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I changed to Wordpress SEO by Yoast. I had some issues with both Platinum SEO and Ultimate SEO, and have never had a problem with Joost's plugin. http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/

When moving content to a new site, I feel it is important to move as much as you can and leave little behind if you want all your pages to rank the same. The problem with moving pages and content is all the INTERNAL links, title tags, etc that make the website rank. It is much easier to delete pages after the whole website is moved. It very hard to put back all the Internal links and title tags. Yet these elements are critical to how people navigate your site and how google looks at the way you have supported the information on your website by linking to additional internal content relative to any particular page. In most cases if a website is ranking for multiple keywords in their business niche deleting any of the old pages, is just not necessary and may be harmful, until that page becomes a 'problem' to ranking, bad links to it, or simply not indexed anymore. Remember it is a counting game for most Internal links. So having 50 old pages linking to a new upper level and visible page, you want to rank, is very helpful. Even if the content is not something you want visitors to find, it is easy to leave the old content out of direct navigation on the new site so the only people that see it are from searches anyway and will be a small number of people. Everyone wants only high ranking pages, optimized to rank for particular keywords but that is rarely what happens. And google knows this, so having a mixture of poor pages and great pages actually will keep you from any negative points with google.

First, I wouldn't use https unless you really need that page to be secure, such as forms, shopping carts, or any page where someone inputs personal information, or where their personal information (or others') is displayed. Second, in cases where you really need to use https then yes, I would 301 redirect the http version to the https version of the page. You may also consider using rel canonical tags to help search engines figure out which version is the one you want them to use. Lastly, if you choose to go with http on some of those pages just make sure you update all of the internal links so they point to the right URL instead of relying on the redirects to do this for you.

Users can comment on the images, but there is no guarantee that we will get comments, so that is not a solution. Also, as mentioned before, there is no way for our editors to write a piece of unique text for each image. I understand that Google will not like these pages, but our concern is duplicate content, not to optimize these pages for SEO. Thank you for your comment.

Hi Diego, I feel your pain, this is a common problem with multi language magento sites. I think the main thing to do is to make sure the language codes are included in the url (so like http://footdistrict.com/en/). This way you will avoid all the problems associated with the url variables ?___store=es and language cookies which is a difficult situation to manage. You can set this up in the magento admin at configuration -> general -> web -> url options. That way there is never any doubt which language any url is displaying in. As it is now, you have a rel canonical to the same page from both languages that the server is serving up in two different languages versions and from what I can see with a site:footdistrict.com search has resulted in your english version is not being indexed (or at least not being indexed well). Getting it setup right has a number of challenges: you will need to check redirects from old urls are working properly, the language switcher needs coding adjustments to work properly, make sure you test it well in other words! Once setup like this you can use just one redirect from footdistrict.com/es to footdistrict.com and the rest of the product/category urls should take care of themselves. Hope that makes sense!

Hi There I'm honestly not sure about specific concerns with those platforms. But I can give a few general tips; In addition to redirects, be sure to maintain titles and descriptions (unless you're updating those too). Going from one platform to the next can change these all around due to default templates etc so you may want to just be sure they stay consistent. I'd  crawl the site with Screaming Frog a bunch of times right as it goes live to catch anything unforeseen: 404's etc. Monitor Webmaster Tools closely as well for errors and messages. I'll see if another associate has some Magento specific experience they can offer tips on. -Dan

You could move them all to one page and add some text content around them.

I'll be brutally honest - the Panda updates have been very unkind to this sort of geo-targeting. Five or more years ago, spinning out hyper-local pages that were similar (search results + a few keywords changed) was popular and relatively effective. Now, Google views it as thin content. In the past, the worst they might do is ignore it. Now, they may penalize the entire site, if taken to extreme. Personally, in 2013, I wouldn't do it at all. The rewards are very small, and the risks are surprisingly high. Is suspect that situation will only get worse. It's fine to have these pages for visitors, but I'd leave them out of the index. If geo-targeting is important, then focus on a few pages (maybe the state level or major markets) and try to build out some unique content for them. Without digging into your site, my gut reaction is that 300+ is dangerous.

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Thanks, Takeshi. As it turned out, most of the 404s would not have been passing very much juice anyway. We did decide to go ahead and hedge our bets by simply redirecting the majority of them to the root anyway and marked them as fixed in GWMT.

Awesome, good to know things are all okay!

thanks. I will start to sort it all now and see what happens.

have you tried to "disallow" google from crawling your images directory in your robots.txt file?  If you get a lot of traffic from google image search you would probably not want to do this, but if the current problem you posted about is your #1 priority to fix, not allowing google to crawl your image directory should fix your problem.

Hi Simon, I agree with Chris comments. The way you're implementing the "seasonality" update is certainly not the most SEO friendly nor the easiest to implement (by replicating your entire structure in your main and a sub-domain, which is not the best from a user experience, architecture and crawling perspective, even if you manage to not fall into content duplication issues by using canonicals or noindex, follow meta robots). There are many websites that update their content based on the season, for example, take a look at how Zappos does it, by enabling many offers in the available spots of their home page, giving them enough visibility, that take the user towards a internal landing pages gathering the offers targeting that season (which are the ones that will rank for those season keywords and you can re-use each year) or directly to the categories of the type of products in offers. If you need to update your look and feel you can do it without touching the Website structure, by updating your menu, text, background colors through CSS and even enabling some additional design elements, that won't affect the site architecture. I hope this helps!

Hi Stilianos, how did this work out for you?

Thanks Thomas but this site only uses wordpress for the blog.  The rest of the site is what I'm concerned with right now.

Hey Francisco, First and foremost, you should check why your traffic has dropped. Check whether it has dropped on a certain search engine or on a certain set of keywords or landing pages, or is it a blanket drop everywhere. Check whether your other sources of traffic have tanked as well (direct, referral, etc.) to see if you maybe have a website problem (Webmaster Tools can help you diagnose that as well). Also check some of the Moz reports available. Moz cannot read Google penalties, so your Domain Authority (as well as your traffic) might have dropped due to a sudden removal of a portion of your backlinks. As a side note, if your subdomain has been penalized due to spammy backlinks, there's a high likelihood your whole domain has been penalized as well.

Hi Michael, Once users find a tattoo on your site that they like, what would be the next thing? Perhaps they would like to know the inspiration behind the artwork, or how long it took to produce? How many sessions did it take to get to how it is now? What did the customer think of it? If they had it now, would they change anything about it? Without knowing too much about it, I would say there's probably a great amount of useful content you can provide your users and it'll go further into converting them than just a picture. Hope that helps! Andrew

Oh wow....it's back!!!  For over a week I've been stressing with this and the lost traffic/sales. Yeehaw  I can now enjoy my weekend.   Although I still have some forensics to focus on but still, a big relief.

Oh wow....it's back!!!  For over a week I've been stressing with this and the lost traffic/sales. Yeehaw  I can now enjoy my weekend.   Although I still have some forensics to focus on but still, a big relief. Lynn, I may not have checked again until tomorrow so you definitely made my night. Thank you for bringing it to my attention and for your feedback. Have a good weekend.