Welcome to the Q&A Forum

How much time has passed since you submitted your sitemap to Bing? I am not sure about other SEO specialists, but I don't spend my time on Bing/Yahoo. As far as I know they have less than 30% of the search market together. I would rather allocate my time on moving more pages of my website to the 1st page of Google. If you are still concerned about being indexed on Bing try to compare your website with your competitors (who are on Bing of course). See how many pages they have indexed. See if you can get the same backlinks. See what robots.txt they have. (Maybe the problem is in it.) See if your site has any errors. See if your site is banned from Bing for some reason. The underscored points are those I would check first. Warmest regards, Slava

Sadly, yes. Perhaps that's something to ask a Google Engineer about an SEO conference.

If you've set up 301 redirects for the important pages (those with links or that get direct traffic from bookmarks, etc), I would simply let the old pages fall out of the index on their own. Just be sure those old pages are properly returning a 404 status. When Googlebot requests a page and gets this server response, it will deindex the page. If the old content is problematic for sensitive reasons, you may want to request removal of specific pages - this will stop them from being accessible in Google's cache. There is no other benefit here, and unless there is truly sensitive information or some legal reason to remove those pages, requesting removal of those pages is not worth the effort. It won't help the new pages get indexed faster.

Think of Googlebot like a web user (who happens to be somewhat aimless and browses without JavaScript support). Googlebot requests a page that it finds by A) following a link on another page, B) following a reference in a sitemap.xml file or C) some other usage data we don't know about (i.e. it scraped the link from a source it doesn't "officially" have access to or users have hit that page frequently with Google toolbar installed, etc). This is a basic server request for the page. The server gets the message "load this URL" - if there's an .htaccess 301 redirect in place, it does not matter whether the page would ordinarily display content, because the server never gets to that point. It handles the redirect first. I'm hung up on the second part of your question. "If the page doesn't need to exist...you want this website to redirect to another website." I'm not sure under what circumstances you'd need to do this. If the page doesn't exist, it shouldn't be referenced anywhere on the web, and if it's not referenced anywhere on the web, there's no need for the redirect. Perhaps you're planning to set up the page as a vanity URL - such as a short URL, for easy reading/remembrance. In short, for whatever reason you want to achieve this, .htaccess bypasses the need for the first URL to exist - it works on the request for that page, whether the page is there or not, the redirect will bypass it and work properly.

Thanks to everyone that answered, it looks like I will have to go back through the directories and correct both the spa and cuts.  OUCH LOL Thanks again!

Thanks for the comment Brendan.

Could this be a case of being sandboxed? If that is something that is genuine?

Thanks for your answer. The thing is, I think any conversion increase would be marginal, if any. So if we assume no improvement in conversion, what would you say then?

Hi Tug, You'll need to provide at least one of video:player_locor video:content_loc. Both would in a perfect world be the best probably.</video:content_loc></video:player_loc> Hope this helps!

That means Google is pulling results from other sources as well

Thanks Heather Robinson for the link.

I know Keri, but by the time this gentleman came to me for SEO, he already had those links. Besides, he hired a few people, some data entry guys with not even a basic understanding of SEO, who would drop blog comments left, right and center. AND they would open random profiles on facebook and post on their wall. Each guy would post on 1000 walls dail, yes, they have a daily target; recently facebook restricted them in many ways. I have been telling him against doing it but he wouldn't budge an inch. His argument is, people are "liking" his site, they at least come to his website once which is giving a boost to his Alexa ranking..and these people who apparently "like" the website are friends of people whose wall he is posting(read spamming) on. Yes, I told him these people are not targeted visitors, besides, in the long run search engines too will raise their eyebrows. I have been trying hard to convince him to direct those efforts in the right way. Now, I will show him this post, hope it will help. Keri, I also belong to "moz school of thought" when it comes to all things SEO, and I am working hard on some really great quality content, would you (or anyone reading this) be so kind to suggest me some people/websites who would love to link to/ share this content. Or any ideas on how I can find such authoritative sources in "wedding planning" niche? Any blog where I can guest post? Thanks for your time.

If there is any way to salvage any of the content, by combining it into fewer pages, that's ultimately the best course.  Because you can then 301 all the old versions to the lower number of new, consolidated versions, and have the best of all worlds.

I agree, run a new XML sitemap, get it installed into GWMT (Google WebMaster Tools), and verifying you aren't seeing any issue with regards to the site, crawl errors, increased 404's will also help your efforts! Cheers.

Thanks for the affirmation.  That was the plan. I have added 301 redirects via htaccess from the subdirectory to the new domain and they are sending the traffic correctly. I could not do a change of address in GWT because it is a subdirectory and not a root domain.  I am in the process of getting sites to change their links to the new site. Thanks, Alan Smith

Thank you for your help!

Alertra is sharing the text / html load time. It is not loading images, videos, javascript, etc. which can take substantially longer to load. Alertra is an excellent, free tool which can help you understand if page speed issues are related to your server or your web design. Also understand Alertra is a snapshot of how your site is performing at any individual moment. Site speeds vary greatly throughout the day. If you press the button once/minute, you will likely notice different results. If your GA shows 4 seconds whereas Alertra shows 1 second, either there are optimization opportunities on your site, or your site offers a lot of images, or the discrepancy is due to random sampling. I have used the tool quite a lot and find it to be useful.

That's a tough question to answer. If the new site can be built using seo best practices, it might be best for the client in the long run. In the short term it might be a bit of a mess to clean up from all the duplicate content, indexing and url mapping that would have to be completed, but that would be serving the client's best interests.