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Yeah, its better to ask then do something bad such as hidden content which google would not like in the slightest!

Have you not read the basics about what google does NOT want you to do to manipulate rankings?

I'm quite sure showing bots and humans something different and hiding content are towards the top of the don't do list! And is something very basic you should know not to do already

Hi Dan!

One issue, is the fact that your product pages are using the same content as multiple sites across the web - for example, check this search for a line of text from your first product link: http://goo.gl/OME7z

Is the content your own or taken from elsewhere? I'd try to have as much of your own unique content on each product page. Some of your product pages I can't even see indexed, http://www.roligaprylar.se/Jedi-Morgonrock.html for example is nowhere to be found.

The canonicals and noindexing of search pages is exactly what I'd have done though - when did you do this? It will take weeks to take full effect.

Thanks for the reply! Hmm, do you mean to add further scripted content to bulk out the pages? We currently have a lot of dynamic (so, near-duplicate, but basically duplicate) content on all of those pages - Page Titles are unique - but the content is the same, just replacing the City name in each paragraph. That's the problem really, so I'm not sure additional dynamic content will fix that unless I've got the wrong end of the stick?

Thanks for the reply - ideally the route we'd take is to have all of them rewritten, but the cost to do that is too simply high for ~1200 pages.

Further investigation shows that only around 500 of the 1200 pages actually bring in traffic, so we could lose (redirect to country pages) 700 of the pages, and write content for 500 - that would reduce the cost, but would still be fairly substantial. Will have to think about that; as you say, adding properly optimised unique content is definitely the way to go, just whether we can justify the cost.

Not sure about what to do about this - I have a client who has a ton of pages (around 1200) which are all City specific pages, for long-tail search.

These are all written with paragraphs in the format such as:

Order to [City] today.

So every page has essentially the same content. The site also only has 1562 pages, so with 1200 of them being City-specific same-content pages, that can't be good.

However the problem is that these pages still rank very well (usually Position 1 or 2) for the terms they're targeting, and bring in enough traffic and revenue to justify their purpose.

We also have Country specific pages, and these are all with unique content, rather than the scripted content on the City pages. So for example, for Italy we might have:

• Italy Page (Unique Content)
  • Rome (Duplicate Content)
  • Milan (Duplicate Content)
  • Venice (Duplicate Content)
  • etc. (Duplicate Content)

For a low traffic country (Austria), we tried to 301 the City pages to the Country page, but that only resulted in us seeing a drop in search results for the city keywords, from (usually) Position 1 to more like Page 3 or 4, so quite a drop.

So, without writing 1200 pages worth of unique content, what would your advice be?

Had a similar situation for a competitor site; best idea is to not get jealous over their high ranking - if they are doing something against Google rules then they will get a penalty in due time - don't resort to doing the same thing for a short term benefit, it won't work out in the long term. You can always report them if you think something is wrong.

Keep at it, focus on your own work and concentrate on improving where your site where you can, but don't get distracted by any black hat tactics used by competitors or you'll just join them when the penalty hits.

Hi Dan!

One issue, is the fact that your product pages are using the same content as multiple sites across the web - for example, check this search for a line of text from your first product link: http://goo.gl/OME7z

Is the content your own or taken from elsewhere? I'd try to have as much of your own unique content on each product page. Some of your product pages I can't even see indexed, http://www.roligaprylar.se/Jedi-Morgonrock.html for example is nowhere to be found.

The canonicals and noindexing of search pages is exactly what I'd have done though - when did you do this? It will take weeks to take full effect.

Have you not read the basics about what google does NOT want you to do to manipulate rankings?

I'm quite sure showing bots and humans something different and hiding content are towards the top of the don't do list! And is something very basic you should know not to do already