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Thanks for the reply. It will be a very hands on job, lot of images to be replaced but if that's what needs done then that's what I'll do. No point in skimping on the work during a content improvement campaign, right haha

To be honest I almost knew already that I'd need to 301 them all - I just wanted there to be another solution, maybe I'll be lucky and find a nice easy rewrite match.

Good to get a second option on this tho. I'm going to hold off marking it as answered for a little while and see if I can get some more input while I prep the job.

Most of my WordPress sites contain content that is supplemented with galleries. I've been using NextGen Gallery for a majority of them. I now want to switch to another plugin - which would involve recreating the galleries by re-uploading the images and they would be using an improved url structure. The pages receive a lot of traffic from Image Search but the images would have moved. Should I 301 every one of the old image links to the corresponding urls?

The move to the new plugin is part of a content freshness and improvement strategy on some of the older pages but it also gives a massive UX boost to the pages which is very welcome.

What do you think is the best course of action in this content removal/replacement situation?

Looking directly at that page I think that your reasoning is sound about adding an 'about', 'testimonials' and a 'review' section on each page. Strengthening those specific pages would do wonders in terms of the 'Participating in affiliate programs without adding sufficient value' bullet in the quality guidelines. In addition - adding more value and text to the page would improve the pages landing potential and fill in a SEO oppertunity that is often overlooked in this kind of funnel page.

Another possible issue of note is - seen upon a simple 'site:domain.tld' search (and there are a lot of pages indexed from the site already so what effect are you noticing from the Google penalty?) - your title tags, again mentioned in the quality guidelines. Most include site title at the front and not much else after. Optimizing those tags is something else I would do and above all else the page title text is a valuable SEO commodity not to be missed out on. Make better use of those titles would actually be my first move now I think of it.

There are probably a few more things about the site that could be addressed but at the moment I shall need to leave a more thorough dig till tomorrow as I'm a little pushed for time and, I've just come to the realization that, the capabilities on an Android tablet for testing are seriously lacking.

Sorry we've not, as of yet, manage to narrow the problem down to a specific reason. Have you created a campaign for the site yet? A crawl might give some insights into other possible causes.

Could you be a little more clear on what Google are telling you the problems with the pages are?

There are many reasons that they might be doing this but the quickest way for us to give an accurate response and help you solve it is telling us what Google told you about the pages.

Right off the top of my head I would suggest your 'thin' pages are more of a problem than your 'money' pages and no-follow might not be enough on the money pages. Firstly I would work on bulking up the content on both the thin and money page types. Noindex on the money pages might also be a good idea if the are overly clogged with affiliate links - but of course you probably want these indexed as they bring in revenue...

On-page my advice is simple - create improved content to pad out the pages. Off-site I would be looking for some quality backlinks from reputable 'people' sites (reddit, twitter) and pushing your content for social shares. I've found that certain pages (affiliate pages especially) perform slightly better in search when a few people have publiclly endorsed it on social media but nothing on-site beats the benefit of well displayed quality content.

If you could provide us with more info on what Google are telling you then I would be able to help more than just suggestions based on the assumptions you've come to (that the thin and money pages are likely to blame) of what the problems are

Very well elaborated, maybe I should have done so myself in my original response.

Always try 301 to relevant pages in this situation but if the redirect rules prove a headache (and the site has little to no inbound links) to create then I would simply remove the subdomain and 301 to main domain homepage. Somewhat of a Time vs Overall Benefit issue, or in some cases a Cost vs Benefit issue.

If the m.domain variant has links pointing to it then it's always beneficial to 301 the links the refering sites are pointing to - I'd try to do this as an absolute minimum in this situation.

It is common for mobile versions of sites have no links pointing to them apart from redirects from the main site so in that situation a 301would likely have zero affect whatsoever.

Redirecting the old mobile version of your site to the new responsive design with 301 redirects would pass on any page authority to the corresponding page on domain.com and a responsive design is generally superior in terms of UX.

In my opinion it would be good practice to forward from an exiting mobile version to a new responsive version as per the serve one page to all devices guideline. Using a 301 redirect would be the correct way to do this.

Thanks, Moosa. The "What Should Be Accessible To Users & Search Engines" section answered the majority of my question but I'm going to hold off just a little bit longer and see if I can get a few more answers or reading suggestions on the wordpress dupe issue.

Thanks again!

I believe that the balance of the link outweighs the threat of penalty from low quality sites scraping your content - providing your not already seeing warnings in your Google Webmaster Tools.

If your content is being scrapped there will likely be other links in the content anyway (as it's normally good practice to interlink your content within your own content). Removing the link added by the plugin wouldn't remove the links in the content and you would still face the same predicament as if you were to include the footer link.

