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If the image does change, your alt attribute text should change the "content" of the page. However, I would question if it helps to have these pages indexed. I assume it's your gallery page you want indexed. If that is true and your site structure allows it, I would disallow all of those individual pages from being crawled using robots.txt. But that depends on the structure of the site. You can also just add a noindex tag on the image pages. David also has a good point. (Below)

Hi, I migrated a load of product category pages on one of my websites recently to cleaner URLs and to force the crawl I submitted the new URLs (and children) to index via WMT. This was to pick them up quickly - and it worked (within seconds). The old URLs appearing were never a problem. However there are limits to the number of times you can do this so that might be a sticking point for your solution as I'm guessing you have lots of products. Try it with one page (a low traffic and selling product!) and see what happens - and let us know. It's possible Google is holding onto your old URLs because they have a number of inbound links and the crawl will eventually catch up to only display the new URLs if you give it time. Aside from agreeing with the sitemap submission suggestion, I'd also triple check that your 301s / canonicals are set up properly on your website's old URLs by firing Screaming Frog or another crawler at it. George

If you've removed all the spammy links and got back into Google's good graces, you should be fine.

The most accurate way is to do it manually. Doing a site:YOURDOMAIN.com in Google will alert you to most of the ugly URLs you want to get rid of.

Kane is correct here. Generally, you don't want to index tagged pages because you'll run into duplicate content issues in addition to providing useless pages that do not bring much value. In terms of user navigation, tagged pages can be convenient but not as a strategy to grow your site. Here's another example of a personal site that has the category page with a  "noindex" tag (http://www.onblastblog.com/blog/) and chose to remove tagged pages altogether. If unique content was written on that category page, only then can it be considered to be indexed. If you're using WordPress, the best plugin to organize your basic title & description data is Yoast. Biznit, since you wrote that message a couple years ago, I hope you haven't exploited tag pages by creating hundreds and indexing them.

I don't think so. A long time ago in first days of the internet websites were no more widley used than other protocols such as ftp or telnet. a domain may have sub domains such as ftp.example.com, telnet.example.com or www<a>.example.com</a>. but example.com itself would not be used, since then websites are the main protocole used and people started to make example.com respond to websites. so really we don't need www anymore but best to redirect it just in case

Thanks Erica!

Thanks for all of the helpful responses!

Hi! Yeah, that's what i said. I would just ignore it and mark as fixed. Just be sure you crawl the whole site so that you dont have the old one linked on some page on your site.

Hello everyone and thank you for your answers. I sincerely appreciate it! I didn’t follow the redesign phase, I’ve just jumped on board now so I actually have no idea why they didn’t go for the 301 solution. As Monica pointed out the 404ed pages were actually valuable pages and, at least in my opinion, this is proved by the fact that now their traffic is close to 0. Their traffic literally dropped in a matter of days (kind of scary to see such a steep fall). I agree with Travis when he says that just the valuable pages should be 301ed, but the thing is that they sell their products online, meaning that hypothetically every (product) page is equally important. They were neither old nor poor quality…I guess they just skipped the 301 step. I will do some more research but I guess that, as you guys suggest, the best way to go is 301 all those pages and see what happens. I have no idea if they did anything on the social side but that’s worth investigating some more. Thank you very much for now! I will keep you updated Cheers

Thanks!

(This is all speculation as I've never done this before.  There are probably people in the forum that have) Be aware you're switching from a ccTLD to a gTLD.  Is the clinic primarily for Canadian residents?  In the simplest terms, switching from a .ca to a .clinic may hurt your Canadian rankings, and help your rankings everywhere else.  If you want your site to continue targeting Canadians specifically, you can set that in your Google Webmaster Tools, although I think having the .ca domain itself is a stronger indicator to Google that your site is geared towards Canadians.

These two URL's http://simplycrowngreenbowls.wordpress.com/ http://simplycrowngreenbowls.com/ Should 301 Redirect to http://simplycrowngreenbowls.co.uk

Ok, if I would be at your place, I will choose one of these solutions. -          301 the URL to appropriate live URLs so that when traffic lands, it go to relevant page or a custom 404 page that tell user the page is not available (and give links to other parts of the website). This is a good idea to retain visitor to the website even when the page is dead. -          If you really want to remove the URLs from Google, in webmaster tool there is a remove URL section, use that and it will remove from the index for 90 days and as the header status of those URL is already 404 they will not come back again. Ever! Hope this helps! 404 hurt rankings? In my personal experience, too many 404 on the page does!

I'll reserve my answer until you hear from your dev team. A massive site for sure. One other question/comment:  just because there are 13 million URLs in your sitemap doesn't necessarily mean there are that many pages on the site. We could be talking about URI versus URL. I'm pretty sure you know what I mean by that, but for others reading this who may not know, URI is the unique Web address of any given resource, while a URL is generally used to reference a complete Web page. An example of this would be an image. While it certainly has its own unique address on the Web, it most often does not have it's very own "page" on a Website (although there are certainly exceptions to that). So, I could see a site having millions of URIs, but very few sites have 17 million+ pages. To put it into perspective, Alibaba and IBM roughly show 6-7 million pages indexed in Google. Walmart has between 8-9 million. So where I'm headed in my thinking is major duplicate content issues...but, as I said, I'm going to reserve further comment until you hear back from your developers. This is a very interesting thread so I want to know more. Cheers!

Thank you very much for the time and consideration to answer my questions. I really did appreciate it. Sincerely, Koki

It looks like the url's being shown are unique categories. I don't know if switching to a flat url structure will help, or just change the url-ref (rho-1..). I think Magento (at least community) needs a better canonical handler than what is built in, I find that Ultimate Seo from Mageworx takes care of most of these issues including ones caused by pagination and layered navigation. If these are unique Categories, then unique content should be created or you will need to overwrite the default magento canonical's with a module and point to one Rho category. You might also want to consider making 'Collections' apart of your layered navigation instead of creating unique categories for each shopping style

Like others have said, DA is just a number and in today's Googles eyes, it's all about relevancy of the page, rather than the page authority. Also a site might have a high DA, but if the link juice doesn't pass down to the page where the link is, DA is irrelevant. how about looking at links in a different way. Instead why not image Google doesn't exist and the only way to get relevant traffic to your site is from other websites talking and sending referral traffic (through a link). You would then only place links where you know you would get decent traffic and sales - think like this and you will get the relevant links and rank nicely. DA and numbers are irreverent then, it's all about relevancy

Sounds a plan. Thanks for your help bud, much appreciated.

Does he benefit from the images ranking so highly? I haven't seen many studies where image clicks result in good traffic, especially in terms of revenue if it's an e-commerce site. It seems a strange way of doing things. Are you saying the images don't match the text content of the page? The context an image is placed in can help it rank, so it seems strange that these images are ranking based on their historical context. Google reads CSS so should see that the images are hidden. Unless you're blocking Google from seeing the CSS which is now against Google's Webmaster Guidelines: https://plus.google.com/+PierreFar/posts/TLeHSDRwjhB If you're not blocking Google from the CSS, all other things being equal, then 301 redirects of the page and images could be enough, though I wouldn't be surprised if the rankings drop as from the information you've given (and assuming they're relatively competitive keywords) I'm surprised the rankings have remained for so long! The best way to preserve the image rankings would be to have the images on a page with relevant content.