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Thank you all.  301 is definitely the plan.  As Andy pointed out - to "predict" how Google will react to the change even with a comprehensive 301 effort is a miss and hit exercise.

For now, I will have to stick to my over-optimization theory, in part because I have seen it too many times and have nothing else to go on short of a full audit. Even natural links can cause it. It is not fair, to an extent, but it happens a lot.

Andy, JCurrier and Derek Thanks so much for all of your help.  Much appreciated!

Hey There I've not used Squarespace but this looks like your answer here: http://help.squarespace.com/guides/how-do-i-create-url-shortcuts-or-mappings I think they are calling them "shortcuts" or "mappings" and not "redirects" but looks like it achieves what you need. As others have said the global catch all isn't very ideal, you should definitely individually redirect old pages. Hope that helps!

I agree with Andy on this one. That resource from Google will be a huge help for you. One thing to consider would be to you might also find some useful answers in this video from Matt Cutts. It is about using different IP addresses for different countries, but there is some other useful info in there pertinent to your issue: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0k6BBgQgqM

As per my information sub domains are considered to be the part of the same domain for quite some time now (http://www.seroundtable.com/subdomains-google-webmaster-tools-13960.html) but as per my experience the sub domain value is not as powerful as sub directory so the ranking drop is very much expected. My advice to you is to sit with the IT person and come up with some alternate solutions ot this problem and in case this is the only solution, in that case plan a powerful marketing strategy and execute it once you restructure the domains to reduce the loss to minimum. Hope this helps!

Hi Erick, I did a quick search and came across this article: http://searchengineland.com/too-many-ads-above-the-fold-now-penalized-by-googles-page-layout-algo-108613 So, if you weren't previously penalized, then the new update may have caught you. If you consider that Google's mission is (other than world domination) to deliver quality content to it's users then this type of penalty makes sense. I'd say it was a good idea to move some of your ads down, and maybe even remove a few of them all together if you have too many on the page.

Hi Lee, My own guidelines for content development are pretty much ruled by a the question, "Does it make sense?". Typically, for service-oriented businesses, it's a good idea to have one page per service. It makes sense to do this, because, for example, someone looking for a contractor will search for 'fence building' if they want a fence built and 'deck building' if they want a deck built. So, having a unique page for each topic on the site makes sense as a way to welcome each customer to a really well-matched landing page that features information about the unique service they are looking for. Some grey area arises, though, with a service like 'car wrapping' vs. 'van wrapping'. I'm not familiar enough with your industry to know whether this really qualifies as two separate services or not. You would know better. If wrapping a car represents a separate user need than wrapping a van, I would create two separate pages, provided I had totally unique things to write about the two services. Some businesses might even be building pages for different models of cars, if they discovered that people were searching that way (Toyota Wrapping, BMW Wrapping, etc.), but they should really only do so if it make sense for the user. So, I guess the answer to your question lies in whether these different terms are just synonyms for an identical service or whether these really are different services people are searching for that require their own page to fully describe the offering. Hope this helps!

If you want to learn all there is about SEO I would go to Moz.com/perks then find https://www.distilled.net/u/ As you can save on the cost you can also With a Distilled U membership it can be paused meaning you do not pay when when not using it. I believe the cost is around $40. And you get 25% off with Moz perks The amount of knowledge that you get access to finish into the videos alone worth $400 each that you have full access to our well worth it The fact that it is so complete and allows you to take tests that you own speed that require you actually learn what you have seen and read I found it to be fantastic. Combining Moz Academy with Distilled.net/U Is probably the most powerful way to learn http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo http://moz.com/learn/seo http://moz.com/academy These are other places I would look to strengthen my knowledge on search Please continue asking me as many questions as you like I am more than happy to answer them I really do enjoy it. When you mentioned that you were learning a lot from the SEER blog I thought this would help you as well. Sincerely, Thomas

I guess the short answer is that Google frowns on this practice, since the pages aren't really duplicates. Since they frown on it, they may choose to simply ignore the canonical, and you'll be left with the problem. I think the general problem is that this requires a lot of extra crawling/processing on their part, so it's not that it's "black at" - it's just a pain for them. I've typically found putting a NOINDEX on pages 2+ is more effective, even in 2014. That said, I do think rel=prev/next has become a viable option, especially if your site isn't high risk for duplicates. Rel=prev/next can, in theory, allow Google to rank any page in the series, without the negative effects of the near-duplicates. Keep in mind that you can combine rel=prev/next and rel=canonical if you're using sorts/filters/etc. Google does support the use of rel=canonical for variants of the same search page. It gets pretty confusing and the simple truth is that they've made some mixed statements that seem to change over time.

