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Ensure there are no re-writes active that may forward traffic from /fred/ to /fred-review/ and you should be good.

Ok Thanks guys for the information, cheers John

The best type of user generated content is where you make users much place a specific amount into the form. It could be to win a price or something to emphasize the users to input the amount of content. Because if you have thin content which is spammy and the same all over the web it will not do much for ranks. I don't really think spelling errors are a big issue, that falls more down into usability, if you are a big brand and you have spelling errors all over your website it will not look professional.But from a UGC point of view I would not worry too much.

Thanks for your help. @ryan&joe: yes - I do know about that issue - unfortunately i dont have any chance to flatten our navigation (only because of people working with the navigation in our company) - im trying it for already 2 years, but its getting better and better

Completely legitimate as long as you're not serving up one thing for the bots and something unrelated to your visitors.

You should try to 301 as many of the dead pagoes as possible to any relevant page you can find. This will pass on the link juice to the new page, especially if it's related content. Otherwise the link juice will be lost and eventually the search engines will drop those pages out of their index. I know doing a couple hundred pages is HUGE task, so I would focus on the most valuable pages first. Ryan is right, 404's is a fact of life. I think it's best to create a custom 404 that your visitors won't mind landing on. For this it's best to be creative, try to make them laugh or smile. Most importantly, give them something to click on. this will allow you to recapture an otherwise lost customer. The very last thing you want them to do is click on their browsers back button.Any visitor can essentially navigate to any of our other pages even though they didn't actually get the page they were originally looking for. Good luck!

Thanks for the insight, I appreciate the well-thought response.

In short, your site URL structure needs to be designed in such a way that Google and other engines can crawl it. Clearly 10k 404 pages is an issue which needs to be addressed. It sounds like your sites redirect or navigation was not set up properly. Without being able to look at the site there is not a lot more information I can share. Would you be able to share your URL?

I don't see any benefit to blocking search engines with robots.txt with the exception of Bing or Google as necessary. Robots.txt is strictly a suggestion to those crawlers who care enough to respect your wishes. The only benefit it can offer is IF a crawler chooses to respect your wishes, then your site will have a bit less traffic volume during the crawl. The reality is any specific crawler from one of the many random companies is going to visit so infrequently it wont make any noticeable difference.

Thanks for the responses guys. @oznappies: I'll have the canonical line at the top for best practices and so it's visible. @Ryan - My CMS has the option to noindex/nofollow too as there are some pages we don't want indexed. Thanks for the heads up about the WMT/Bing method though.

Well it depends on your meaning of "necessary". It is never a requirement. If your site consistently uses folders and the proper meta tags then Google should get things right ever time. Specifying the tools in Google WMT is mainly helpful to assist Google in making a determination when there is any confusion. For example, if you have a page marked with the "EN" tag located in your /uk/ folder, then Google may not be sure whether the page should be considered for US or England. If you have your location properly specified in Google WMT, then that would be taken as a very strong indicator the web page should be associated with England. Short answer....just do it. It takes moments to take this action and helps ensures your pages are correctly associated with the right SERPs.

Perfect, thanks.

cheers mate

I think the ideal size is below 500k, yet I feel Google will crawl even larger sized pages if the content provides value for the users. Back in 2005 I remember Google had much tighter figures on these types of numbers yet in today's market it is a bit different, they seem to allow larger file sizes.

Whenever Matt Cutts discusses this subject in the Webmaster Tools videos and elsewhere, there is always a caveat along the lines of "while google mostly take notice of noindex and robots.txt, this may not always be acted upon". The primary reason given for this seems to be if content is indexed via a link from another site, or exists in google cache. In these cases it seems logical that it may continue to appear in the index. Your question reminded me of Dr Pete's Catastrophic Canonicalization Experiment - it seems his method proved quite effective

Chris, Thank so much for the great tips. I didn't quite understood how will I be able to create a new listing and have it up and runing in days with google having to mail us a postcard, etc. Can you please explain how should I do this? Also, regarding the domain email. Do you mean Mydomain@gmail.com as the account the listing is on? Or info@mydomain.com as the contact email on the listing?