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Bryan, If I were removing 100 product pages from an eCommerce site because they barely convert I would approach it this way: #1. Run the URls through a tool to see which ones have external backlinks. Often times none of the pages will have any external backlinks, and those that do are usually not very good. If this is the case - or if you "really" aren't able to do any 301 redirects (and if so that's something that needs to be fixed) - skip to step #3. Otherwise... #2. 301 redirect those with external backlinks to the most relevant page, be that a similar product or the category page directly above the product to be removed. Try to avoid redirecting them all to the homepage or some other "catch all" page, as these may be treated like a 404 by Google. #3. Simply remove the pages and show the custom 404 page that suggests other products, or whatever messaging you want to show there (e.g. "This product has been removed from our catalog. Please see these other products...") and be sure to check the http header response code (lots of free tools for that) to ensure these URLs actually serve a 404 response (note: This should show up on the removed URL, as opposed to redirecting the visitor to another page like .../404.html). #4. Since the now-removed URLs are not linked to from anywhere, either internally or externally, it could take awhile for Google to recrawl them and see the 404 error. If you need this to happen more quickly, such as when dealing with duplicate manufacturer descriptions and removal of page to recover from Panda, it may be wise to provide some type of html sitemap file listing out the URLs long enough for Google to recrawl them. I would not block them in the robots.txt file, as that could result in Google not seeing the 404 and not removing it from the index (though they will cease to show the meta description).

Yes, your question makes sense. You can put the schema.org properties in any order, but spitting the description like that is going to be problematic.  I would also suggest that your example is tedious to read and lacks a product description heading.  A more realistic example would be: h1 Widget /h1 The widget comes in blue, green, ... Hiding the price in the middle of the description is also difficult for humans to read.  Putting aside the schema syntax, the example IMO is a poor user experience.

John, That wouldn't quite work in this situation. The OLD website is still very much an active functioning site.... its is just one service which has been split into another company.  So for example... we only want to redirect; www.oldwebsite.com/servicename to the NEW website. I could of course just edit the old page and say ...."click here to go to the new site"..... but it does wind me up somewhat that the ideal solution, and proper way to do it is a 301.... but if we do it they get put under penalty. The official Google line about doing what we want to do is a 301 redirect.. http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/how-to-move-your-content-to-new.html To quote them "It’s important to redirect all users and bots that visit your old content location to the new content location using 301 redirects." I wonder if a cross-domain canonical would be worth doing?

Hi Lynn, Thank you so much for the detailed explanation and reference links. Much appreciated Regards, Mert

Or push the limits a bit and go for moz.gov.  Online marketing education for the central intelligence, and so forth... Its edu, and .gov links that we are after ;D

Yes--start here.  Then, click on the Adwords Express tab and you're off and running.  Cost will depend very much on the keywords you want to bid on, and the size of your market, just like regular AdWords.

Danny Dover wrote this guide to moving domains back in 2009, but I did a quick review of it and it still looks good today.

Sure, 301 redirecting them to corresponding pages would be fine. Before doing that, however, be sure that the microsites aren't under a penalty.  Your drinkingstuff.com site seems safe from my quick inspection; ranks well for "drinking gifts". On IIS, you can use the IIS rewrite rule module to do your redirects (it's just going to add statements to your web.config file).

Hello there, just read the blog post http://moz.com/blog/how-should-you-handle-expired-content. Ur answer is inside we believe. Hope it helps! Frutiko Team

I wouldn't say that it wouldn't hurt your site, but it may confuse the search engines a bit and you may see a good bit of movement for a while. That said, I think you might want to rethink what you're planning.  You indicated that when you changed your title tags you got an increase in rankings and CTR.  That's awesome!  If the number of impressions decreased during a time when your rankings improved then the decrease would, by definition, have to be due to a decrease in the overall searches.  Normally, you rank higher and a greater percentage of people see your listing.  So, a ranking improvement leads to an increase of impressions if the traffic for the keyword remains constant.    So, if you saw a decrease in impressions, it would indicate the search traffic dropped and you cannot improve that with a Title tag change. Kurt Steinbrueck OurChurch.Com

Yes that's correct The pages will be found just as quick thought there new links as they would have been though their old links with 301's

Hi EGOL, Thanks a mill for the reply really appreciate it. Based on your suggestion I will keep the redirects in place simply just in case in case there is links on other website leading to our pages and I don't want them going to a 404. Cheers, Glen

It can be good, to redirect users to simular content, but not how they have done it, but I think there are much better things to spend you time on. What they have done is returned a Status code of 200, this will cause problems with soft 404s. Also when you create a 404 page, you really should not have any external files such a images css or js files, this can cause a eternal loop if any of these files goes missing. a missing image will create a 404, that will call the 404 page that will cause a it to happen al over again. Crawlers will not like this. Bing once stated that they see your site of low quality of this is the case.

Elementary, my dear Mosley.

That happens for 3 reasons It is a low competitive keyword where EMD is very strong. Low profit (around £0,50-0,90 CPC) He is using automated software like No Hands SEO or GSA which automatically generate relevant blog comments and split the links to follow and no follow so that they seem natural to Google. He will get penalised in the end as both of these tools are ok to use for web 2 properties but people dont know and use it on their web sites (penalty inc) He is probably purchasing good follow links from a high DA and PA blog/PR network, there are plenty around for 100-200 a month. All this make me conclude that your competitor has a money site or a Micro Niche Site meaning he wants to make a cash and dont care for long term goals (check for adsense and amazon affiliate links within the pages).  If that is not the case then his SEO guy clearly needs to move forward! Pure 2010 black hat practise.

Your impression is right.Think about it in this way, Google wants to provide  the best experience to its customer when they look for something online. If your site hasn't got any issues (technical issues), could be easily indexed by robots, has good original content and most important helps answering customers' queries, you get a step closer to the first page. Indeed link building (or earning), social media, local and whatnot do have a crucial role to improve your site authority, but without a "search engine/visitor friendly" website, all your effort won't be worth as much. Good luck Oscar

Thanks everyone, really helpful!

Lynn, Good morning. I tried the above suggestion and it worked! Thank you for your help with this issue!

Yep, I mean a trail of category page links on product pages, like this - http://screencast.com/t/YSlLeuXeG Personally I have noticed this not only reinforces the site structure, but helps more pages of my site get crawled because it makes it easier for Google's spiders to navigate my site.

Thanks everyone - those are great responses