We recently launched a large 3500 page website that auto generates a sentence after we plug in statistical data in our database.

So the only unique content is a single sentence?

Within that sentence many of the words would need to be common as well. Consider a simple site that offered the population for any given location. "The population of [California] is [13 million] people."

In the above example only 3 words are unique. Maybe your pages are a bit more elaborate but it seems to me those pages are simply not indexable. What you can do is index the main page where users can enter the location they wish to learn about, but not each possible result (i.e. California).

Either add significantly more content, or only index the main page.

You can have some duplicate content in the manner you mentioned above. It is a natural and expected part of the internet that existing sources of information will be utilized.

There is not any magic number which says "30% duplication is ok, but 31% is not". Google's algorithms are private and constantly changing. Use good sense to guide you as to whether your page is unique and offers value to users.

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The short answer is, it does not matter.

The recommendation I would make is to use what some people refer to as "technology-proof" URLs. Drop the file extension. Why?

• it looks cleaner and nicer to users

• it makes it a bit harder (more work) for someone who wants to hack your site as they are unsure of your page's language

• it gives you the flexibility to change technologies without requiring a new URL (from html to php for example)

The only difference between your URLs then would be the trailing slash. It is a matter of personal preference but I add the trailing slash to indicate a folder, and no slash to indicate it is a file.

Matt Cutts has a couple videos on URLs and file names which you may enjoy:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRzMhlFZz9I

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=971qGsTPs8M

Your understanding is correct.

Google does not care how many directories appear in a URL. The two URLs you offered as an example are viewed equally by Google. What's important is how many clicks it takes users to access those links.

Nick,

Sounds like you have a good strategy. I only have two additional items to share based on your latest reply.

www.url.com/resort_hotels/hotels_in_rome.asp

That url seems a bit spammy to me. Mentioning "hotels" twice is something I would avoid. I would consider something along the lines of the below options instead:

www.url.com/resorts/hotels_in_rome

www.url.com/resort_hotels/rome

www.url.com/hotels/rome

I also wanted to talk about the landing pages for cars and air travel once more. Before directing all your current pages to a generic page I would take a look at the existing 140 pages and ask once again, do any of the pages have anything that is unique which can be used for the location based car and air landing pages?

Your plans are to develop these pages with quality content over time, which is great. I hate the idea of having establishing pages for each area, pulling back to having one generic page, then expanding again to location-based pages.

If you sincerely intend to develop these pages on a reasonable time period, I would suggest establishing one page for each location even if it was thin on content to start with. Driving directions, local driving laws, testimonials, anything that can be used as a starting point to hold your footing would be preferred.

If you do pull back to a generic "car rentals" page, I have two ideas. Build out your location landing page for one area such as London. Closely watch your conversion rates on users on the London page versus the generic page. If there is a significant difference, it may help speed up your transition. If you realize you are losing $$ every day you don't have those pages, then perhaps you can hire additional help to speed up the process.

The final idea would be to build country-based landing pages for car rentals as an stop-gap measure. Your Milan, Rome, etc pages could all direct to "Cars Italy" and "Air Italy".

There are tons of choices on the internet for travel providers. You have an extremely well established user base. My top concern for any migration is to maintain all my existing relationships. Some travel sites do great with a single landing page for air/cars/hotels. It sounds like your site has catered to clients in a specific way, and I would be sensitive to maintaining your current user experience.

One last idea that just came to me. After the migration poll users for feedback. Take surveys, offer discounts, generate hype but engage users because they will offer a different point of view which you may not have considered.

The transition I mentioned would allow for a smoother migration process rather then a "cold turkey" switch from the old site to the new site. You clearly recognize the end goal is to create your new site and delete the old site. The good news is that change does not have to happen over night.

You can build out your new site completely and go live with it. At that point you would update any external links you control along with your advertisements, signatures, etc. You would also want to reach out to partners and any sites with links that you can influence. Update those links so they point to your new pages.

The final step is the redirection of your 140k page old site to the appropriate pages on the new site. Clearly you wish to begin with the most prominent pages such as your landing pages along with any important pages such as "Contact Us", your reservation system, etc.

The next step would be applying your redirect rules to the remaining pages. Extensive testing will be required.

You should set up GA or another tracking tool to monitor your old site. You will want to closely monitor activity for quite some time. Specifically look for any issues with 404s and multiple redirects.

With respect to your anchor text, I suspect it was used to sculpt your site so your link value was focused on a particular page for each topic. When you have 140 pages on a given topic, you can pursue an incredible amount of longtail phrases. Now I suspect you may have 4 pages for each area: Rome, Rome by Air, Rome by Car, and Rome hotels. If that is the case your future anchor text linking will be a lot more straight forward.

I want to say "I wouldn't be concerned about the anchor text" but you have a major project ahead of you, you are highly dependent on SEO and there are many opportunities for something to go wrong. In that context, I would share the anchor text would be on the list of things to think about, but the proper redirects is a much larger concern.

A final thought I would offer: this is all high level, generic advice. I would recommend hiring a SEO who could offer a proper evaluation of your site along with a migration plan. Once the change has been completed and tested, you should gain many advantages with your new site. Hopefully they will offset any loss from the migration. Once you are confident in your new site, I would recommend a SEO campaign promoting your new site.

You are on the right track. The link value from your existing pages must be saved.

Prior to offering a further reply I would like to ask a couple questions:

• how are your currently URLs coded? As an older site I presume your page URLs end in .asp?

• will your new design also be in asp?

What I am trying to determine is, will the new site require new URLs. If your current page is /rome.asp and the new page will be /rome.php then the URL will change so both your new site and old site can co-exist at the same domain. This process will be helpful for staging a transition.

PS. My recommendation for URLs would be to use friendly URLs which do not show an extension (i.e. /rome) but that is not the present focus.

Hi Steve.

I would suggest taking a good look at your content pages. I understand having dupe pages, but you are suggesting a possible 140:1 ratio which is....wow.

As I am sure you are aware, there is not going to be any quick and easy fix. Here are some initial thoughts:

The first step I would take is to look for ANY commonalities between pages you can grab. For example, you mention 1000 travel guides. Are all the travel areas unique? For example, is there only one guide for Rome? If so, do all the duplicate Rome pages have "Rome" in the URL? If so, you can consider adding a regex expression to your htaccess file (presuming you are on an apache server) which could cover your 301s.

Is there any unique code on the pages which are common for a given guide? Using the above example, do all the "Rome" pages have "Rome" in the page title? If so, you could possibly update all the "Rome" pages by adding the correct canonical to the page's meta information. At this point it would truly depend on how your site is coded. Do you have a CMS? In what language are your pages written?

The bottom line, there is simply too much value in those pages to discard them. They each need to be properly 301'd as the preferred method. The 301s really need to be handled with general expressions which cover a large number of pages at once. You cannot use individual redirects even if you wanted to as it would cripple your web server.

I would not redirect all the pages to a single home page unless every other opportunity was completely explored.