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Thanks so much to you all. This has gotten us closer to an answer. We are consulting with the folks who developed the Web store to make sure that these solutions won't break other things if implemented, particularly something mentioned to me by our IT Director called "Sim links" - I'll keep you posted!

Hi Chammy, that is great that the blog is in the subfolder. Awesome. Now you need to decide whether to use the "www" or not for both the main site and blog. Either use www.mainsite.com with 301 redirect from non www version with www.mainsite.com/blog with 301 redirect from non www version OR mainsite.com with 301 redirect from www version and mainsite.com/blog with 301 redirect from www version. The reason that it is best practice to redirect from the subdomain www to the root (or vice versa) is to prevent duplicate content and prevent domain authority from being split between two sites, as the search engines view www.mainsite.com and mainsite.com and separate sites. So if you keep things the way they are, your blog will not be on the same site as the main site, and you will lose out on the benefits of building a single, strong site -- not to mention the internal linking headaches that you will have! So, to answer your questions: This is not okay. Yes, they should both be www or non www. And yes, you should worry ... but only if you don't do something.

Hi Rahul! I recently answer a very similar question. Lynn Patchett comment was extremely helpful as well. Check it out: http://moz.com/community/q/are-reciprocal-links-with-a-pandalized-site-harmful Hope it helps.

Hello Rubix, Saijo gave you some great advice, but I'm concerned about the fact that you have that page in the first place, and that it produces those URL parameters. It suggests to me that instead of showing a 404 error on the contact-office.aspx page (assuming that pages doesn't exist on that URL) you are redirecting the user who tries to access that URL to the /404.html page (e.g. /404.html?aspxerrorpath=/contact-office.aspx). Typically you want the 404 http status code to show on the URL the user is trying to unsuccessfully access. In this case instead of redirecting them to your "404 page URL" you would want to show your customized 404 message (and ensure it returns a 404 status code, use this tool) on www.yourdomain.com/contact-office.aspx. I hope this makes sense to you. If not, feel free to ask for clarification.

Ideally, that's what I would have done. Have new site on a subdomain disallow, noindex everything and allow user transition and testing to go forward without impacting SERPS. Unfortunately, someone's bright idea (before I was hired) was to transition site entirely within two weeks and take down the old one right away, hence the pickle. We understand the ramifications of large 301'ing but our current site is terrible for many reasons (grandfather/legacy issues) and our SERP visibility is good but not where we should be. That's why loss in traffic is a gamble worth taking because our new site will be 1000% improved from a SE & user perspective. Don't get me wrong, we don't take the loss likely b/c we are the 2nd largest online retailer in our market. About 2500 top level URLs are changing.

Hi, As you mention Panda is not a link based update so it is unlikely that the links are related to your issues, if (an important if) you are sure your problems are Panda based. Check out this useful analytics overlay tool to see if any important dates pop out of your analytics data and confirm traffic drops around known google updates. As Guillermo mentions, reciprocals in themselves are not inherently bad and as you say they have brought you direct referral traffic so nothing wrong with that. That being said, bunches of them on 2000+ pages, especially if they are anchor text rich and do follow could be a fine line. If in doubt I would no follow them, but make sure you have identified as best as possible the original cause of your problems before you start making wholesale changes.

That is definitely rendered, you can tell because it is so perfect and there are not any weld lines for the prongs. I think most internet companies do this so they do not have to carry stock.

This is definitely the best thing to do. Whenever a page goes to a 404 you should be consider a redirect of some sort. I would take into consideration user experience when you're doing your redirects as a priority. In general, when I work with e-commerce website, I will 301 redirect old product pages (now 404 pages) through to the main category pages. This provides a good user experience and any links that were pointing to that product page can be flowed into the category page (you'll be surprised how much traffic you lose from not doing this).

The attractions page that you linked to has plenty of unique content, but if you're targeting the keyword "st augustine attractions", you'll want to do everything in your power to make that page more attractive and useful than anything else ranking for the target keyword. Listing blog posts down below as title + short description is great from a user standpoint and a search engine standpoint. Keep it up, and try to find ways to add more internal links to the text throughout the page rather than relying on dumping all the links at the bottom.

I wouldn't redirect them all to the homepage as this is a common blackhat technique and G may think something fishy is going on. If you can redirect individual pages to relevant/similar pages on the new domain (and all the general ones redirect to the homepage), then that would be a very good strategy. Just make sure that the links to the old sites are natural/healthy. If they are bad, the effects will transfer to the new domain as well.

Hi Dan, thanks for the link!

What if the affiliate links are follow but they go to an specific subdomain which disallows robots via robots.txt. Can those kind of links hurt the main domain? Thanks in advanced. Jabi

Hi Keri, Its back up to 51 now, thanks very much for all your help on this!

Does anyone else have any insight to these URLs?

Thank Everett thats really helpful. I must admit i do wonder whether i have split out too many pages that could be combined, I think when i launched this version of the site in June, i was trying to focus a core keyword per page, with plurials etc, as i didnt think google would in the example you used pick up funeral planning & funeral plans as connected - god this job is hard sometimes! Ash

Can this override the automatic authorship system where every page on a domain has been approved as by an author??

Hi Moosa, thank you for the good answer... You said - Use it for users not for Search Engines! Then what type of links would you use for search engines...

Take a look at the Panguin Tool - http://www.barracuda-digital.co.uk/panguin-tool/ This tool uses the organic traffic from your GA account and overlays the dates of major Google updates. You can then see if a Google update resulted in a sudden drop in your organic search traffic. Once you know this you can look at what changed as part of that update and check this against your live site.

How many products does your store have? Magento have an option call "URL Rewrite Management" (Catalog > URL Rewrite Management) If you have a few products you can change the URLs manually to match OsCommerce. If you have  a lot products you should: 1 - Export SKU and URL from OsCommerce to CSV. (ask a PHP developer to make script for you) 2 - Import the spreadsheet to magento  with the columns named: SKU and  url_key If your site is really big you will need a third part magento extension to import the categories. Magento do not have any native function to import categories.

Where I saw the KW stuffing was on your description of your firm on G+.Thanks for your help.I just need this answer.