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We recently took a good look at one of our content site's sitemap and tried to cut out a lot of crap that had gotten in there such as .php, .xml, .htm versions of each page. We also cut out images to put in a separate image sitemap.

The sitemap generated 83,000+ URLs for google to crawl (this partially used the Yoast Wordpress plugin to generate)

In webmaster tools in the index status section is showing that this site has a total index of 1.5 million.

With our sitemap coming back with 83k and google indexing 1.5 million pages, is this a sign of a CMS gone rogue? Is it an indication that we could be pumping out error pages or empty templates, or junk pages that we're cramming into Google's bot?

I would love to hear what you guys think. Is this normal? Is this something to be concerned about? Should our total index more closely match our sitemap page count?

Thanks, we'll check it out. Have you had any experience using this tool?

I was afraid of an answer like this

Thanks for the tips. Are you aware of any database or list of spam sites I could easily run our backlinks through to cut down the list?

Agreed. It's been a company practice to do these types of links for years but with penguin/panda, I'm afraid it's only hurting us.

It's a tough case to change these links. They do bring traffic to the site so I'm hoping a nofollow is good enough.

Thanks for your input.

Webmaster Tools is saying we have close to 24 million links to our site. The site has been around since the mid 90s and has accumulated all these links since.

We also have our own network of sites that have links in their templates to our main site. I'm fighting to get these links "nofollow"'d but upper management seems scared to alter this practice.

This past year we've found our rankings have dropped significantly and suspect it's due to some spammy backlinks or being penalized for doing an accidental link scheme network.

24 million links is too many to check manually for using the disavow tool and it seems that bulk services out there to check backlinks can't even come close.

What's an SEO to do?

Thanks for the response, Oleg.

I guess a concern is if a googlebot with a Florida IP crawls the homepage, it will see florida dealerships. Will the homepage in Google's index then reflect a more Florida geared page and not be so readily served up to someone in Seattle because of some Florida keywords?

I feel like Google is smarter than this and has strategy in place for dealing with this type of content. We're just looking for some kind of reassurance.

We have a site with a generic top level domain and we'd like to use a small portion of the homepage to cater content based on the IP of a visiting user.

The content is for product dealerships around different regions/states of the US, not internationally. The idea being that someone from Seattle would see dealerships for this product near their location in Seattle.

The section on the homepage is relatively small and would churn out 5 links and images according to location. The rest of the homepage would be the same for everyone, which includes links to news and reviews and fuller content.

We have landing pages for regional/state content deeper in the site that don't use an IP to deliver content and also have unique URLs for the different regions/states. An example being a "Washington State Dealerships" landing page with links to all the dealerships there.

We're wondering what kind of SEO impact there would be to having a section of the homepage delivering different content based on IP, and if there's anything we should do about it (or if we should be doing it all!).

Thank you.

We have a motorcycle classifieds section that lets users search for motorcycles for sale using various drop down menus to pick year-make-type-model-trim, etc..

These search results create urls such as:
www.example.com/classifieds/search.php?vehicle_manufacturer=Triumph&vehicle_category=On-Off Road&vehicle_model=Tiger&vehicle_trim=800 XC ABS

We understand that all of these URL varieties are considered unique URLs by Google. The issue is that we are getting duplicate content errors on the pages that have no results as they have no content to distinguish themselves from each other.

A URL like:
www.example.com/classifieds/search.php?vehicle_manufacturer=Triumph&vehicle_category=Sportbike
and
www.example.com/classifieds/search.php?vehicle_manufacturer=Honda&vehicle_category=Streetbike

Will have a results page that says "0 results found".

I'm wondering how we can distinguish these "unique" pages better?

Some thoughts:
-make sure <title>reflects what was search<br />-add a heading that may say "0 results found for Triumph On-Off Road Tiger 800 XC ABS"<br /><br />Can anyone please help out and lend some ideas in solving this? <br /><br />Thank you.</p></title>