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I would recommend getting the link from their root domain(s) to the service hosted on your own domain as that wold most likely be more valuable.  This would do a few things. Referral visits. You could see pretty quickly how many people are coming from the university site to your site using the link. Endorsement strength. By having the link and university's explanation of your service on their site, they're providing additional trust based on people's past interactions with the university. This is partially an SEO thing, but also a conversion factor, i.e., "I trust my Uni's opinion so this is probably a worthwhile service." Simpler. You'll be managing fewer domains (just you're own) and won't have to worry about technical changes on the uni's side regarding the redirection and subdomain. There's all that, plust the newly created subdomain wouldn't carry nearly as much trust and authority as the root domain. It's why Wordpress.org doesn't get in trouble in Google if someone creates: reallyspammysite.wordpress.org.  Hope that clears it up. If someone else has compelling reasons for the other method, I'll let them expand on it.

Today it has a green check mark, and absolutely no changes were made to the website since I asked this question.

Good point! I need to check with all the users involved! Regards Peru

Thanks. It was purely a theoretical question, just trying to get a better handle on the relative importance of different ranking factors.

Hi Dov, You can definitely create separate sitemaps and GWT accounts for your two subdirectories if you prefer, but I don't think that it'll solve your problem. It sounds like the problem is, pages on the original subdirectory probably have a higher Page Authority and are outranking your new pages. When there are two pages on the same site that are both relevant for a search term, Google tries to only display one. So, your best bet is to make sure that there aren't any pages on the old subdirectory that are relevant to the keywords that you want the new subdirectory to rank for. You have two options here: Remove pages from the old subdirectory that are ranking for terms that you want the new subdirectory to rank for. 301 redirect their URLs to the new subdirectory. For pages that you would like to stay on the site, change the wording so it doesn't compete with the new subdirectory. I realize this is really general guidance, but it's tough to give more specific feedback unless I can see the site. Hope this helps, Kristina

Sorry don't think I replied directly to your comment... the previous site defaulted to English so every page on mysite.com was in English. The other languages were accessible via top navigation and those were/are found under mysite.com/jp/ mysite.com/aus/ The only change now is instead of having English pages on mysite.com/some-page/ they've decided to add the English subdirectory /en/ so you get mysite.com/en/ mysite.com/en/some-page/ The homepage was never a language select page because English is the most commonly requested language. I'm just wondering if adding /en/ to each page will have a negative impact to the site. A large chunk of our links were pointing to the old homepage www.mysite.com but now our homepage is www.mysite.com/en/ (keep in mind we have thousands of linking root domains pointing to all different parts of our site and we are considered an authority) Hope I explained that ok. Thanks.

To add to what Massimiliano said - once you change the URL to be more descriptive and you have 3 pages, 301 the /av to the closest related new page. Then, add internal links to the 2 other new pages that target their primary term/topic. This way you have the authority from /av going to 1 of the newly created pages and then the other 2 new pages have a clear internal link structure so Google understands they are a higher authority for the new topics they are targeting.

GWT for new index, then ask for complete read...then u/l a new .xml sitemap...

Well, that depends on the structure of your website and how you want to use category pages. For example, I manage an ecommerce website that sells Widgets. I have a high ranking XYZ Widgets product page. It sells amazing and since my price is so awesome, people link to it from their blogs and such. However, XYZ widgets just became discontinued. When the product page disappears, it creates a 301 to my main Widgets Category. My Widgets Category page isn't going anywhere (not being removed from the site anytime soon) and ranks high in the SERPs. All those 301'ed product pages help improve its authority and allows me to rank high for a broad industry term - it also acts an efficient landing page. That's just one store setup though, it could be that your category pages do not add value and you use a different page for that type of use. If you're not using your category pages to rank in the SERPs, then I would find which broad pages you do want to rank and have the product pages 301'd to those pages (to save any authority gained). In terms of Internal linking, since I want my category pages to rank, a clear internal link structure helps that case. It also ends up that my category pages have a higher internal link count because of the structure I have in place. That all contributes to the category pages ranking higher for broader terms and allows my product pages to rank higher for the specific terms.

Hey there, It really depends, do you want to remove the links from Google ? if so then a 301 redirect will passes 90-99% of power / link juice to the URL you point it to plus tells Google this URL no longer exist at that location and therefore drops it from its index. If you do not want to drop the URLS within the index then a 302 is a good way to temporarily keep them there if you are going to reinstate them.

ok thanks ! nothing has changed just hoped it might do something

Thanks Rob, clear answer, much appreciated Jez

As I said theoretically having the keyword you are after in the leftmost position is better. So if you already analyzed which keywords are the most relevant for you, you should try to place them in the leftmost position. If for example you are fighting a battle to improve your serp position for the query "property-name", you could decide to choose the second url in your example. But, as others have already mentioned, serp positions are influenced by many many many factors, and focusing too much one technicality can mislead you and shift your focus from the general picture. In general you should structure your content in folders, because google algo expect to find content structured that way, but it doesn't mean you have to in your specific case or for all your pages, or all your products, etc... You should structure your url, after analyzing your content, the keywords you are after and your visitors behavior (and I would give a look at your competitors as well). At the end you will have to make decisions between different possible url structures; you will have to take a risk making you best educated guess based on the analysis you have done, that's why I said the best thing you can do is "test". I can't tell which structure is best for you, because it depends on that lengthy analysis you should perform, there's not an answer which fit them all.

However, just because an image is visible in Google Image search, does not mean you have the rights to simply use the image as you see fit. Other parties may have intellectual ownership over each image.

All really good answers. Looks like a visual graphical resource guide will be the way to both provide value and no having too many links on the page. thanks guys.

Hello benseb, From what I'm understanding, your best bet is to 301 to the new page (assuming it provides quality content). Even though you may lose some "link juice" in the process, it is still a better option than risking poor url structure and link equity. Even producing some mildly relevant content would help you out in this case - using the same old, tired content and making the 301 simply for Google's sake might not be the best strategy, but if you can freshen it up and 301 correctly that would be optimal. Best of luck, Rob

Both measures are not really reliable to know how many pages are actually in the index. Googles definition on 'Total Indexed': Shows the total URLs available to appear in search results, along with other URLs Google might discover by other means. This number changes over time as you add and remove pages. The number of indexed URLs is almost always significantly smaller than the number of crawled URLs, because Total indexed excludes URLs identified as duplicatesor non-canonical, as less useful, or that contain a meta noindex tag. (source: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2642366)  => basically this number contains all the pages Google has been crawling since the launch of your site, and is quite useless as absolute figure, it's the evolution over time which is more important site:domain.com will show you pages that are eligible to show in the search results, but is not a really reliable measure either  - it's quite possible that more pages are indexed. On very big sites you will see this number change when you go to page 2,3,...Etc It is a good check to see if your site is indexed or not. That said, the number of pages in the index is not a very important figure, it's rather the ranking of your site for your main keywords which is important, as it is the main driver of your traffic.

Awesome, thanks for the answer

Thanks all, I'm glad 75% of you agree with my method. Thanks for the input!

Well, mine has about 250 for site:yoursite and about 3X that in GWT.