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I would say Yes, if you make sure you're redirecting the right pages to the working URLS on the other site you should be fine. Also make sure that sitemaps are updated as Google won't like redirects within a sitemap.

Hi Moosa: Actually we were hit by Penguin in April 2012, and then by Panda 4.0 (for thin content) in late May of this year. Regarding the Penguin issue, we identified bad links, requested removal and filed a disavow with Google listing the domains that refused to remove links. We are also re-writing as much content as possible. In terms of creating links, I have been instructed that the best way to do so is to create high quality onsite content that others will link to. So I am hoping we are on the right track. But getting back to my original question, I don't know why the home page has been punished disproportionately. Thanks, Alan

Yup. It is indexed now. Gonna try to up the frequency!

Thanks, Benjamin.  It's not that we don't know how, I was more interested in best-in-class examples on the internet.  I've seen examples of slideshows/galleries that either have regular pagination or they have a jquery slideshow implementation that doesn't load new pages. Just curious if there are non e-commerce examples of 'view all' pages out there.

Thanks for the good info. I don't see any warnings in Webmaster Tools but it does look like about 30 pages we un-indexed right around the time we launched the re-design. Q3A2oyt.png

Hi, If you're worried about the Freshness factor for search, I don't believe it specifically applies to individual pages such as your product page.  It doesn't make sense to constantly update your images or product description to keep your product content fresh.  If you look around, you don't see a lot of eCommerce sites constantly update their product descriptions. I believe this factor applies to the website as a whole.  As long as there are new and fresh activities going on your website such as new reviews that Moosa mentioned below, it should be fine.  I believe you will also be adding more products and updating landing pages which already satisfy the "freshness factor." I would suggest spending more time on other factors if you're just thinking about Search Engine. My 2 cents

There's lots of good usability info available, but the main problems are: text that is too small not enough contrast between the text and the background Contrast isn't just a problem caused by the colour of the text (but avoid the gray on gray text!) it's also caused by the weight of the font. The vogue for thin fonts also reduces contrast and readability. To compensate the text needs to be larger. Not everyone has the eyes of a teenager! If you can - test your designs on someone(or more than one person) who represents your target audience. You'll also want to consider the devices/resolution that your audience will be using. (kids with smartphones vs retired people with older desktops and low resolution displays. Also keep line length in mind - especially with responsive design. Here's a couple of Jakob Neilsen articles on fonts, (there's lots of other guidance out there though) From Serif vs. Sans-Serif Fonts for HD Screens Let Users Control Font Size Hope this helps.

Only do 301 if the other sites have great value, you say that you have merged all content on 1 site an rewritten it? Google will automatic see the new content, the only reason i think you should do a 301 is if the other sites have a PR higher than 3 or 4, pr 2 and 1 are EASY to get. So take the new uniq content your wrote, combine each site with your different keywords. More on same page are good for results. You dont need a landing page for each keyword. I would do this: Check the PR and Alexa for all the sites, figure out if the traffic is real customers or just scans. There is no point in redirecting scan bots to new site, they will come automatic. Then i would do the 301 from Google Webmaster Tools and make sure that they all go to front site of brand.com site. But only if they have anything to offer for your new site.

Hi David, Wow, every person who replied has helped me greatly.  Thank you! That tool link you sent me was great.  I am using that as we speak.  I like the Similar Page Checker tool you have.  Question - at what % threshold would you think about consolidating or deleting a similar page?  I have located 2 sets of pages thus far that are very similar. We initially created them to go after similar variations of a keyword.  Ie, "mens-titanium-rings" and "mens-titanium-wedding-bands".  But the products are identical.  That set of pages has a 54% similarity.  Would you ditch one of them?  I'm not sure where the threshold should be. Thanks again!

Long as you have the 301 redirects set up properly, you should be good. Bing webmaster tools has it's own "Site Move" feature but I'm not sure you need to use it.

Hi Lee, In my 2nd message I included these URL's: Hahaione condos pages: http://www.honoluluhi5.com/oahu/honolulu/hawaii-kai/hahaione-condos/ Hahaione houses page: http://www.honoluluhi5.com/oahu/honolulu/hawaii-kai/hahaione-homes/ Obviously, 2 different URL's. Do you have any evidence or detailed blog posts showing that using same wording in breadcrumbs or inter-linking in general to different URL's is OK, as long as the URL and / or H1 clearly shows what the page is about? Again, my concern comes from the fact that I have been sold if I interlink with the anchor "Example" then I need to make sure "Example" always points to the same landing page, as search engine's otherwise will be left confused. I somehow think this line of thought is outdated, but any evidence or insight to clarify would be helpful

Hey, if I PayPal you $25 and give you my login details, could you modify the header.php file and get the dropdown menu to work? I'm sure it'd take just a few minutes. I don't know that much PHP. My e-mail address is in my Moz profile -- feel free to e-mail there.

