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Tom, there is undoubtedly a difference, speaking broadly in terms of the use of query strings - at the SEO level - and at the usability / customer retention level.

URLs that are easy to read are easier to remember and easier to copy-paste too - meaning more robust - less likely to break or get corrupted when run through text parsers.

Google is explicit about their preference for clean urls, and a clean url structure for your site as a whole. I'm not sure if this is relevant to where you're at with your particular project, but I always try build a site with a url schema that exposes the information architecture and content priority as much as possible, usually with important pages close to the site root.

If you have to use query strings - and of course they are sometimes unavoidable, or actually just the best tool for the job at hand - Google Webmaster Tools allows you to provide explicit classifications for each parameter. Personally I thought this was a great addition to their suite of tools.

Unique Listing Copy

I would try to get that unique content to the top of the source order - it doesn't necessarily have to appear at the top of the page - it could be in a sidebar for instance, but it should be first in the source so that Googlebot gobbles it up before it reaches duplicate stuff or secondary nav / footer links etc.

No Results pages

Yes, you could certainly noindex your no-results pages with a robots meta tag - that would be a good idea.

Loading duplicate content with ajax

In terms of Google and ajax content, yes Googlebot can and does follow links it finds in javascript.

All I can tell you here is my own experience On my product detail template, I have loaded up category descriptions with ajax that appear canonically (if that's the right way of putting it) on my listing pages. In the SERPs, the cat description content is indexed for the pages I want it to be indexed for (the listings in this case), and not for the product detail pages where I'm loading with ajax. And these product detail pages still perform well and get good organic landing traffic.

On the product detail page where I'm loading with ajax, I have the copy in an accordion, and it's loaded with an ajax request on document ready. It might be considered slightly more cochre to do this in response to a user action though - such as clicking on the accordion in my case. The theory being that you're making your site responsive to a user's needs, rather than loading up half the content one way and the other half another way, if you get what I mean.

Sometimes of course you just cannot avoid certain amounts of content duplication within your site.

Hi, I've tried to address your issues point by point according to your post...

Duplicate Job Posting Content

You can try to offset this by having a couple hundred words of unique copy per listing page url exposed to Google. So, if your page lists all jobs in the catering industry in New Jersey for instance, write some copy on the topic, and try to make it readable and useful to the user as well. Add microdata to the template using schema.org, so that Google can understand what's there at the data level - there will likely be entities available there to describe your content in terms of location, the companies that are hiring, etc.

I'm inclined to say don't bother with reshuffling duplicate content and adding bullet points to it - Google is smart enough to recognise that this copy is the same, and will not give you any points - perhaps the opposite - for trying to disguise this.

Filtering & Blank Results Pages

Could this not be done with javascript / ajax, so that Google never finds an empty listing?

'About the Company' Duplicate Content

You could load this content from an ajax template, either as the page loads, or in response to a user action (eg. click on a button 'show company details'). I have solved this exact problem like this in the past - loading a tour category description that appears on a great many tour detail pages.

Perhaps you can do as I'm suggesting above for the job description duplication - where possible, and as long as it's done in a way that does not come across as cloaking. It's good that you have a unique paragaph above the duplicate description.Try not to load up the duplicate description by default. I'm not sure on your source order or site / template structure so difficult to get too detailed here and I don't want to risk suggesting something that could be interpreted as a violation of Google's guidelines.

Pagination

You will want to, where possible, specify a view-all page for Google - this is suggested by them as a best practice, and in my experience, Googlebot loves to find chunky listing content, PROVIDED that it loads quickly enough not to hamper the user experience.

You can make sure of this by lazyloading images and other media. Be sure to specify the correct image src attributes (not spacer.gif for instance) inside of noscript tags to make sure that image content is still indexed.

You could also load up the markup for all items in the listing, and then use javascript to chunk the content into 'pages', or load it asynchronously where javascript is available. If no javascript, then load all content. By using javascript pagination, you basically avert the need for a separate view all page, meaning only have one template to maintain and optimise.

Thanks EGOL, this is an interesting piece of anecdotal evidence for me.

I have been wondering along the same lines as the OP - specifically because I'm a little concerned that Google is parsing javascript now (in some cases) and may be iffy about javascript copy truncation. However, I would view this in my own case, as a user experience improvement.

