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If you have moved the content elsewhere, 301 Permanent Redirect should be used, as it passes all(well most) the old pages link value e.t.c. to the new page If it's temporarly elsewhere, 302 If it's gone for good and not coming back and theres nowhere apropriate to send people, consider 410 gone. If you mean what status code should your missing pages/bad urls return, that should be 404, not 3XX. Redirecting the user to a 'error' page with a 301 that then returns 200 ok is a great way to have a lot of problems and little way of spotting them.

Thanks for your response.  To answer your question - I did file a reconsideration request and was told there was no manual penalty. So I assume it was Panda / Penuin because my home page, which ranked in the top 1-7  positions for trophies and for trophies and awards disappeared (meaning it could not be found in the top few hundred listings).  Even our brand, trophycentral, disappeared for a couple of weeks.  TrophyCentral came back after a few weeks, but nothing else on the home page came back.  Other pages are fine.  So we are getting some sort of algorithmic penalty and we have no idea why.  It has been a couple of months now.   Thanks for your thoughts.

Thanks for the help guys. I will not get into anything like that but it will be interesting to see if they maintain that position. Thanks again

That works but you can also use the SERP Control Panel and select US

Thanks, Malcolm, I will give it a try...

Yea That's what I think. I tried adding the traoling slash with 301 redirecet, but it didn't work. RewriteEngine On RewriteBase / RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(.)/$ RewriteRule ^(.)$ http://www.exercisebiology.com/$1/ [L,R=301] This was the code I used. Can you tell me what is wrong please?

Olga, here is a link to a ZenCart store which is in development (i.e. not a live site). http://www.durazestcanada.com/store/ Take a look at the images. Right-click on them and depending on your browser plugins you can "Inspect Element" or view the source code. The images have names and ALT tags which relate to the product. I am not aware of any true shopping cart which does not allow this flexibility.

But if someone can tell me the exact reason why nainital page is ranking instead of mussoorie will be greatful as it might help me to get my rank back! I am not sure what other words can be shared to help you better understand the situation. The travelmasti website has legitimately earned a first page spot for their website. For an unknown reason, the wrong URL is presently showing. You are correct right now there is not a 301 in place. The current page does not show a canonical tag either. It is possible there was a 301 or canonical and it has been removed. It is more likely there is some other issue causing this confusion. My expectation is Google will resolve the issue soon replace the currently result once they index the /mussoorie.htm page. The recommended approach for improving your site's rankings is always to focus on your site. Even if you were to get this result removed from Google's index, the improvement to your site is insignificant.

My mistake, I wrongly assumed demoting all that currently show would effectively turn them off. According to this, there's no way to do it: http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!category-topic/webmasters/removing-content/GrV8Axa81Ec

If you just allow the link to go 404, google will notice that you have a fault on your site - and no juice will be passed from the linking part. If Google is the one ranking your page, sending you customers and perhaps (as in our case) gives you 30% of your customers online -Then you dont want them to see any faults on your site! If you 301, juice will be passed and you have the chance to present interesting stuff for the users (potential customers) that have clicked the link ... Good links are hard to get, so you should nurture them. Make sure they reach a related page/product - add a 301-text message serverside, telling the potential customer that this merchandise is out of stock, not produced anymore or whatever reason. Depending on your company-type, make it personal: "Hi. Sorry we're aout of stock on this product. Sorry. Regards Tina, Salesmanager (add image)" Google gave you GWT for a reason. Make sure you weekly take care of faults listed in there, and take them serious. Dont bite the hand that feeds you ;o) I dont know the structure of your site, but we did some serverside-301-automatics, redirecting old product-pages to nearest avaiable product: /travel/spain/mallorca/alcudia/non-existing-hotel --> /travel/spain/mallorca/alcudia On single info-pages we found relevant pages. All redirects came with a 301-message displayed on page, telling customers why we send them somewhere else.

Well it's all about passing the threshold of your link building profile which you don't want to do, if you have an already well established site, moderate forum links won't get you penalized. Avoid sig links like the plaque. Most blog comments are nofollow, if you find a dofollow blog and it posts without moderation it's only a matter of time before spammers start hammering the comments on that page so you'll eventually wind up in a bad neighborhood. Also if you post in a forum you can always log in and edit your post or delete your account, once a blog comment goes up it can be more difficult to get removed.

Hey, just wanted to let you know that I've made my own solution available on Codecanyon.  I'm sure it will need some customization for most SEO's, but it works great for me...Hate to publicize on here about my own product, so dont want to share a link, but PM me if you're interested.

I asked my hostagtor customer service and he said I cannot add the trailing sash since it will create a infinite loop. And I added the index.php through the hostagtor control panel where it has a form which you can fill. And it automatically  writes the code. I am just confused about the trailing slash code in the article.

I wonder about your current ranking, page rank and domain age because that will be a big component in dictating what you  might do. Recently I began working on targeting specific geographic regions for a site. We are working on off page techniques to rank and then geo-targeting back to the site. There are different techniques you might consider for targeting other regions outside of the UK but I'd be interested in seeing what some veterans have to say.

.pdf documents are indexed and will compete in the search results along with web pages.  They accumulate pagerank and any links on them are followed and credited the same as a web page. So, if you have copies of your webpages in pdf format then you should expect them to attract at least some of the traffic that would have gone to your webpage. It is possible for them to rank higher than your webpages - especially if you optimize them by giving them document titles. I believe that they can lead to duplicate content problems.  I have lots of pdfs on my sites.  To prevent duplicate content problems I have used htaccess to rel=canonical them to the corresponding webpage.