My opinion is that the URLs are less important than the actual content on the page, including title tags, headlines, body text, etc.

Unfortunately, there's no way to manually determine when you've crossed the line of "near-duplicate" content, so it's best to make each content experience serve a unique experience targeted towards a specific purpose.

This is a tough question to answer because each page should serve a unique and important purpose for your visitor, and these examples seem like they are trying to cover the same topic using different keywords.

While this approach is somewhat common, when your variations don't "vary" too much, it becomes fodder for Google's Panda algorithm, which penalizes sites with content that repeat the same topic over and over again with minor variations.

On the other hand, if your pages really do serve a unique purpose, then the situation you described is perfectly acceptable. I suspect Google considers "New York City" and "Manhattan" as two distinct, but closely related entities. It's tough to know in advance how different pages optimized for these terms will interplay with each other, but you may have to do some experimenting to find out.

Keep us updated on your progress. Best of luck!

Hi there,

I'm sorry to hear your rankings took a hit. That's a major drag. Major ranking changes can be caused by 100s of different things, so it's important to look at as many elements as you can, and it may take a long time to do a thorough investigation. Even then, it's not unusual for some webmasters to never know why their rankings changed.

The first 3 questions you want to investigate:

• Have you been hit by a penalty?
• Have you been hit by an algorithmic update? (as Pixel by Pixel pointed out)
• Any major crawling issues? You can check Moz or Google Webmaster Tools

If the answer turns up negative, you might consider a full site audit. Keep in mind, you may not have done anything "wrong." Algorithms change, and you might simply need to change your tactics to keep pace.

It's quite common. Moz tends to receive a lot of traffic for "porn"

Go figure.

If it's not a lot of traffic and it's not causing too many problems, it may not be worth the effort of trying to "unrank" for the word. Otherwise by removing important keywords from you on-page elements you may inadvertently unrank for other important terms.

Hi mszeer,

This resource might help: http://moz.com/blog/the-international-seo-checklist