For example : I sometimes use javascript to truncate my copy where I feel it may push other content too far down the page. Some users will want to read the whole passage, but others will be scanning for the content further down.

Is this the type of 'hidden text' you are referring to? The full content is easily accessible at the click of a 'show more' link. The content is hidden by the javascript, so will be available to user agents that do not execute javascript.

Thanks Ryan, that's definitely where our focus is, especially given that resources are limited for the time being.

Thanks Ryan, I was gravitating towards disavowing the real garbage pointing to the .co.uk site - there are a few links I think I'll keep.

I'm wary of the risk of using the tool in light of how it has been presented - with big warning labels - but at the same time the .co.uk is not our focus, just a secondary site we hoped to get some residual PR and redirect referrals from - so if things go wrong with the disavow tool it's probably not a total train smash.

We have a .com domain where we are 301-ing the .co.uk site into it before shutting it down - the client no longer has an office in the UK and wants to focus on the .com.

The .com is a nice domain with good trust indicators. I've just redesigned the site, added a wad of healthy structured markup, had the duplicate content mostly rewritten - still finishing off this job but I think we got most of it with Copyscape.

The site has not so many backlinks, but we're working on this too and the ones it does have are natural, varied and from trustworthy sites. We also have a little feature on the redesign coming up in .Net magazine early next year, so that will help.

The .co.uk on the other hand has a fair few backlinks - 1489 showing in Open Site Explorer - and I spent a good amount of time matching the .co.uk pages to similar content on the .com so that the redirects would hopefully pass some pagerank.

However, approximately a year later, we are struggling to grow organic traffic to the .com site. It feels like we are driving with the handbrake on.

I went and did some research into the backlink profile of the .co.uk, and it is mostly made up of article submissions, a few on 'quality' (not in my opinion) article sites such as ezine, and the majority on godawful and broken spammy article sites and old blogs bought for seo purposes.

So my question is, in light of the fact that the SEO company that 'built' these shoddy links will not reply to my questions as to whether they received a penalty notification or noticed a Penguin penalty, and the fact that they have also deleted the Google Analytics profiles for the site, how should I proceed?

**To my mind I have 3 options. **

1. Ignore the bad majority in the .co.uk backlink profile, keep up the change of address and 301's, and hope that we can just drown out the shoddy links by building new quality ones - to the .com. Hopefully the crufty links will fade into insignificance over time.. I'm not too keen on this course of action.

2. Use the disavow tool for every suspect link pointing to the .co.uk site (no way I will be able to get the links removed manually) - and the advice I've seen also suggests submitting a reinclusion request afterwards- but this seems pointless considering we are just 301-ing to the new (.com) site.

3. Disassociate ourselves completely from the .co.uk site - forget about the few quality links to it and cut our losses. Remove the change of address request in GWT and possibly remove the site altogether and return 410 headers for it just to force the issue. Clean slate in the post.

What say you mozzers? Please help, working myself blue in the face to fix the organic traffic issues for this client and not getting very far as yet.

Tom, there is undoubtedly a difference, speaking broadly in terms of the use of query strings - at the SEO level - and at the usability / customer retention level.

URLs that are easy to read are easier to remember and easier to copy-paste too - meaning more robust - less likely to break or get corrupted when run through text parsers.

Google is explicit about their preference for clean urls, and a clean url structure for your site as a whole. I'm not sure if this is relevant to where you're at with your particular project, but I always try build a site with a url schema that exposes the information architecture and content priority as much as possible, usually with important pages close to the site root.

If you have to use query strings - and of course they are sometimes unavoidable, or actually just the best tool for the job at hand - Google Webmaster Tools allows you to provide explicit classifications for each parameter. Personally I thought this was a great addition to their suite of tools.

Thanks EGOL, this is an interesting piece of anecdotal evidence for me.

I have been wondering along the same lines as the OP - specifically because I'm a little concerned that Google is parsing javascript now (in some cases) and may be iffy about javascript copy truncation. However, I would view this in my own case, as a user experience improvement.

For example : I sometimes use javascript to truncate my copy where I feel it may push other content too far down the page. Some users will want to read the whole passage, but others will be scanning for the content further down.

Is this the type of 'hidden text' you are referring to? The full content is easily accessible at the click of a 'show more' link. The content is hidden by the javascript, so will be available to user agents that do not execute javascript.