Hey David, Thanks for the input, that's the answer I was looking for. We are actually working on a more robust and user-friendly top navigation. I'm hoping that the new structure of the site will help spread the link juice around and make us more relevant for our important keywords. I'll leave the footer links alone and work on better structure and internal linking for now.

Invalid code does not equate to slow code. Google used to purposely not close html and body tags to save bandwidth and loading time. I took the question as meaning w3c valid code.

Hello, if you search the page URL (exact) in Google at the end of the Google search URL type "&as_qdr=y15" This can also be used with the inurl command on searches for a whole domain,  whilst not 100% its a start it also sometimes shows last cached version (don't forget there is a date filter on searches!) I also wanted to give a shout out to the wayback machine http://archive.org/web/web.php hope ti helps & good luck!

Had a bit of the same feeling when I read it from top > bottom. But if you read it the other way around it sounds way better in my opinion as you start with the better quality links instead of the weaker links (directories, web 2.0 profiles).

Hi Robin, Just wanted to clarify - when you delete a page and googlebot tries to access that URL it returns a 404 (not found) response - i.e. those pages you're deleting are 404-ing. I'm assuming you're asking whether or not you should return a custom 404 page (see guidance here). Creating a useful custom 404 page is a good idea as it helps visitors to your site find an appropriate alternative to the page you've deleted. This often a better solution than just displaying your homepage. Depending on why you're deleting these pages you might elect to 301 redirect any outdated URLs to the current version of the content (rather than just letting these pages 404) - more on this later. You also asked if these 404s can cause you problems. Obviously 404s can cause problems for users - if they can't find the content they're looking for, chances are they may elect to leave your site and go somewhere else to find whatever they need. From an SEO perspective, allowing pages you no longer wish to be indexed 404 is fine. However, when you delete a page you should also ensure that you remove the page from your sitemap and also remove any links to the page across your site. However you should be careful with letting some pages 404. Rand wrote a post way back in 2009  essentially he highlights that if a page has good links from external sources, and/or, is receiving substantive traffic and/or has an obvious URL visitors or linking sites intended to reach then you should 301 redirect to an appropriate page. I hope this helps, Hannah

Hi because I have not seen the exact stats on your site I cannot tell you this for certain but Normally I would use a tool like deep crawl as this would allow me to see how many URLs should have indexed and how many your site contains. Along with many other metrics. You say your seen a drop of search traffic by 80% over the last eight months and now it feels like you are getting no traffic? Normally that is a really bad sign as Google tends to take sites that do index out of the index prior to issuing a manual penalty some what of a warning. Because you have told me you did build links I am going to assume you took a link from any site you could get? Because this is honestly a pretty severe problem I would check Google Webmaster tools before going forward if you do not have an account with Google Webmaster tools all you need is an e-mail address you can sign up for free and check if you have been penalized? If you want to remove the links which you have built I would agree you should do this because briefly looking at your link profile I see a lot of very spamming links if you want to do it on your own I recommend http://www.removeem.com/self-serve.php If you want an expert to handle this for you I would call Ryan at http://www.vitopian.com/contact-us / removeem will tell you if it believes the link is bad and it does a pretty good job of doing that. However in these situations I really do not think it can substitute for human being. It depends on how much money you want to spend on saving this business I can tell you that I personally know people that have been helped by Ryan and are very happy with the results. Your question of should you remove your links that you have built I would say most likely answer is going to be yes but I do not know how you built them if you did something against googles terms of service absolutely you should remove them ASAP. I hope this is been of help, Thomas

Agree with Justin, There is no right or wrong (www. vs none) pick one which suits you and go from there. You can learn setting preferred domain on webmasters here - https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/44231 301 redirects depend on your CMS but don't forge to redirect to each relevant page. Best of luck BJS. (in short) 1) Hosted on the root domain instead of subdomain This is your preference 2) 301 all incoming requests on domain to point to www.domain (subdomain) Yes 301 so you're only using one site not both (e.g use www. or htttp:// but not both) but it doesn't have to be the www.

Fetch as Google is a good tool to use to index pages that have recently changed, or in certain special circumstances, but it's not intended to be the primary way to get your site in Google's index. A foundation of good content, proper site architecture, and a healthy dose of external links is the best course to proper indexation.