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If those pages are getting traffic or have good links/referrals, then sure, redirect to the appropriate page. What 'good' means really depends upon the vertical, but you know what pages get traffic and which are chaff. Check your various link sources and site analytics. Whatever doesn't make your cut, 410. Whatever makes the cut, 301 to a page with content relevant to the old page. Don't do a blanket (all old pages redirect to evananas.com) redirect. It's also a very good idea to consider responsive design, now that GWT is getting angry about improper mobile redirects.

Thank you for the answer. I have another website with 28000 unique pages that all linked to home page. My home page optimised for one keyword but I can't get it in top even though my competitors are way smaller and they are in top with almost no seo.. On the other hand I have looooots of traffic on internal pages, but internal pages only.

If you are going to have the exact same content on all domains, stick with the .com and 301 redirect the rest of the domains to the main domain. If you are willing to invest in different content for each domain, then you should have no problem. Just be sure to put the hreflang tags in the header of all the sites, so Google knows that they are related:

Hi We submit our xml site maps daily automatically anyway.  Leave a copy on the site to be crawled, but by submitting the site map it ensures that the Google Index is upto date without waiting for it to be crawled. There are plenty of bolt on sitemap generators which will automatically send the sitemaps, without manual intervention. Bruce

Mmm... if your site has not been translated yet, the correct should be rel="alternate" hreflang="en-FR", but - yes - that would mean that people searching in French from France won't see the /fr subfolder. On the other hand, using as hreflang "fr-FR" would not be correct. My best suggestion, in cases like this, is using the hrelang="x-default", where the href is the country selector page, so that people searching in French from France will be pointed to the selector page and, from there being able to click on the french version link. Another suggestion is to create personalized message telling the French people entering in the site but seeing it is in English that the site is going to be soon translated in their language, but that the products and services are already available for the French market, so inviting them to not bounce back, which should be the most common reaction the users can have.

I totally agree with EGOL on this. I would like to add my 2cents since I think I am one of the only SEO people that is a developer too. This is what I would do (in pseudo code) put a <rel="canonical"  href="$url=strtok($_SERVER[" request_uri"],'?');"=""> </rel="canonical"> This is in php, I don't know what platform you are on, but what it will do in php is return the current url as the canonical and delete the ? and everything after. So basically it will return the url minus the query string. I use this technique a lot with my clients for doing canonical urls on CMS's that use query strings and it works great.

Hi, Phil Nottingham did an excellent post a couple of years back on video seo, worth having a look especially the bit on what types of searches are likely to result in video results (not local for example!). He has done some other more recent articles on various sites, all worth having a look at.

Ok as far as I understand your question, you are saying your website is ranking but for some keywords not the preferred page on the website is ranking. I will answer as per the best of my understanding… Ok this usually happens when you didn’t setup your website navigation and structure correctly. I would prefer to give another look to your internal linking strategy. Another thing you can do is to get some quality links with anchor text around your keyword to your targeted pages. Get an internal link from the ranked page to the page you want to rank in search engines against your key term. I am not saying this will work 100% but most of the times it works for me…

No, I would not.  In fact, I just signed two new online product companies for SEO, and I'm taking them away from different product pages for each variation of the product.  Here's why: (1) Confusing Google not good. You will confuse Google all to death if you have 4 different product pages for your BOOK.  One for online, one for ebook, hardback, paperback, etc....    You need to be clear on which page you want Google to land when I search for "the best book ever" (2) Risk Duplicate Content By putting the same book/product/service description on each variation page, you risk being tagged for duplicate content.  Again, this upsets Google.  Don't do that. (3) Lack of Content Depth You will get tired and burned out on writing details on all those products, you will cut corners, and your content will end up being short or non-descriptive.  Better to write one very long product/book/service page and have buttons that allow customers to add the variations into their cart from that page.  In this way, this particular page will have deep content, images and everything else Google loves, and it won't be confused one bit on what you are trying to rank for. I've got my work cut out for me on fixing these two product pages, so at some point I'll have to follow up and share the results on my little scientific experiment.  My money is on my theory.  Bet yours is too!

Awesome responses guys. Anyone else have any other insight?

I agree with all the opinions voiced here. PR isn't really relevant any more. With all the algorithm changes from Google, it can be tough to keep up. I always suggest  following Matt Cutts' blog and video channel. Any time there is even the hint of a change, he usually mentions what is going on at Google. He is currently on leave, but his blog and video channel provides great information!

The fact that you tell Google bot to follow the links on these pages suggest that there is at least some link juice flowing from these pages. If this assumption is true you should direct that link juice to pages that make you money. You could do that with a 301 redirect or by updating the pages with better (not broken) outgoing links. If the assumption is not true and there is no or very little link juice flowing from these pages that no one ever visits, I would suggest to remove them all together.

LindaLV, we were actually going to 301 from the path to the subdomain (no content at the path). Could you explain a bit more about how subdomain-to-path 301-redirects would work? Would they not just end up somewhere where there is no content? Lesley, we use IIS so not htaccess issues as such but, yes, we were having problems in that area. Thank you both!

Thank you.

So, do you have any content, other than the one homepage, that is the same for both offices?   I would think there will be a need for some such content - maybe a general "About The Firm" page, or other details that are going to be the same for both offices, and would also create duplicate issues beyond just the blog. If so, is it too late for you to consider a single navigation, with a top level page for both Boston and Atlanta, and then subpages for each that can be optimized for your local terms? Regarding duplicate content, you are correct that Google has stated that there isn't a penalty, you just will only get the version of a page that is most appropriate.   So if someone is searching from Atlanta, they will most likely get the Atlanta version of the blog. Will you have some blog posts that only are relevant (or are most relevant) for one location or the other?  If so, duplicating a portion of pages is probably safer than 100% duplication.

You're welcome. Then do what the big giants do. Redirect each domain to the appropriate page in your main domain: product-domain.com 301 redirects to domain.com/product-page

Hi Atticus, Just want to clarify that you are not seeking actual local rankings for this, as rental buildings are considered ineligible business models per Google's Local Business Information Guidelines which read: Rental or for-sale properties, such as vacation homes or vacant apartments, are not eligible to be listed on Google Maps and should not be verified. Instead, verify the business information for your sales or leasing office or offices. If you have a property with an on-site office, you may verify that office location. So, if Local is out due to the business model, then this becomes a purely organic puzzle. Google's treatment of a query like '44 Wall St' is going to be varied, due to the lack of specificity of such a query. They are not sure why you are looking for this address and the results I see consist of a variety of answers on Google's part including Mapquest results, some attorneys that work there, some rental offices, etc. In other words, the results are a hodgepodge. "44 Wall St office space" is a much clearer query, in terms of its intent. Competition looks extremely stiff for this, and searching from California, I see you coming up on page 3 of Google's organic results. Moving up in a situation like that is likely going to result from the typical organic factors (authority, age, activity, freshness, etc.) If you're not duplicating content or building bad links, then it's probably not a penalty - just a competitive environment. I'm hoping you'll receive further feedback from the community on this!

in webmaster tools 404 are going gradually down for desktop and now suddenly going up for mobile for pages that are not linked to for months.