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It seems like these pages were gaining links for you so I would suggest recreating them to the best of your ability. Hopefully it will be high enough quality content again that people will continue to link to it. A 301 is great too but content that relates to something may not be what people will link to in the first place. Either way it sounds like you know what you are doing SEO wise, but now just think what would be better for the reader. Perhaps 301 them all now and create the pages as you have time? Good luck.

Great, I really appreciate the info.

Great information.  Thank you.

Good luck. Like I said, this is just me being silly. I pray to my Google shrine twice a day and this is what it tells me. All at once or drip feed, either way your content gets up there!

I think you've answered your own question by noticing that the searches for Brad Pitt photos and Brad Pitt images are different. I think Google is smart enough to know that photos and images could mean the same thing, but still treats them as different entities. For my titles, I try to add variations but I'm careful not to look like I am stuffing. Another thing you could do is try an experiment.  Title the page "Brad Pitt Photos" and after a while see if it ranks for "Brad Pitt Images", then change the title to "Brad Pitt Photos and Images" and see what happens to the SERPS.

Hello, In fact there are several types of URL Standard URLs:     domain.php?p=12 Basic Friendly URLs:     domain.php?product-12 Advanced Friendly URLs:     domain.php/product-12 Mod Rewrite Friendly URLs:     domain/product-12 The difference is in how they are written or rewritten in .htaccess file, if RewriteEngine on and rewrite rules are defined for your server. Enabling friendly URLs can increase your site's ranking in search engines and can be useful and friendly for users to understand the URL's that they follow. Radu

Yes. It isn't a lot of help, but yes, it is a factor and you should definitely do it. You can also consider altering the name just slightly. For example, if your keyword is "toy" then you can name the image "toys". Also, be sure your ALT tag is used as well.

A couple years ago I had about a hundred pages that described closely related substances.  Their title tags consisted of the name of the substance and a few other words.  I launched those pages and saw where they ranked and decided to change the words in hopes of better rankings.  It worked good but not great as I was hoping.  So I changed them again, and then again... BAM... my rankings droped big time.  Like from bottom of first page to third page.  They stayed there for a few months then moved up.  Now almost all of those pages rank near the top of the first page. Based upon this I think that Google is tolerant of a little bit of experimentation.  But when you really go at it you might get demoted for a while.  Now I don't monkey with title tags.  I research first and then launch.

I agree with all of the above comments. The only reason I'd use a subdomain would be for a members-only area or support section that you don't want ranked or indexed.

1. Create 301 redirects from any of the old pages to their equivalent new pages - this tells Google that old content has moved from www.abcdomain.com/page1.html to www.abcdomain.com/category1/page1.html for example. Do that for every page. If there isn't an exact match for the old page - redirect it to an equivalent page where possible. (You can get a wordpress plugin to manage your 301 redirects - if you want to manage/monitor them - but modifying the .htaccess file is better. You might want to create a spreadsheet or list based on an existing sitemap perhaps of the old url structure and the new one and cross reference them and mark each one as redirected as you create your 301 list for the htaccess file. 2. Resubmitting a new xml sitemap in Google.com/Webmasters may help the changes get picked up a little quicker. 3. Advise the client that 301 redirects can take a few weeks to properly kick in in terms of Google giving them back 90% of the authority they had previously - so you are likely to dip in the rankings for a bit - however, the better optimised site will eventually offset that and take it beyond where it was previously.

In an earlier reply I shared two steps you can take that MAY help resolve this issue. As EGOL shared, it's Google's website and they can do as they deem best. With that understood, by understanding how Google works we can help them meet our needs by making a few logical adjustments to our site.

No, you would keep MOST of the link juice. You would lose between 1-10% of your link juice with the redirect.

You can also see how much of your desired content Google is indexing. in Google Webmaster Tools, you can see that you've submitted 65 pages and 45 pages of those are indexed. You still need to figure out for yourself which are those 20 pages, but you know that there are some things not being indexed.

Thanks for your input guys. I will definitely forget the Z option and carry on looking for a non-hyphenated alternative. Since reading your replies and taking on board your advice, I have found a couple of possibile alternatives and I am even considering a domain without the keyword in at all. Sadly, EGOL, buying www.keywordguides.com is probably not an option. The budget for this project is tiny... I guess I am just going to have to be a bit more creative

So I advised him to remove it asap and wait until google has recrawled the site without that on there. What is the next step?  call Google and ask to review the site to see if there was a penalty?

Ive never seen any benefit proven and certainly wouldn't bother. Here's a short video from Matt Cutts answering just this question

If all your dealers are running your copy on their sites, verbatim, that could be a piece of your problem... certainly worth looking at. It's not uncommon for an affiliate to out rank their principal even though the principal had the original content up for a year or more prior. Another thing worth keeping in the back of your mind, as you chase this down - sometimes we don't drop in the SERPs because we dropped, but rather because someone else ROSE.