Hi Lynn and thanks for your input, 1. No content, only url changes. Our main focus was to get better results for queries like 'xxx phone cards' and also for spanish queries like 'Mexico tarjetas telefonicas' (before the update the spanish urls contained english words..) 2. We started the link profile cleaning and we're still working on it (removed a big amount of 'bad links', disavowed others)

For a personal project, I implemented a CDN to my site (MaxCDN). The CDN now delivers every image via a subdomain and the CDN has sped my site's load speed. My goal from the start was speed, and in fact I got obsessed with load speed as I wanted to score over 90 in Google's PageSpeed and GTMetrix. There was another element at play and it was the most crucial one - the customer. I'm impatient when it comes to web browsing and I know I'm not alone. We know what we want when we click links, and we expect it to load fast. I am my own customer so speed was important. I name my image files with SEO in mind, using dashes, key phrases relavant to the image and alt tags, but I also know images aren't the sole driver for link backs and leads. Your site is an ecommerce site, if you have up to 21 images per page, speed is the importance here. Your customers are more likely to link/share to your product page not images The goal for you is an ecommerce conversion. Users who share your images might fall into 2 groups, users who share images for the aesthetic value and users who share the image for a purchase. Those sharing for purchase will more likely share the page URL and that's the audience you want. This ties into how users will find your images, search engines will offer the ability to see the image (aesthetic audience) and visit the page (potential purchaser). Getting the right alt tag, image file name will help rank your image higher in the search result for images Hosting your images in a subdomain should be fine as your site is an ecommerce one, it isn't deviantArt where they want every link to the core domain You already are using the correct file names and alt tags. Images are just one element of an optimisation strategy. To conclude, I would put yourself in your customer's shoes and ask, what do I want when I visit your ecommerce site. Will a slow site frustrate/make you leave? Will speed change your experience with the site and thus make you browse more? How are you showing such large images? Is the user experience fluid?

You may find this helpful - https://plus.google.com/+MattCutts/posts/4VaWg4TMM5F

Could you provide me with some keywords where you dropped in ranking? (If you don't feel comfortable sharing it here you can send me a private message.)

Hi Joel, If the domains are separate and the multi site and mapping is all set up correctly (it can be a bit tricky) then google will see the sites as different domains and as far as that goes will treat them all as regular websites. No reason for a negative impact at a technical level there. As to if there are indicators that these sites are related, yes there are as you mention shared ips and c blocks and if the front end code is substantially the same then this is identifiable also, but they will still be treated as separate domains. As long as your content for each domain is strong and unique you shouldn't have a problem.

I'm with Kate on this one. marketing/digital/research reflects the site structure, is very easy to read, and shouldn't be a problem. Keywords in URLs are no longer a real factor, unless you have an exact match domain name. Go with the URL that's easiest to read, will be easy from a structural point of view (in whatever CMS you're using) and most likely to get clicked.

Unfortunately, I don't think we track a lot of history, beyond raw numbers. I'm not aware of anything where we'd show a link disappearing from the link graph. Majestic tracks more history, but I don't think they do it by the individual link either (we're both focused on link acquisition/growth). You get export our link data, but that gets pretty manual. Some of the removal tools, like Remove'em (http://www.removeem.com/), claim to do this. I can imagine building a crawler that would do this, but I'm trying to think of a way to build it from "off the shelf" parts, so to speak, and I'm coming up empty.

HI James, You can use Screaming Frog to generate your sitemap. If you have more than 500 pages you'll need to buy the license that cost  99 £. -Felipe

I would start marking anything and everything you can, that makes since to. I mean the Big three have all said that it is the future of the web, so why not start now. I would say top priorities would be marking up things that are already showing in the SERPS... products, prices, reviews, ETC. I think that breadcrumb makes a lot of since to mark up since it could be easily used by a Crawler to understand site structure.

Hi Jason, Thanks for the question. I'm not sure if you've made changes already or if things are fluctuating right now, but I see your category page ranking for the keyword "twin dvd player" - not the advice page. I am however seeing your advice pay rank for "site radio" and understand that this is a problem. In case you haven't seen it yet, this post from Rand is an old one but still very relevant to this topic. There are a few things that you can look at here that can play a part in the wrong page ranking: External links to the page - I can't see many links at all but this is definitely a big factor Internal links to the page - you mentioned this and your site architecture looks logical Content of the page - I'd look for ways of being unique, useful content onto the category page so that it becomes more than just a list of products. I'd look to incorporate things like unique reviews for the products on that page, extra content on how to choose the best product, technical considerations etc. I know this is tricky as you don't want to push the products too far down the page, but with some good design, it can be done Page title - I'd possible look at making the page titles of your advice centre pages a bit more focused on the types of keywords someone would use when looking for this content. For example one keyword may be "Tips for Buying a DVD Player" "DVD player buying guide" etc which may help Google undertstand that this page is more to do with advice and info rather than products themselves The other thing I'd recommend (this isn't a long term solution but makes the best of the short term) is to add some product images to your advice pages so that you stand a good chance of getting someone to click through to the product page and convert. You could choose your most popular three or four products and list them at the side. At least this means that people landing on this page stand more chance of converting. I hope that helps! Paddy