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That's a pretty big debate, actually. Google's Matt Cutts has said that they don't provide any SEO value, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they hurt you. In my opinion, they're still useful for their intended purpose—informing the press about newsworthy events. By my understanding, best practices include 1) make sure the links in the press release are nofollowed, and 2) avoid posting the press release verbatim on your own site. This actually came up in Q&A back in March. That thread might help clear things up for you. There are a few articles linked in the original post if you really want to get into things. Sorry that's not a more definitive answer. As I said, it's definitely something that's debated.

Hi there Here's a fantastic resource on Moz that can give you quite a bit of information and direction. There's a lot there, so make sure you take the time to go step by step through it. I'd also take a look at these content audit and backlink audit resources, especially to find potential links to remove or update for the old site. Hope this helps! Good luck!

Joost - that's correct! Yes, I assume woocommerce, since they are product pages.

My response to "domain opportunities" is usually, let the domain expire and spend the registration savings on beer. In this situation, I would do as you suggest and simply redirect.   That domain is relevant enough that I would give up the beer. I would not take one moment away from my focus on my main project just to use a domain.  I would only use it if I had a new project and that domain was the perfect fit.

Cheers Dirk, I will look to implement this fix, as always you've been great!

Peter, i'm trying to PM you but i have no idea what to place in the "recepient" field. Thank you for assistance.

These are normal 404 errors - the :443 after the url just indicates that it's using the https port (you can add the 443 after each of your https urls - they redirect to the normal ones); Don't know why wordpress is adding the :443 Check your site if you have internal links to these 404 pages (try Screaming Frog or another crawltool. These pages seem to have existed in the past: check this example http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:_M5jZnMoFmcJ:https://www.compleetverkleed.nl/hoed-al-capone-panter-8713647758068-2/+&cd=2&hl=nl&ct=clnk&gl=nl If no internal / external links to these pages exist - this problem should disappear after a while. rgds, Dirk

This is correct.

Thank you ATP for your answer +1 thumbs up

I think you make a very valid point. We first thought we could be getting penalized from the duplicate pages on our own site (which we couldn't find) but never questioned if our site was being copied. It seems like our content is being taken and re-purposed by other sites (a few competitors). This makes me feel both flattered and slightly irritated.

Hi Matt, We did resubmit the site about 4-5 days ago and I guess we will update some stuff as per advise from the other 2 responses and wait and see if Google picks it up. Thanks again for your help.

Patrick, Thanks for the info on disavowing backlinks. I'm just starting to dig into it. Re: Running through backlinks, I read the article you referenced. It was pretty comprehensive but it wasn't clear to me how to redirect a backlink to the new page. Is this something to discuss with the person responsible for linking to you or is there a technology solution you have in mind. I feel like a bonehead having to ask, but I'm eager to learn here, so I'm ignoring the potential for looking pretty stupid and asking anyway.

It was an error in the product URL field in the global settings. I believe they are in maintenance. We moved to big commerce a little while ago so I can't go back to the Volusion store. I know it was in the global settings field, I just don't remember how to get there.

Hi Eileen I just noticed you didn't respond to my questions here - are you all good? Would love to help in any way that I can! Also, can you provide a URL so I can review? Thank you!

Thats a good point actually, being UK based, i tend to forget States in the US is how you're likely to do location redirects (that and i read Colorado as Canada... my bad). The short answer i think is not directly. You could use the users IP address and something called mode_geoip in order to handle the redirects, it takes a bit more configuration and setup though. Im seeing lots about redirecting on country, not all that much on redirecting on state, but a good starting point is perhaps this Stackoverflow thread. It's probably something you'll need to ask a developer to do. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9838344/how-to-redirect-domain-according-to-country-ip-address

Another amazing easy to understand and clear answer. Thank you Dirk! As we are considering not offering spring bulbs at all anymore, I just leave it to a 404 page. Thanks again!

Can it be that the traffic from Google are expats? Since it's hard to give people a face solely based on Google Analytics data. Either way you look at it, I think the best solution is the one that services your visitors and is SEO friendly. And if you’re facing the situation you can’t choose between the two, I would always stick with designing for people instead of search engines. Since search engines are getting pretty smart in detecting unnatural “optimalisation” and a good user experience results indirect in good rankings (dwell time for example) as well.

Hi Tyler, I think about AJAX and Google this way: if you can see all of the content on your site that you want Google to see without AJAX, you're good. It looks like all of the content loads without JavaScript, it's just the filters that Google won't be able to use. So, if you have 12 items for sale like this example, I think you're in the clear. The problem is going to come if you start to have more products than you can fit on this page. Site architecture is a big part of rankings; you don't want the crawler to miss out on new products because they're on page 15 and the crawler never gets there. I see that you have a Popular Tags box, which may help with that, but you'll have to be very aware of that as you grow. This set up may also make you miss out on category pages, which can be extremely valuable. With this set up, I'm not sure that you'd be able to have a landing page for "Android Phones," for example. If Google could crawl your filters, it would be able to come up with that combination.Then again, you may have thought this all through, and are just asking about this specific page. Either way, I hope this helped!Kristina

I'd been asking about this on Twitter all week with no response.  Thanks for the link; that really helps!

Thanks for all your responses Linda and Dirk! The pages are not live on the first website so there will be no possibility of any redirects. Although i'm reassured now that we can transfer the descriptions over without being penalised. Thank you again!