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That depends upon why the page stopped ranking.  If it was being filtered for duplicate content then rewriting might bring it back if your new content is unique. If it stopped ranking because you have an overabundance of exact match anchor text links pointing at the page then rewriting will probably not work.

When I did a similar transition with hundreds of thousands of links. I created a database table with source and destination columns. Then a script that handles all 404 requests. If the requested link matches an entry in the source column, the user is sent a 301 to the matching destination entry. That allowed for easier maintenance than a huge htaccess file and the server load caused by te script should go down over time as 301 are saved and you contact site owners to update links. The other benefit is that you can do enhanced tracking to see what is request, found and not found and where those people came from.

You product pages (and other pages, though haven't dug through the rest of the site) have rel=canonical tags in their headers, Lorraine. These are likely being created automatically by your shopping cart software. This is a very good thing. Including the canonical tag in the head of each page is considered best practice. Unfortunately, SEOMoz's Crawl Report Page doesn't' do a good job of explaining that the Notices section doesn't mean those items have problems, it's just advising that those features are present on your webpages so that you can confirm that you actually want them and that they've been implemented correctly. In your case, the canonical tags are desirable and have been implemented correctly. The thing the notice is telling you that I would check on though is that the tags aren't appearing on each page (For example, your home page doesn't have a canonical tag) I would check with your site software/developer to see if it's possible to implement it on all your pages. Make sense?

I know you posted this a while ago, but I've just seen it. The simplest way would be to generate your ROBOTS meta tag based on the parameter. I code in PHP so this is my example, but it will depend on your platform Say your URL is domain.com?lang=es or ?lang=po or ?lang=de $lang = $_GET['lang']; if($lang=="de"){ echo ''; } else{ echo ''; } I left 'follow' in the German line because you may already have pages in the index, so this means Google DE has free reign over all your site, but any pages it finds should not be indexed. If the site's not live yet, then you can change the 'follow' in the DE line to 'nofollow'. Hope this helps.

May as well kick-start the responses! I'm a Schema fan, it's easy to implement and gives Google and other search engines the information they need. I don't think you need to be too concerned about one over the other so long as your microformat is, in an of itself, correctly implemented. An advantage of using Schema is that you can use Google Webmaster Tool to check your rich snippet so you have confidence to know it's done right. But I'm just one opinion

Hi Marisa, Thank you for the kind words. It seems not many people seem to understand the point system. I am not blaming anybody to this point it out hope you're doing well your friend, Thomas

If you are using Yoast for seo, there is an option which redirects the attachment pages back to the original post page :} if not , then you can use your robots.txt to block off these attachment pages :} hope that helps

Modesto has a great post about moving servers at http://www.seomoz.org/blog/web-site-migration-guide-tips-for-seos that should help you out a bit.

just added a new one as i work in k2 http://www.in2town.co.uk/component/option,com_dmk2googlenewssitemap/lang,en/

Would it help your client? Probably not, but I think you might have a cool idea! I have always been a big fan of creating community pages.  If you can create a site for any group of people in which they can come to rely on you and your content, as well as feel like they can contribute, than it is a win/win for everyone.  Make it more than just guest blogs though.  Think about how you can generate interest through White Papers, webinars presented by leaders in the industry, even a YouTube channel in which your members can discuss the latest trends in rodent destruction.  Think about it as if you are creating an SEOmoz for rodent eradicators.  I think that there is something there.  You can focus on helping them run their business more efficiently, marketing their business, etc.  You will also be able to monetize it relatively easily with the inclusion of banner ads and content generated by companies that target exterminators. There are similar websites (see Pestworld.org), but I have not seen a community site yet.  Doesn’t mean it isn’t out there, I just did a cursory search. Good luck!

Hey William, Thanks again. I've made a point to significantly increase the content on affiliate landing pages. We optimized title tags a few days ago so hopefully they're indexed very soon. Campaign turned up the following crawl diagnostics: Too Many on-page links. (800 errors, many pages with 130-140 links)  We made many of the menu-links no-follow (specifically links to affiliate landing pages). I believe this will cut down the number of on-page links crawled by Google and should thus solve the problem to an extent? Duplicate Page Titles (600 instances) - We've fixed these now and created original / descriptive page titles for each page. Missing meta tag description (270 instances) - Added these. Duplicate Page Content (160 instances) - We've fixed this as best we can I believe. Those were the main issues. They seem so simple. I believe we've now fixed these all to a good degree. Perhaps a culmination This was the report from a crawl on December 17th and many of the changes were made since then, so just waiting for the new crawl to see if we've truly improved on these errors. With your knowledge and experience would you be able to comment on how the sheer volume of error / warning instances above could effect our likelihood of receiving a penalty? For example is 800 errors/warnings for having too many on-page links something of severe concern? Thanks.

thank you for all the great comments i sure got my work cut out

I'm not sure what the "id=" parameter is doing, functionally, but there are many ways to control it, and Robots.txt is probably not your best bet. You could META NOINDEX the duplicates, or you could rel=canonical to the "master" page. It's a complex subject, and I've got a comprehensive post about it here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-in-a-post-panda-world Those duplicates can definitely dilute your ranking ability, and even trigger a Panda problem (that could harm your entire site). I don't believe there's really a sandbox in 2012, in the way we used to mean it. Many sites go out the gate ranking pretty quickly. Sometimes, after an initial grace period (30 days or so?), Google lowers a site's ranking, but that's usually because they re-evaluated the link profile. Large-scale duplication wouldn't cause that. The good news is that, once you clean it up, rankings should gradually improve.

Thanks William, nice to hear advice from some one who has been using the plugin. I'll go ahead and use the apache module to keep the server usage low.

If they have any PR at all you should 301 them to the most appropriate pages or categories and not let them 404. Only 404 junk pages with no matches that have no PR.