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Agreed on all counts Jason, not to mention the improved customer experience because we won't have people landing on those God-awful ugly and useless pages! From a server perspective, could deleting 8,000 files (pages, images, PDFs) results in our site speed improving too? Or would it likely have no impact?

I would recommend changing the links. Rel=canonical should carry across all authority for charter.intelliresponse.com to ask.charter.com, but you're still better off pointing all links you can change to ask.charter.com directly.

Hello, Did you check the "linked From" tab? click on each error and see which are the sites that are linked from

I'd assume GWT is returning a Soft 404 for those pages. Have you considered writing content for the page to express the need to log in for users to reach whatever important content is available via an account? That way Google sees that it is a real page and not so empty as to make them think it has 404'd. Or if there is no reason for Google to be indexing this page in the first place you could mark it NoIndex.

Chris Menke, Francisco Meza , Jeepster thanks for your response

thanks a lot robert for your answer

Not at all, I'm happy to help! I can only presume that the theme query you're getting is related to the WP/Joomla theme you're using.  Wouldn't be able to help specifically without seeing it, but I would assume that the URL without the "theme=default" at the end should be the canonical URL. For more stringent decisions - if you have a big amount of URLs and you're thinking of redirecting some, I'd start by looking at your analytics traffic - has any visitor come to your site via that URL within the last 60 days? If yes, I would definitely redirect.  If no, I'd ask this: Do you have any inbound links to that page? If you put in the root domain into Open Site Explorer and click on top pages and export the results into a CSV - you can see which pages have inbound links.  Those without links can be ignored, those with links should be 301'd (provided you are happy that the links are of a good quality), in order for you to preserve the link equity, or SEO 'strength', of the link.

Hi Lewis To be honest, you've done everything absolutely right.  The only other thing I could suggest would be to add to the head of those pages, if you haven't already. But from everything you've said and having tested it myself, it doesn't look as though Google now has any chance of reading duplicate content from the dev sub-domain. Have you received a warning in Google webmasters?  Have you submitted a reconsideration request if you think you have been penalised? There shouldn't be any duplicate content issue now that is affecting the live site's ability to rank. Panda refreshes may take a while, if indeed you have been hit at all, but you've done everything here spot on in my eyes. With that in mind, I'd focus on building quality content and links to your live site, in order to try and rank it.  I think you just need to show a bit of blind faith in Google to sort this out themselves.

Baldea, The domain was new indeed. We are going to try your suggestions and hope for the best! Fingers crossed indeed

yes ALeyda answer was more concrete for sure Glad to have been of help however

Hi Mark, has your question been answered?

Cheers Joel I did push past it and the crawl has run! Stephen

Thanks. Just had some light shed on matter though - the GA code was only partly correct. There was one lot of code on some pages and another on the others. Unfortunately the majority had the wrong code and it has now been updated. I found the missing traffic on one of our old GA numbers. Still working on redirects though but they can't be done through our CMS - it's an ancient version of Alterian and one we are locked into for some time :(.

Hi Michelle! Here are the steps on how tell Google when your site had moved: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=83106 Just follow the steps there and you'll be fine. Cheers!

IMO it is more about ease of use for the end user and less about SEO. If you have a good help sub-domain, it will automatically redirect users to the product site. Still If I had to make a decision, I would have compared metrics like pages/visit, time on site, bounce rate of help site and main site. If help metrics are better than the main site, adding content to main will add value else it will deplete value. Also if it is only one product, it makes sense to have help within main site bur for multiple products, you should be better off with sub domains (product wise and not docs vs main). Please see and decide what is best for your users first, keeping SEO at second priority. Hope it helps. Nitin

Thanks guys!

Thanks for your response Kyle Jack

Hi Matt, Maybe you can help me with this one too, as it may be similar?? I have a series of folders that are in the structure: c/123456/bags.html   (the "123456" can be any series of 6 digit numbers), and the "bags.html" can be any product I need that to be 301 redirected to: /default/bags/bags.html Thanks, Paul

It depends on what you mean by "Good". IBM is used by more of the Top 25 e-commerce Sites (sites doing more than about $1B/year in sales) and has scaled larger than any other e-commerce platform you can buy, so in that sense it's certainly "Good." I say "you can buy" because amongst the Top 25 sites, the most popular solution is actually to build your own solution.   That should give you a good idea of how Top 25 sites operate, they have large teams of developers that build features on top of the "platform".  They think of their product as a "platform" they develop on, rather than a turn-key "solution" they use. In the Top 25, you mostly see In-House, IBM, Oracle, and hybris.  hybris actually only has 1 site in this group, but that's largely because it takes these firms a LONG time to adopt a new platform, and hybris has so much momentum in the marketplace, that I include them in the top tier. If you look at a broader group like the top 275 sites (sites above $50M/year in revenue), you still see a lot of in-house, IBM, Oracle, and hybris, but you also see GSI, Fry, and DemandWare.  Many of these sites will still do a lot of development, but you'll start to find some sites trying to use the product as an out of the box solution, or sites that outsource their development to third parties. Another challenge with these top end systems, is that (because there are so many extensions and customizations) it's very difficult to upgrade to newer versions.  I tend to call them "Re-Implementations" rather than "Upgrades", so even when the vendor improves the features of the platform, it takes a long time before the clients get around to upgrading (if ever). Specifically with your IBM site, if it's older than about 2 years (older than WCS V7 FeP 2), then you have almost no business user tooling for SEO.  All changes need to be made to the Java Server Page files by programers.  If you have V7 FeP2 or later, you have tools to set the default templates for URLs and Meta Data (Title Tag and Meta Description), and you have good business user tooling to over-ridding those defaults on a page by page basis.  But if you need to do any structured markup, site-map generation, canonicalization, etc... you'll still have to do it via developers not business users.  Also keep in mind that depending on what else is in your stack and how it's implemented, such as a third party search engine (very likely if your still on WCS 6) or a content management system, IBM may not even control all the SEO elements for all your pages. So at the end of the day, IBM, Oracle, and hybris are all "good" systems for very large sites.  hybris is more modern/younger, so it is more user friendly.  DemandWare is a SaaS solution and can be pretty turn-key if you want.  But none of these platforms are as user friendly for business users as the solutions for small sites like Magento or Shopify. If I were running a $1B site, I could do it with IBM, Oracle, or hybris and my SEO team would be handing specs to developers to implement   The deciding factor between those 3 platforms, would not be SEO features, it would be things like total cost of ownership, native mobile support, speed, search, content management, merchandising features, and the ability to hire subject mater experts.  Frankly, the implementation team would be more important than the platform. But if I were running a $20M site, I wouldn't want to do it on any of those platforms.  Note: Most $20M/year sites, want to be $200M sites, so it's still very common to see IBM and Oracle used on small sites, but they often struggle. I hope that gives you some food for thought.  If you're willing to share more details about your site and your challenges here, I'd be happy to give more specific advice. Cheers, -Jason "Retailgeek" Goldberg