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I'm going to disagree a little bit with the other commenters. I've done quite a few large scale redirect projects and I'm not 100% opposed to using a "dirty sitemap" for a short duration. The better option is to leave some internal links pointed at the old URLs. I know what the search engines say, but I also know what I've experienced when it comes to getting 301'd links crawled again. Read this post by Everett Sizemore for more info at what I'm describing: http://moz.com/blog/uncrawled-301s-a-quick-fix-for-when-relaunches-go-too-well

Yes, fix the links. As Anthony says, there has been a lot said about 301s passing only 90% of link juice, and why accept only 90% when a couple of days work can get you 100%? Even if the 90% thing is all rubbish (I believe it may be but, Mr Cutts did say 301s 'don't pass as much juice' (I am paraphrasing) so there probably is something in the 90% thing.

As usual, a good answer from Chris Menke. Santaur, you asked: "Should I keep the SubCategory page "Men's Ski Clothing" if it helps usability? " I say "Yes". If it helps usability, as sub-category pages often do in this type of situation, you should keep them. You can add content to sub-category pages to help them rank better for phrases that will bring in the RIGHT customer from the SERPs, even if they don't know yet what specific product they want. For example: "Overstock Ski Jackets" or "Discount Ski Jackets" would align with your client's value prop, target high-converting keywords, and bring in the right visitor to the right page.

Glad to hear it! Yeah, patience isn't easy, that's for sure.

Signed certificates do cost money but it's relatively low if you stick to providers like GoDaddy.  Verisign and Thawte are sometimes considered a "better certificate" as the companies carry more clout but most users won't know the difference and you'll certainly pay a difference. https requires more overhead than traditional http because the content has to be encrypted in transit.  If you submit data like checkout details, address, name, etc it also has to be decrypted by the server before it can be interpreted.  The load is really minimal for most modern servers but it's worth mentioning if you plan to use slower hosting on a high traffic site.  It can become a real bottleneck on very high traffic sites as load balancers need to see decrypted traffic which requires the use of an ssl decrypting appliance in front of the load balancer.  -- Again most of this probably isn't relevant to you but it bears mentioning. Server(website) ---> encrypted data ---> Your browser -Nick

First, I have to second Marie - the easiest way right now to detect a Penguin drop is to look at the publicly released update dates and compare them to your search traffic. Penguin often hits hard and fast - it's not usually subtle. One thing I think you have to be careful about is your definition of "quality" vs. Google's. For example, diversity matters to Google. If you guest blog on generally decent sites (non-spammy, for lack of a better word), but that's your only link-building tactic, you could still be in trouble. It's just not natural, in Google's eyes, and they're going to think you're only guest blogging to get links (which may be the truth). It's not that your posts are bad, but you're relying too much on one tactic to the point that it could look manipulative. I'm not saying this is what you're doing - just making a general observation (and one that affects a lot of people right now, IMO). At first glance (and, please note, link profile analysis can be tricky), I'm seeing a lot of keyword-loaded anchor text. It's a bit tricky, since you have an EMD (so your "brand" is keyword-based), but you may be pushing the variants of "banner(s)" too hard. Again, that can be a sign of artificial link building patterns. Frankly, you've also got some links that look outright spammy. Take this one, for example: http://www.constructionindustryscheme.org/ Your link is at the bottom (not even really in a footer) with no context or relevance to the page. This looks incredibly artificial.

Sorry for the delay in responding. The holidays caught up with me! I'm not sure why OSE would still include those links so long after the site was taken down. Could you email help@moz.com and give our help team the details, so we can investigate and see if there's a bug? Thanks!

Hi Michael, First, I need to clarify something. If you have .es, .it. de, those are not language domains, they are ccTLDs, targeted at different countries. .es is for Spain based sites, not Spanish language sites. If your translations are on ccTLDs, you are sending the wrong signals to Google and Bing. A ccTLD is always geo-targeted to that country and for some of these domains, the language you mean to target is actually much larger than that country. For instance, only half of the world's French speakers live in France. If you are just meaning to translate your content, I'd suggest moving that to your main domain and putting them in subfolders, so www.domain.com/es www.domain.com/it (for italian, not Italy). Once that is all settled, linking to the others in the footer is not hurting your link equity, but it isn't necessary either. For translated content, you should be utilizing HREFLANG and the Meta Content Language tag (for Bing) to note to the search engines what pages are translations. Then you simply need to give users a way to change the language either at the top of the page (preferred) or the footer. If you mean to geo-target (developing different sites to target different countries), then my answers change completely, let me know if that's what you are trying to do here rather than just translate. If you're not sure what to do, check out this tool I made to help you pick the best international strategy. http://www.katemorris.com/issg

I can understand hosting the forum on a different sub-domain if it's markedly different from your site.  If you market the forum separately and the forum and your page link to each-other it could have an SEO benefit, but if you don't plan on treating them as two separate entities under your umbrella, I'd look for new hosting.

Hi there I've not tested this, but this could be what you're after: http://www.nopcommerce.com/p/945/supermodal-advanced-modal-popup-plugin.aspx, http://www.pronopcommerce.com/super-modal-plugin Hope this helps.

