Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Ryan has offered some great ideas.  Lots of those are not normally considered until after the problems hit. As a general rule, if you merge multiple websites, you unite their strengths and assets.  This is done by placing a 301 redirect on each of the existing domains so that any traffic that enters the site will be redirected to a destination on the combined site. If you have a main website like LakesidePrimaryCare.com, then each physician would have a personal profile page on that site.  I would redirect each of their former sites to their personal page on the combined site.   If you do that, their personal page will receive the strength from their previous site and help their personal page rank for queries like... "Dr Egol in scranton PA".   (Some benefit would also go into the entire site for any query that they are optimized to rank for.) If all of the redirects go to the homepage of the site it will give maximum power for the new site rank for "doctors in Scranton PA".  Which might be more beneficial for all but might be less satisfying individually.  (I would want this if I was one of the physicians, but I tend to be a team player rather than looking for maximum individual benefits.)  I believe that this option gives maximum benefit to everyone. In my opinion, and others will disagree, the old domains must remain on hosting with DNS pointing at them permanently and that 301 redirect must be in place permanently.   This can be done without paying hosting for all of the domains, if you have a server where multiple domains can be routed.  If this is not done any link popularity will be lost.

Thanks Don. The links are external. We do have a general 404 page, but for whatever reason, when he built this site, the developer guided those specific 404s to that news page. Thanks again.

Hi there, I am in a very similar situation with multiple manufacturers on my EComm site. You are absolutely correct in adding uniquely valuable content to the category pages. You can use the category pages to target key terms and engage users. Content on category pages is especially useful for targeting branded and long tailed key terms. In this case, the Canonical tags will not help you, because the duplicate content is not on pages within your domain. If you had the same product description on two products on your site, then the canonical tag would be appropriate. However, when you use that tag you are telling the engines that the authoritative page should be the page that ranks, which means there is a chance the other pages won't rank. If you use the "no follow" tag, your pages will not be crawled by bots, which means you have 0 chance of that page actually showing in search results. I would also suggest getting some user generated content on the product pages. Customer reviews and comments will eventually leverage the duplicate content. Aside from that, reviews are uniquely valuable to searchers, in my opinion, they are the holy grail of content. What consumer doesn't value an actual person's opinion of a product above a carbon copied description?

Thanks again!

Okay so you need to use the root to verify the domain first. Just stop the redirect to /index.php long enough for you to insert Google's verification code. Then turn back on the redirect. What google is trying to accomplish is to verify you actually do own the new domain. Since some domains share directories this is the only way for them to know you do own the domain since you can verify you control it at root. Hope that helps, Don

I think thats a great Idea .net is not my thing. All the best! Tom

Thanks for the detailed response Ryan.

If you want to permanently remove URLs from the index, this is the basic process: Have your developer implement NoIndex, Follow to all pages that have the URL parameter you want removed. For example, if the URL contains categoryFilter= (like above), then add the NoIndex, Follow tag to the of the page. Do this for all URL paramters you want removed from the index. Make sure Google is allowed to crawl those pages. If they are blocked by robots.txt or told not to crawl them via Google Webmaster Tools, Google will not be able to see the newly implement NoIndex, Follow tag. Then, give it some time and wait. It may take Google a long time to crawl all of these paramtered URLs again. Fallout of the index might be slow. Once the URLs are gone, consider blocking the crawling of them via robots.txt or in GWT parameter handling.

Hi Neil, As Don says there is nothing technically wrong with serving the site from a subdomain, google will simply see all the content as coming from the www domain, so no issues with indexing, getting page authority etc. The issue is likely to be the 'keeping some of the old links live' - I cannot think of a way you are going to be able to do this unless you recreate the old joomla content on the new wordpress install and either make the wordpress install serve the same urls as joomla did or 301 redirect the old urls to the new ones. When you say that you have advised that google will not be able to crawl them this means also that users will not be able to see them, that YOU will not be able to see them. So - they are not really live in any real sense (unless I misunderstood something!).

I was reading it as have a separate image sitemap thinking I needed 50 different sitemaps. This makes a lot more sense. Thank you.

If the admin subdomain is used for any testing purposes, then I wouldn't redirect it. If there is no specific use for it, you could do a 301. If it is used for testing purposes, then you could: block the crawlers noindex the pages (as Ryan mentioned it above) use canonical to the www. version I hope it was helpful. Gr., Keszi

Wow, interesting question. I am with you I would definitely worry about obfuscated text penalties (keyword stuffing) employing that particular method. I have no experience with these guidelines but I am interested in what others have to say about the matter. My initial though would be something like Directions [image: Directions-5th-Store.png] Under the assumption that a speech reader would read alt text since users wouldn't see the image. And of course the image could be something completely simple like an arrow or bullet point. I will wait to see what others may say, Good luck, Don

so if content is identical should I edit the meta tag to be identical? I have example.com/page & m.example.com/page identical in content. the mobile version does not include title meta tag at all.

Well typically the bot crawls multiple links on a page and when it hits a 404 or a redirect loop that particular action is stopped. It can prevent additional pages from being crawled.

Thank you both!

You're welcome.  Ok, I think the reason you're not seeing link data yet is because your site's redesign was done between the last two updates of OSE data. (http://moz.com/products/api/updates between December 4th and January 28th)  If that's the case, you should see link data soon as the next update is scheduled to go live mañana. You might also be able to get some update link data and testing via Google Webmaster Tools.  Thankfully other things with the redesign sound like they're functioning smoothly. Best of luck!

Hi, Having a self referencing canonical tag on your own pages is not a problem. The canonical tag needs to go into the head of the page though (it is not valid if in the body of the html) so just make sure that the 3rd party syndication service actually provides this - it might - but it might not I am guessing. Even with the canonical I would still include a clean text link back to the original page if this is possible (both as a second indication of origin but also for the visits it might send).

You're the best Thanks!

Hi Once the 301 redirects are in place and they should be done page by page not domain to buy domain. Creating a separate new URL that will hold content will not help actually it will hurt because that new URL will not have any authority. Simply redirect the URLs to the most relevant or exact URL on Wordpress. Take any of the quality content from the old (CMS A) and move that over to (CMS B) a.k.a. WordPress You will need a few of the things below. One of the most important ones is either a copy of screaming frog preferably the Pro version or deep crawl My preferred method is to use both but deep crawl rocks look at this article about site redevelopment it will index both sites and really make your life a lot easier http://deepcrawl.co.uk/use-cases/site-redevelopment http://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/ Definitely download the free version! & a pro- of screaming fraud there is a paid version it is 100 British pounds Read this guide it has incredible insight on how to use both tools http://www.seerinteractive.com/blog/screaming-frog-guide/ Here are the basics that you don't want to stray from at all take all this in before changing the URL. http://moz.com/blog/domain-migration-lessons http://moz.com/blog/web-site-migration-guide-tips-for-seos http://moz.com/blog/achieving-an-seo-friendly-domain-migration-the-infographic http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2067216/The-10-Step-Site-Migration-Process http://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-tutorials/how-to-move-your-site-from-joomla-to-wordpress/ http://www.reviewzntips.com/migrate-from-joomla-to-wordpress/ I hope this helps, Thomas

happy to be of help and remember if you ever have an issue with your permana  links breaking before you going crazy simply go into them and hit the save button this refreshes them and works miracles I promise you. All the best, Tom