In the case of your content not being interlinked then the decision would need to be based solely on the quality of the domains scrapping the content and you'd need to do a little bit of research to find the sites that were commonly scraping your content and decide based upon the reputation of those sites.

I don't think an answer to this one will be all that black and white as it's highly situation dependent. If it were doing your rankings major harm then you'd be given a warning in your Google Webmaster Tools and you'd know to disable the footer link in the RSS feed. But if you're getting no warnings, initial impressions of the scraping sites aren't too bad and you've seen no other issues relate to the links then I'd keep the link and hopefully benefit from the free backlink with my chosen anchor text.

I run WordPress on many of my sites and a site crawl has found MANY duplicate content pages on the latest domain I started a campaign for.

I expected to see quite a lot on the tag pages that only had one post but even tag pages with multiple posts and author and category pages with many posts are showing as duplicate content. Is this normal for a WordPress site to have so much duplicate content warnings from the taxonomy pages?

I have the option to bulk noindex, follow the category and tag pages but should I do it? I get some traffic directly to the tag pages so removing the pages from search results would dent the traffic of the site a little (generally high bounce rate, low engagement traffic anyway) but could removing the apparent duplicate content actually improve the article pages themselves?

Or does anyone have any WordPress specific advice for making the pages not duplicate content? I've toyed with the idea of just displaying excerpts but creating manual excerpts for the 4 years worth of posts, some of which I have no personal knowledge of the subject matter so other suggestions are welcome.

This one is an almost completely off-page SEO problem. There are small things you can do on-page that won't directly be seen like alt-tags, title attributes and file names but they are only small improvements - and having the keywords on the site will almost always beat those methods in the search results. Using related terms as well will help but it doesn't really solve the problem.

I think the best strategy is a good content marketing plan - spreading out links with the required anchor text for keywords you want to rank for and surrounding the link with text containing related and variations of the primary keywords. Depending on the competition of your keywords this one could turn into a very long-term goal.

The short answer to your question is: anchor text or more precisely a SEO focused content marketing strategy.

Everything Paul says is true and with regards to the SEO perspective faster is better. Speed is a ranking factor which Google looks at.

I've actually used "Redirection" on a few of my sites before and the speed difference between redirects using WordPress redirect VS Apache redirect is marginal but the resource usage difference is vast. It requires very little server resources to read the .htaccess file and redirect compared to running through the core of WordPress to generate the 301 then send it.

Point the plugin to the .htaccess file and use the Apache module instead and you'll get both the benefit of slightly improved redirect times with the added benefit of using less server resources to do it.

Redirecting the old mobile version of your site to the new responsive design with 301 redirects would pass on any page authority to the corresponding page on domain.com and a responsive design is generally superior in terms of UX.

In my opinion it would be good practice to forward from an exiting mobile version to a new responsive version as per the serve one page to all devices guideline. Using a 301 redirect would be the correct way to do this.

Could you be a little more clear on what Google are telling you the problems with the pages are?

There are many reasons that they might be doing this but the quickest way for us to give an accurate response and help you solve it is telling us what Google told you about the pages.

Right off the top of my head I would suggest your 'thin' pages are more of a problem than your 'money' pages and no-follow might not be enough on the money pages. Firstly I would work on bulking up the content on both the thin and money page types. Noindex on the money pages might also be a good idea if the are overly clogged with affiliate links - but of course you probably want these indexed as they bring in revenue...

On-page my advice is simple - create improved content to pad out the pages. Off-site I would be looking for some quality backlinks from reputable 'people' sites (reddit, twitter) and pushing your content for social shares. I've found that certain pages (affiliate pages especially) perform slightly better in search when a few people have publiclly endorsed it on social media but nothing on-site beats the benefit of well displayed quality content.

If you could provide us with more info on what Google are telling you then I would be able to help more than just suggestions based on the assumptions you've come to (that the thin and money pages are likely to blame) of what the problems are

Very well elaborated, maybe I should have done so myself in my original response.

Always try 301 to relevant pages in this situation but if the redirect rules prove a headache (and the site has little to no inbound links) to create then I would simply remove the subdomain and 301 to main domain homepage. Somewhat of a Time vs Overall Benefit issue, or in some cases a Cost vs Benefit issue.

If the m.domain variant has links pointing to it then it's always beneficial to 301 the links the refering sites are pointing to - I'd try to do this as an absolute minimum in this situation.

It is common for mobile versions of sites have no links pointing to them apart from redirects from the main site so in that situation a 301would likely have zero affect whatsoever.