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Older information, but mostly still relevant: http://www.seobook.com/images/robotstxtgrid.png

Hi Guy, Does this help... Although the canonical URL tag is generally thought of as a way to solve duplicate content problems, it can be extremely wise to use it on every (unique) page of a site to help prevent any query strings, session IDs, scraped versions, licensing deals or future developments to potentially create a secondary version and pull link juice or other metrics away from the original. We believe the canonical URL tag is a best practice to help prevent future problems, even if nothing is specifically duplicate/problematic today. Source:http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/on-page-keyword-optimization/new

ok. thank you !!!!

I'm still seeing an error page at the top of the list with the url of http://www.jwsuretybonds.com:443/ Are there any negative effects of this?

Yes, Marcus, your suggestions are very helpful. Thank you very much!

The page rank for your website is 2, thats what i can see. Most important thing for you is to see if there is any  dramatic change in traffic, rankings and pages indexed by google. You also have to check inner pages PR, if these pages also have drop in PR as compared to  past? Do also check for warning in google webmaster tools. If Answer for above questions is NO, don't worry and focus on your Linkbuilding and other SEO efforts.

The rewrite done by WP is a 301.

This is definitely a good idea. I've just done exactly this for a large ecommerce site, as well as implement a new URL rewrite, and by adding this granularity to the sitemap you can really see which pages are being indexed and control it better. There was a blog post here on SEOMoz which I used for guidance and that demonstrated how the improved site maps actually lead to increased site traffic. (http://www.seomoz.org/blog/multiple-xml-sitemaps-increased-indexation-and-traffic) If you're a Wordpress user, checkout the Wordpress SEO plugin by yoast, as his site maps do exactly this and are set-out very nicely.

I've used this for some projects: http://www.balsamiq.com/ However, I usually fall back to Visio (believe it or not) mostly because it "gels" better with our overall business tools and more people I work with are familiar with it. Makes it easier to collaborate when I don't have to teach them how to use a program. I usually start with a sectional approach: what section of the site do we need to work on? What content do we want to include? How will it "live" together in the section and live within the overall site? From there I look at keywords, then we drill down into on page content. I like to see how long tail words can support more generic keywords so a higher level visual works well for me.

Pardon my ignorance when it comes to your particular industry, but do those pages need to be crawlable?

Diane, the OP is talking about 301 redirects of entire domains, and I believe you've been 301 redirecting missing URLs from all one domain, correct?

first a 301 redirect is only going to help if you have links pointing to the page, if not then I would 404. if you 301, remeber that the page you redirect to, does not have to be relevant to the old page, but needs to be relevant to the link text and the page the link is comming from. so link text, linking page and linked page should be relevant, the old page no longer counts for anything,

Thanks - I think I actually just answered my own question. I was initially doing queries on on the URL as I wanted to see if the page was in the index to start with.  The words that were being highlighted in the text ad on the right, much of it was related to the words in the URL. I went and searched on some keywords that we rank well on.  When I did this, other parts of the page were highlighted in the preview snippet.  I found some cases where the title was highlighted and others where text from the paragraph was highlighted on the page. So, it looks like Google is taking whatever keyword query you are entering and then when you look at the preview for the page, it decides what text on the page to highlight. If you want to see this in action here is what I did.  Take a page that ranks well for a key phrase.  Search the URL and then look at what text Google highlights.  It is probably some text that is in your URL.   When for that same page, search on the key phrase that you rank well for.  It will highlight a different section.   You would optimally want a page that ranks for keywords that are not in your domain name etc. My initial concern was that Google was not doing a good job of highlighting the right part of the page.  Looks like they actually do decent work on this. That said, thanks for the tip for checking the CSS layout.  I can see where we need to move some things around - thanks Irving!

Thank you !!! :)))

Caffeine was a back-end improvement that Google implemented in 2010. The idea was to provide more up to date results for topical and fast moving stories. From a user perspective there is nothing to worry about. You search - stuff happens. Whether caffeine impacts on that stuff isn't important. There is a user level explanation of Caffeine here From and SEO perspective then if you have been doing stuff that works for the last couple of years then don't worry explicitly about caffeine - you've been dealing with it's impact anyway.  If you are struggling to rank for breaking stories or those that are updated quickly then it is more of a consideration.

Before initiating anything major on the website, always look in to Bing analytics and see what BING webmaster tool tells about your current rankings... sometime due to several data centre issues what you see are not the universal results....