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You're right. If you removed the redirects, there's no need disavow. I assumed that was what you had done to remove the links given you said you sold Site A. In my personal experience, it can take Google months, up to 8 months, to drop links. Hopefully in your case it won't take that long.

Many Thanks Jeff Much Appreciated. Pete

Thanks Cyrus and Max, Very good answer and I am going to work as per your suggestions

The concept of optimizing the internal page for Blue Widgets should be the same as your home page. It should contain relevant links and on page optimization focusing on your keyterm. In this case, blue widgets. You would want to make sure that you use this term in your meta title, description, in the URL and include relevant content as well. The links are only half of the equation. Having a ton of links and no relevant content will be what gets you in trouble with the engines. As long as you have a balance of links and on page content you should be ok.

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-bold-titles-19331.html A post from about a month ago.

Good to know. Thanks for closing the loop on this.

Looks like Page Rank for all our key product listing pages has taken a hammering. They're all getting a PR of 1, even though our domain authority remains ok (it has dropped too, but not as dramatic).

Hi Erica, & Alan below... Thank you both very much for taking the time to respond to my query.  It's as much as we suspected, and it's great to get your expert views on this. We will take your advice on board and go forth, and clean-up! Oh to have a time machine. Thanks again guys, have a great week/weekend. Aidan

I totally agree but the issue is we have sections of our site we now can't control title tag and descriptions for because we use that anchor jump menu all over the place.  That was what I was trying to get to the bottom of.  I did find a jquery solution for it that we may try.  Thanks everyone!

These other folks left some fantastic responses, so I'll only add that DA is a relativistic number generated each update. It's best use case is to compare yourself to other sites, so if both you and your competitor dropped a similar amount, that's actually not a bad thing.

Hi WiIl, I believe this issue was resolved on your other thread. Please let me know if not. I see prices and ratings on the sample URL you provided in that thread. Great work on this. Pat yourself on the back and ask for a raise.

Hello WillsWales, I just checked the Si Francis Bacon Skis product URL on Google and see this in the SERPs: Rating: 4.5 - ‎2 votes - ‎$649.95 - ‎In stock I am assuming it was just a delay and that now everything is on-track. Let us know if otherwise.

George Thank you for your insight and you are right its a tough decision which needs to be made before we move forward.  I will research it a bit more over the weekend and make a decision on Monday. All the best and have a great weeekend. Karl

Yes but what do you think about the old date which is visible in the results. Isnt content freshnes a factor?

301 the domain over to capitalize fully but it sounds like you might want to keep both sites active. If you have content that you want to move over or is ranking, be sure to create separate 301 from the old url to the new url. The page that receives the 301 will benefit from that. In many cases, the new url will rank in the place of the old one. If they have pages that have great backlinks (like an about page or products page) but you don't really want to move them over and want to just delete them, then just 301 those urls to relevant urls on your site and you will benefit from their links. Hope that helps! Good luck!

Assuming both are on different servers or if you can do the transfer for the whole thing quickly: 1. Just copy the content over, including the meta details, images etc. 2. Put a 301 from the old page url to the new page url. 3. Update both sitemaps and refresh them in webmaster tools. That's basically it. There can be other tricky things like if you decide to 301 the whole domain or if you want to leave both content on.

I looked into it, but it seems like if you direct Google image hits to posts (which can be done in a number of ways), your images soon drop out of the search results. I think I'm better off getting a trickle of traffic from images (those who click on "view post") as my search traffic to landing pages is still on a steep climb.

Google's multi-layered multi-algorithm system has come a long way in being able to "figure it all out", yet at the same time, falls far short of always successfully "getting it right". Robots.txt files are no longer an absolute directive.  They're now "just another signal", as are canonical tags, meta robots instructions, and their own Google Webmaster URL Parameters system. Because of this its critical to be consistent across all signals.  If you've got the robots.txt file set to not index pages, but also have inbound links from affiliates, that's a prime example of where inbound link signals can override the robots.txt file's instruction if they're not nofollowed links. While they technically SHOULD not index them after discovering them off-site (because the destination says "index this other version"), that's part of their confused multilayered system. I have a question though - from what limited information you've provided, this example is based on a url parameter of ?ec= When I search Google using site:http://www.oakfurnitureland.co.uk/ inurl:ec I see only three such pages indexed AND where those pages are "fully" indexed.  All the rest (over 1,000 additional URLs), are in the Google system, however every one of those others has a meta description of "A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt - learn more." What that means is they are NOT fully indexing those pages - there is no worry to be had about duplicate content for those. Google is simply tracking that those URLs exist. So - is that the only URL parameter you're worried about? If so, it's not a major problem on your site. Except for those few exceptions, Google is doing what you need them to do with those.

Interesting situation...and very frustrating for you, I'm sure. You mentioned this below: "I checked 'cached snapshot of page' in Google Toolbar for the pages that weren't being indexed, and it showed up as a 404 error. " This sounds like you had some sort of technical error.  But some things still don't add up for me.  It kind of sounds like your pages were not resolving for Google.  But, the odd thing is that if Google sees a 404 error, they keep trying for days, weeks or even months before they conclude that the pages should be removed from the index. I don't have an answer for you but the first place I'd look is to make sure that your robots.txt file is not blocking Googlebot in some way.  I'd also check server logs and perhaps check with your host to see if there was some significant down time for the site. If there was a technical glitch, and the problem is now fixed, then your pages should come back into the index without you doing anything. I'm pretty certain this isn't a penalty issue though.

George is right, I think it might be best to ask this question here: http://forums.iis.net/