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Now i have worked out how to do this, can anyone let me know if this would be wasting my time. I am correct that it is good for seo to find all my lost pages that are generating good links and putting the content back on my site to gain that link juice.

Seems to me you might be spending some time doing this: I think what you want to do is: Discover all the old urls that were bringing traffic 301 redirect them to the relevant new urls on the updated site using htaccess (assuming you're on apache) [optional: submit a sitemap to google with the old urls to encourage the crawler to see that they're now redirected] [if not doing step 3, might be worth doing this as the first step] create a sitemap for the new site (I have trouble with xmap so I don't use it, would love to though since it automates things - I know many people like it) try manually creating one with say xenu or integrity submit the new sitemap to bing and google sit back fingers crossed keep tracking 404 errors in gwt to identify urls you've missed that can be added to the 301 list there are posts on seomoz and elsewhere that cover how to do 301 redirects in htaccess, how to use xenu etc. good luck! -- EDIT: One other thing to remember, (particularly if you've suffered data loss in the past) is backup - search for akeeba backup for joomla, it's free and works brilliantly.

Thanks Charles I'm really happy with him

Jassy, Thanks for all of your help.... our traffic is fairly slow today, but not a big enough sample size.  if it remains low, i will report back and ask for advice... Thanks!

Spot-on answer from Brian. So long as everything is done properly (such as correct URL mapping, 301s rather than 302s...) in a timely fashion, then you may even experience a zero drop in rankings and visitors. With regards to inbound links to your current/old URLs; for any valuable links, try to get those changed so that they point directly to your new URLs, so that none of that link juice is lost through the redirects. Regards, Simon

You said as the old URLs can not be redirected. Then why don't you try for canonical implementation in the important pages to avoid losing link authority that  might have built over the years naturally. The rest of the URLs can be blocked through GWT using parameters. Since you have new version of site, you may want to concentrate only on the new pages. If the old pages are not redirected, anyway you are going to be benefited. I would suggest to go with canonical wherever possible and URL parameters only as a last option. Note: To have canonical, pages need to have more similarities

in case they do not all start with /category Disallow: product_compare

Thanks Ryan

I totally understand, I've been spoiled by working with web designers that are very customer service oriented and who have not held their customers hostage...so this has been very disheartening on several levels. All three of the clients have been referred to other web designers per my recommendation. One has moved, one is waiting for a little while, and the other has not decided yet. I have managed to do some canonical meta work using the plug-in and appreciate your sharing the other options available.

Makes perfect sense.  I run a site with very targetted traffic per state at backcountrysecrets.com.  Doesn't do someone in California much good to know what is available in the outdoors in Idaho if they are looking for something to do this weekend in California. That being said, I still let everyone from California see what is available in Idaho, if they choose to see it.  Who knows, they might be considering a move or visit to Idaho soon.  I really don't think it is worth the worry to hide anything from your customers.  I would worry more about making it easy to find their state.  Perhaps use their IP address to display a prominent link to their state on the page. The other thing to consider is that IP matching is not always correct.  I often get targetted ads for Denver, CO even though it's 8 hours away because of my ISP.

From the link: "Server location (through the IP address of the server) is frequently near your users. However, some websites use distributed content delivery networks (CDNs) or are hosted in a country with better webserver infrastructure, so we try not to rely on the server location alone."

There is none.

Instead of building links I am building content assets - even for retail sites... http://www.seomoz.org/blog/throwing-out-the-book-on-seo

Thank for looking into this. The new site has been uploaded almost a month ago. Since then, Google crawled our website at least 4 times; nevertheless, the image snippet is still from the old template. Although, as you pointed out, there some minor issues, they are certainly not the reason why we dropped so bad.  As Rand pointed out to me about 2 weeks ago, sometimes Google works in mysterious ways that even the best in SEO cannot understand.  I'll wait for Google to show the snippet image of my Homepage, just to make sure he completely crawled it. Thanks again for your help!

Hi Ryan, Thank you for the reply.  Yes, content for millions of part numbers is hard to come by for one's own use.  It's proprietary for most companies. When we have more part information, such as a part we have sold, I have a plethora of good information on that part because we've inspected in (photos, detailed visual examination, etc).  Example: http://parts.usbid.com/SAA7115HL.html Yet, there are millions of parts we can sell to people that we haven't actually sold yet.  We have hundreds of vendors. We can procure parts from other sources for our customers (as well as out of our own inventory). Since we offer hard-to-find parts, businesses come to us when they cannot find it via other channels. How do they search?  They dump the number in Google and look for reputable sites that can provide a quote on that part (qty, manufacturer, etc). So, many times all I have is the part number and a list of those on the page **is not great content.  So admitted. ** It's the best I have to generate a lead. If you have strong thoughts on SEO attention and content for the arena in which we play, I'm all ears.  Like I mentioned to Cyrus, I am looking to work with talented people to improve content and SEO.  Whom do you recommend? Kindly, Loren

Here is the info on pushstates - as mentioned above: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/DOM/Manipulating_the_browser_history

Thanks Dimitar for your inputs. I really appreciated it. "Add transcription of the video." Would you please clarify why this is necessary.