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Redirecting at the registrar level doesn't allow you to redirect individual pages, only entire domains. In some cases, that's not an issue but if you're redirecting a site that has back links pointing at internal pages by redirecting the entire domain, then you are foregoing a lot of the value of those back links.  Redirects on the host can let you redirect one specific internal URL to another specific internal URL and keep much of the value of the links pointing at the old URL.

oke. So if i would like to try to get better SEO results(better organic results) i should get rid of the tabs and put the hidden content and hidden links below eachother.?(like Amazon) Here you can see an example of our current productdetail page with tabs: http://goo.gl/wce1EO

Hi Rickus, As long as you remember the https --> http redirects and changing any canonicals, you really shouldn't see any issues. There is no advantage or disadvantage to one over the other either way. Check out this MOZ post on best practice redirection for hints. That said, do remember that Google will treat this like a completely new site and with it, you might see some bouncing around of positions in the SERPs while everything is settling down again. That might be completely unavoidable. -Andy

Thanks that what I thought but in the end I made a recommendation against doing anything and keep the website as is. It seemed too risky.

Hello, The canonical looks fine, also you should be ensure your internal links which should point to the canonical version of your page, also the external links count (they should link to your canonical version). Also you can include the robots clause on your short version as NOINDEX,FOLLOW. It will resolve your problem Hope it helps Claudio

Hi John, Typically when you switch from Flash to HTML, you'll see a nice bump in organic traffic as search engines have a hard time with most flash sites. In your case, you are using the hash bang to deliver content to users and the escaped fragments to deliver content to search engines on your new site. While this should be ok, it isn't always. It should be more effective for you than your main current site though. SEO-Browser is a good tool to simulate how a search engine would see your site. You can see your old site here (note, from the cached version it appears that Google is actually accessing some of your flash content) and your new site here. Ideally, you'd have a site that relies entirely on HTML/CSS to display your content to users. In your case, I'd feel comfortable updating the main site to the new version. A couple notes here - make sure you remove the noindex tag from the new site when you transition from the old site to the new site you shouldn't have the two sites accessible by search engines at the same time as they utilize much of the same content I've never heard of anyone going to a Wix site for SEO. If you want to use a simple CMS that is good for SEO, I'd recommend WordPress.

Thank you for the info, Nick. The link is the logo in the header, so mousing over it brings up "Home." Most sites don't bother with the ALT tag, but since it is being used, we might as well make it a bit more informative with the company name. The company name isn't well branded, so little things like this can only help.

Hi I put it on the back burner for a while. This morning i had another go and I think it was caused by shortcodes for accordion style links put in a long time ago by someone else. I've taken the shortcode out and will see if things have improved on the next report.

Have you found an exact answer to this? I really ned to know it too Thanks

It's not necessarily an SEO problem (as long as you don't redirect all 404s to your homepage at least. I've seen that be an issue in the past.) However, use it as an opportunity.  Make the 404 a sales page if you have that many.  It's a lander now for "the product you were searching for is out of stock - here are the search results on our site for similar products" etc.  You can turn it into something productive to have that many 404s. From WMT, mark them as fixed and then anytime one pops up, find out what is linking to the product and try to remove that link.  You don't want to be linking to 404s internally if you can help it (bad user experience = Google's nightmare) so having 1000s of 404s isn't bad but try to break any internal links to them.  (Xenu can help as well if you don't feel like waiting for WMT.)

Possibly, but as Keri says, it comes with substantial risks as well. I did a video post about this awhile back that may be worth watching: http://moz.com/blog/save-your-website-with-redirects I'd make sure your supplemental pages link appropriately to the landing page, and make any necessary on-page improvements before considering a redirect. On the other hand, if the supplemental pages don't offer unique content or mostly consist of duplicate content, it may be appropriate to redirect. Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.

Good point. If you don't want the filter pages crawled at all, it would be better to just block them via robots.txt. My preferred approach is to use query parameters for filters, and canonicaling the filtered pages back to the original, unfiltered page. Another approach is to use AJAX to dynamically filter the page. This takes more programming overhead, but won't result in tons of extra pages being crawled and potentially indexed.

Thanks for the help guys! Appreciate it.

Thanks Martijn. The more I look at it the more I think that it not a good fit in this situation.

Thank you everyone, lot of interesting information. We'll take the approach suggested by Miriam of building up organic authority slowly and we're already on with Adwords (this site is only 5 months old so it was the obvious choice over the winter). I'm also going to follow Rob's advice and focus on a few local areas based on Analytics to try and get a bit more visibility until we build up some domain authority. Thanks again, Rodney

I agree with Keri...there are a ton of factors that all contribute to ranking for any given term.  It's possible to rank well based simply on a few of them, if it's not super-competitive space.

Super thanks for the heads up. I will start an new topic.

Thank you all for responding. Your answers were very clear and useful. Best regards, Marike

Sometimes catalog businesses have customers who feel more comfortable with an online version of their printed catalog than an eCommerce site. In such cases it can be a good user experience to have those available online. However, I would not allow them to be indexable. I'm assuming the products are all available on product pages in the eCommerce site, which is where I would focus my efforts. The online version of the printed catalog in PDF (Other formats, such as flash or AJAX work well too) should just be a feature for users, not necessarily for search.