead. Just be sure that if there was some good content inthat page it has moved to your home before asking a link to be changed.