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Hi Martin There is no magic number although I have heard 100, 150, 300, 450 all given as the "best practice". The minimum I would suggest would need to be an amount in which you could achieve mentioning the primary keyword naturally at least 2 or 3 times. I tend to use the text on a home page as an introduction mentioning the company name, what it does and where. More details are then provided on an about us page. This approach usually means that keywords, phrases and brands are covered in this text. There is obviously a balance to be achieved between providing not too much text for the user as we are told they don't read it but provide enough for the search engines to be happy.

Hi Matthew - not that I saw. It appears to be a feature built in and non-configurable. Lot's of indexation options but nothing for canonicals.

I agree with EGOL. Look at the SEOMOZ video transcripts. Lots of times I'll just read through the transcript so I can get to the "nugget" of info really fast. We've been in the habit of doing video transcripts and lots of times those pages will outrank lots of other pages. How about just adding a link - "Read the Video Transcript" and going to a new page? Simple but effective. FYI - you can use up to 5,000 characters in the YouTube description. Use all of it! Good luck! LHC

Download the All in One SEO pack plugin for wordpress, and then in the settings turn no-index on for all these page types.

Two ways: 1. Find out where Google followed a link to the non-existent category pages, and get those links removed and the category pages redirected or blocked as EGOL mentioned. 2. Change your code so that non-existent categories show a 404 page, preferably a 404 crafted to gently push your user to something they may be interested in.

If it doesn't work like you need let me know, you might need to do it in scripting.

Thanks a lot!

Hi Marcus, Yes I'm afraid so, the client in question removed a word from their company name and therefore they need to change the URL. I'm pretty happy that we'll be able to do it with the minumum of damage, just wanted to put the question out here in case someone had an alternative method based on experience.  I agree there's no perfect way to do it, however I think building some strength for the new site before killing the old one is as good a plan as any. Thanks again.

Yep, you can suggest up to 15 parameters to ignore I believe (that's from memory but its a good few)

Some good advice from Google on changing domains here: https://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=83105&hl=en I have never 301'd 50 different sites either, however I wouldn't just leave it up to the 301s to inform Google - use the 'Change of Address' function in Webmaster Tools.  If you haven't already got Webmaster Tools set up on all of the old sites, I'd say that's an essential task to do first.  Then you can tell Google manually that the new site is replacing the old one/s.  You'll have to repeat the process 50 times but it's quick, easy and well worth the effort. Google suggest that you leave the 301s in place on the old site/s for at least 180 days - but probably better to listen to Marcus and Alan; 12 months won't do any harm. I'd also get the new site up and running concurrently for a few weeks first, if it's a new domain or if it hasn't had any content on it for a while.  A client recently immediately killed their old site upon launching the new domain, found out the new domain had previously been burnt, and it tool 6-8 weeks to recover rankings for the new site after a 'reconsideration request'.  It cost them organic traffic and extra PPC spend. Maybe others would advise against this?  Realise it's potentially duplicate content but a short cross-over period would enable the old sites to continue providing temporary value as the new site registers.