Hi there! It looks like your site has now been indexed. Martijn gave you some good advice. Did it help answer your question? If so, please mark it as a "good answer". Thanks! Christy

As others have mentioned, unless you are using dedicated servers it's likely most of your accounts are already closely related IPs and/or c-blocks already, so switching to a combined account will likely make little or no difference. In my personal opinion, I'm not a huge fan of Godaddy for my own hosting as I have a perception of a lot of low-quality sites also hosting there, which could influence my performance if they share the same server as myself, or spam from the same IP. I perfer to go with dedicated hosting or choose a slightly more pricey host to "raise the bar" on my neighbors. Probably doesn't make a big difference in the end but I have my superstitions.

Karen - So, I've taken a look at the site, and it looks like: 1. The site loads quickly - 1.29 seconds, according to a Pingdom Website speed test. To me, this means that your hosting is fine, and that you don't have any problems with the user experience, or how long the images or other assets take to download. 2. The home page has about 825 words of content.  This might be an area to increase the content, perhaps.  You do seem to have seven images on the home page that don't have ALT tags on them.  This is best practice, and while you shouldn't try to stuff keywords in them, you're raising a red flag and missing an opportunity. 3. Your site has a 33 domain authority, and the home page has a page authority of 43.  You have 5,061 inbound links from 92 root domains. Your site has 1 facebook share, and zero likes, and 0 tweets and 0 Google +1s.  I think from a social media signaling perspective, your profile needs more inbound social media love to rank better. 4. Here's more technical information on what a search spider simulator found: Access and Status search spiders are not blocked by robots.txt Status code after all redirects: 200 0 Redirect(s) Title Outdoor Blinds Perth | Patio Blinds | Cafe Blinds | Bozzy Shade Blinds Title length is about right Meta Description: Bozzy Shade Blinds - a leading provider of outdoor blinds, patio blinds, cafà blinds and shade sails in Perth and WA. The description length is about right, but watch out for the illegal characters. Key words The words shown below should be words that make sense for your webpage content: blinds - used 45 times on page outdoor - used 18 times on page shade - used 12 times on page bozzy - used 11 times on page Links The tool found 104 total links on the home page of your site: 48 unique links 38 unique internal links 6 unique external links 3 links not counted (href='#' or 'mailto:' etc.) 24 image links 0 nofollow links - (listed below if present) My $0.02: There may be too many links on the home page.  According to the "Feed the Bot" site, this might be normal for well linked to major media/news sites and online retailers. [But] if you aren't famous and you don't have a lot of links to your pages this is probably too many links. You are likely confusing users with too many choices and may appear to search engines as spammy. If you have legitimate reason for so many links, you may want to organize your site better so that there aren't so many links. You also need to work on better social media sharing to increase your presence. Also, it looks like the domain was last modified today (12/30/2013).  I'd recommend renewing it out a couple of years...

Have you looked for any SEO companies or individuals local to you? If you find someone, Google has some advice on what to look out for here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35291?hl=en You could post a job on a website such as www.peopleperhour.com and www.elance.com and invite applications. If you're willing to post your link publicly, you could get some free help here...or maybe we could help you anyway. The first questions I'd ask are; is your blog registered on Google Webmaster Tools, and if so, are there any messages regarding a penalty in your account? Do you have many pages with duplicate or little content?

Cool, you bet - thanks for following up and letting us know it worked out

Hi there, Verifying your Webmaster Tools account via Google Analytics shouldn't have any impact on your ability to see links pointing to your site. How old is your site? If it's brand new, there might just not be any links pointing to it yet. Are there any links that you have manually verified exist? What do you see if you run your site through Open Site Explorer or Majestic SEO? It's also worth noting that Google doesn't necessarily list every link that they've discovered in your Webmaster Tools account. So if your site is very new and only has a few links pointing to it, it's possible that they've just chosen not to display those links in your account. Tim

Hi there! Were you able to sort this out, or not? Please let us know, thanks! Christy

Sorry for all the posts however maybe this will help you as well that get rid of the dynamic uRLs http://www.webconfs.com/url-rewriting-tool.php Thomas

Not 100% sure if it's Penguin per se but it's definitely a link based problem. Look at all of the top anchor text to the site - it's entirely commercial keywords --> http://screencast.com/t/gt4zbWiWNxMc What I've seen happen in this cases is that you will artificially rank well for some of those keywords for a little while and then a link algo catches up with you and you'll drop to where you should have been (or lower) all along. Your on-site isn't as poorly over-optimized as other sites I've seen, but it could be toned down a little but removing keyword repetition / stuffing in the titles/URLs/descriptions etc. You should definitely try to change the anchor text on any of the back links that might be good links, but just too optimized from an anchor standpoint. Use natural non-exact match anchors or branded / domain for the anchor text. For any links that are just plain old bad/spammy/low quality - try to remove them or disavow them.

Hi, Would you mind sharing the URL? Thanks! Merry Christmas!