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Wow. "Yes, there is some lose of "link juice" through a 301 redirect. I can't give you a precise number, but most SEOs believe it's about 80%." I had no idea it was that much. I have also never heard of having two sitemaps, for old and new urls. Glad I ran one BEFORE making massic 301 changes to site structure today! Will throw the new one to Google but keep the old one. Thanks for the tip!

Vladimir, in regards of redirecting 301. Which 301 do we set, temporary or permanent 301? Thanks, George.

Looks like the above code might be a bit wrong/ out of date. Current format should be:PUT YOUR PRODUCT, BUSINESS OR SERVICE HERE REVIEW SUMMARY HERE. I.E. WHAT YOUR CUSTOMER IS SAYING IN THE REVIEW 4.5 out of 5 based on 17 reviewsI've also replace the H3 tag with standard span tag, as each person might want the info formatted slightly differently. You can, of course, easily change the numerical ratings of the system. E.g. if your average rating is 7 out of 10, then 7 is the average and 10 is the best.

thanks for this

thank you for your reply. that ip had only mysql on it for over a year and no http files. We ve recently move the mysql to another machine. wmt shows 75K links from this ip to our site. but when you tried to go to the link , you couldnt, even with mysql on that machine. i read in the google webmaster forums that this is some sort of bug or display bug on ip linking. i m not sure what is going on. nick

No Change! I would not change any URLs that are ranking well. Keep your URLs as is; and only add. Once the new design is LIVE with the new pages; I would slowly do the whole 301 redirect; starting with the least important pages and see if the PR value and ranking are affected. We revamped a site a few years back, Invested quite a bit on fresh new content and we attempted to simplify the URLs and got burnt. We ranked TOP 2 for good keywords and disappeared! We did integrate the 301 redirects properly and ensured content was super clean etc.... If you want Users to reference your current URLs easily; consider using URL shorteners.

Only bad if those 404 pages are resulting from pages in your own site.  ( For example, the page that has the 404 is being linked to by another page on yoru site) Not from external sites.  That being said, fix them.  It's easy.  If the page actually doesn't exist then remove them from your sitemap and them remove url like I mentioned before.  If the page exists (like example.com/page but the 404 is for example.com/page.html) you can 301 pages or fix your site extensions.  I know Joomla has a SEF URL setting.

Hi Please look at this : http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/duplicate-content

Yep, this definitely is an issue that we are painstakingly working through. The old SEO really did a number on their content. Thanks so much!

You are more then welcome have a lovely evening! jungles

Hi, thanks for the idea. Actually manually of course can be done, but if there is automatic update solution would be much easier, expecially if there are many projects.

I saw the duplicate and posted in the original as I thought the other might end up being got rid of, but maybe I should have posted in both as you have Chris. Anyway I hope both our answers are of use to Pedro..

Hi Pedro, Please go through Google link scheme guidelines: http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66356 In above guidelines they have clearly mention that "Links from low quality directory sites is unnatural". So its better to stay away from reciprocal directory sites. Hope this help you out....

Hi Moosa, The only thing is, I don't rank at ALL on Google for my keywords. Not even in the top 1000. That leads me to believe it is some type of penalty. What were the small problems you saw? Thanks so much.

lol.  Hey Derek! Ya, I would assume that page ranks well since its a single url and doesnt change based on the ajax/java functionality.  Getting into multiple urls in search results based on categories, filters and groupings gets real hairy real fast.  I would recommend thinking through this before you do it.  Google will start to index all the page variations (even with canonicalization in place) and then you start getting duplicate content, or unwanted indexed pages. i would still use the "view all" or make sure that you have a good internal linking structure along with the canonical tagging to get the information architecture pointing to the right spots still. Hit me up at our next event and lets chat a bit about it.

It goes without saying but also ensure that as well as 301'ing all the old URL's, that you create a robots.txt to stop Google potentially spidering the new subdomain which contains the legacy files. Best of luck!

Excellent analysis! #6 and #7 are the big ones. Make sure your site is seen as relevant and get links from other relevant sites. In GWT > Optimization > Content Keywords - this table will give you a gist of the kind of keywords on your site. If its not what you were expecting to see, you need to change your content.

You lose some juice with a 301 and there is usually a 2 week period where you drop out of SERPs for that page. However, the rankings usually come back strong after that. A note about rewriting pages in general: I've rewritten old pages and seen improvements in SERPs. The risk would lie in how big of a content change occurs - if you have a page about dogs and rewrite for cats, you won't be rankings as well for dog terms. The benefit of rewriting over creating a new page is that it already has ranking power and can rank more easily for new terms. Since #2 is the one that is getting shared/linked to frequently now (and I'm assuming a better domain name), I would slowly redirect the pages from #1 to #2. Try it for a few pages and see what kind of results you get. Just give G 2 weeks to update your rankings. Cheers, Oleg Follow & Connect

Hi Matt, Thanks for your support. I checked both of those resources, they make sense. I guess what I'm looking for is really a combination of both - a nice, automated way to migrate wordpress installations whilst maintaining all required 301's.  I imagine by now there's a plugin of some sort! These resources seem to be good: http://yoast.com/move-wordpress-blog-domain-10-steps/ http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/simple-301-redirects/ Let me know if those seem to be on the wrong track... Cheers, A