Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Here's what I mean. When you are deciding whether to do something, if your first question is, "How will this affect PageRank?" then you are asking the wrong questions. For example: If you want to know whether to try to get a link from a website, don't worry so much about its PageRank. Ask yourself whether this is a link you would want even if Google did not exist, whether it is topically relevant to your website, whether you will get quality referral traffic, whether you will be "earning" or "building" the link, and a lot more. All of those things matter more than a number that is increasing arbitrary and rarely updated by Google anymore. The point: Google is thinking more like a human and less like a machine. Digital marketers need to catch up (if they weren't there already).

Thanks all that's good advice. It sounds like this is a fairly grey area. Based on this, we've decided to run some checks on the domain first before proceeding.

will you be able to get the same URL structures? If so then that's already a big plus to minimize your rank changes. It will definitely happen, one way or another but once it gets fixed, things usually go back to where they were, at least for me. I've never tried Volusion before but I have moved ecom sites over to WP, Magento etc,

If it's just a few pages then I don't think it should be something to worry about. I've 301'ed thousands and it never affected me before. The problem with this though is you might have some trouble ranking for some (different) location based searches, or at least, to consistently improve after the 301's initial benefits stop. I always stay away from 404s as much as I can. Although it doesnt really affect your SEO if the dead link is nowhere on your pages but I still dislike it, personal preference. I won't be much help as this is all still trivial without seeing the actual pages and their functions. Treat it as a test though, you'll learn a lot from it.

Well, I removed the suspect content, and after 2 weeks, nothing. Then I added Google Authorship to each page, and the NEXT DAY the site is back in the top positions for our target terms, and the leads are pouring in. Was it the Google Authorship? It certainly felt like it. But I thought that was not a ranking factor. Anyway, thanks for all the support! BB

Thank you so much! You're amazing!

"Bing had indicated that disavowing was not as relevant as getting the links removed" If you think the links are causing your issues and request them to to disavowed, they will be. It's very hard to give any advice without viewing the URL. There could be any number of factors affecting the site such as thin content, poor backend SEO keyword choices, poorly written descriptions, etc etc. Could you please provide the URL? If it's a privacy issue with the company or client, please send me a PM with the URL for additional advice.

You should login to Google Webmaster Tools and do a fetch as Google, if the page returns a status 200 then you know that your pages are working as intended and what your experiencing is just the Google cache service not working, which should resolve itself in time. Google Cache is not Realtime It's worth mentioning that the Google cache system runs independently and does not effect the real time rankings of Google and the index. So even if there is no cache, cache errors doesn't mean there is problems with your site or rankings. Simply do as suggested with the fetch as Google, once you ruled out that your pages are not at fault which I suspect they are not (Google's caching service often has problems), then its just a simple matter of putting your feet up and waiting for the Cache system to resolve this issue on its own. Also should check that the robots for that page is not set to be "no-archive" " NOINDEX tag tells Google not to index a specific page NOFOLLOW tag tells Google not to follow the links on a specific page NOARCHIVE tag tells Google not to store a cached copy of your page NOSNIPPET tag tells Google not to show a snippet (description) under your Google listing, it will also not show a cached link in the search results "

Definitely just disavow.  John Mueller from Google said in a hangout that you should not be paying for link removal unless for some reason you feel that you have inconvenienced the site owner and feel that you ought to pay for the link to be removed.  In the same hangout a Google employee, Mariya said, "No! Don't pay for link removal!  That's what the disavow tool is for."  I've transcribed the video and given my thoughts on it here: http://www.hiswebmarketing.com/should-you-pay-for-link-removal/

I think the answer your looking for is in the very link you provided http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.in/2012/08/website-testing-google-search.html Do not redirect only bots.... This is seen as deceptive and will get you a nice penalty. 302 is a good solution.  Just make sure you do it with the same frequency you do for a real person... no special handling for google bot. If you prefer one version remain indexed over another version, use the rel=“canonical” link attribute

Then send a DMCA to the server company. The server company doesn't care that he's a lawyer, and I bet your client and send a very well written one. Besides that, you're strategy moving forward seems pretty sound.

Thanks for the input guys! I believe Twitter and Facebook don't run sitemaps for their profiles, what they have is a directory for all their profiles (twitter: https://twitter.com/i/directory/profiles Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/find-friends?ref=pf) and use that to get their profiles crawled, however I feel the best approach is through xml sitemaps and Google plus actually does this with their profiles (http://www.gstatic.com/s2/sitemaps/profiles-sitemap.xml) and quite frankly I would rather follow Google then FB or Twitter...  I'm just now wondering how the hell they upkeep that monster!  Does it create a new sitemap everything one hits 50k?  When do they update their sitemap? daily, weekly, or monthly and how? One other question I have is if their is any penalties to getting a lot of pages crawled at once? Meaning one day we have 10 pages and the next we have 10,000 pages or 50,000 pages... Thanks again guys!

While I can't help with the second part of your question just now, I can help with the first.  There have been a couple of studies that have argued that 302 redirects are eventually treated as 301s.  Here is one example.

I would 301 redirect the old url to the new on. Here is some info on it, https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93633?hl=en

Yes its coming because for Exact Domain and there are no more searches for this keyword.

Expanding a bit on what William said. You have to be careful about the domain as well. If the domain is in your line of business it will usually be a good thing, but you need to be sure the domain is indexing in Google (this can be checked by site:www.examplesite.com) and then look at opensiteexplorer, majesticseo and/or ahrefs and see if the anchor text on the site is relevant, If the anchor text looks spammy or low quality you should tread carefully. Also make sure to pay attention to how the links were built, if they were all built recently that screams black hat SEO. If a site passes all the tests mentioned above it should be a benefit.

If the images are coded into the website using "http://example.com/image.jpg" instead of "/image.jpg" then the images will always pull from example.com, instead if your test site. If they were coded with "/image.jpg" then the code would pull from example.com when the page was there, and example.yoursite.com when you moved it over for testing.

Can any one else give an answer as to how a small company can outrank large companies? This is still unsolved. Thanks.

Thanks David The site has a mobile template that displays on a smart phone only. I think I am just going to ask the developer to do the extra work to use the same URL as the site and recognize that a user is on a mobile smart phone. I would like to see the site move to a responsive design.

Thanks a lot, I think SEMRUSH provide all database from Google Analytic so how can we say its true. Thanks, Akhilesh