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You are assuming correctly. The spider will see the content that is shown by default, which in your case should be the retail pricing.

Ah, e-commerce product pages - that makes more sense!

Hi bizzer, Everyone should ideally have a mobile-friendly website, because the percentage of people accessing your site on mobile devices will only continue to increase. And if you already have a Wordpress site, switching to a responsive theme is a great way to achieve that. But...as you note, there are other considerations, such as potentially lost rankings. Only you know how much of a drop you can afford. It's a short-term sacrifice for long-term results. Generally speaking, my recommendation would always be that if you can possibly do it, you should. And Miki and Moosa made some good suggestions above for how to minimise the negative impact somewhat. Combined with good technical SEO going into the new source code, you should hopefully be able to regain your position fairly quickly. To answer your follow-up question: we don't know for sure, but it seems likely that having a mobile-friendly website could be a quality factor, whether now or later. Google have certainly discussed best practice guidelines for mobile, which seems to indicate that a good mobile experience is something which they care about. Apart from anything else, ~60% of mobile users will bounce if they land on a non-mobile-friendly site and go to a competitor, so that in itself will send a negative signal if you have a significant amount of mobile traffic. (and 15-20% isn't too shabby - even if some of that is tablet traffic, a responsive design will provide a better experience for them as well). Hope that helps!

Sharon, if i'm not mistaken this is what you are trying to do: http://www.riafinancial.com/locations/us/home.aspx is normally in English (or American to some ;-)) and with the language selection the us part of the url changes to FR for France and CH for Chinese .. etc. I think you will find your answer in Danny Dovers cheat sheet: http://moz.com/blog/the-web-developers-seo-cheat-sheet-2013-edition you can indeed target selected languages and countries with the href lang and using the double parameter (hreflang="fr-FR"). Hope this helps  you and solves your problem. Regards Jarno

Thanks Reload Media and Deb Dulal Dey. The job is done (for a while now) and the results are even better than hoped for. In the beginning, there was a little (very little) drop, but within two weeks they climed up. Now we have doubled the organic visitors! So, it turned out great

These pages that produce soft 404 errors don't show products at all because these people search for our products that are not available.

Doug, You are the man, nailed it! Robert

understand thanks

I second that!

Thanks everybody! That was absolutely terrifying

I agree with Devanur.  Just about every site get's scraped and has other poor links to it.  Google knows this.  They are looking for a pattern indicating intent to manipulate the rankings.

I like the idea of 301 redirecting to a new URL, especially if you are planning to drop one of the products. I think that the domains are a tossup. From my experience, EMD are still very effective in many verticals. I agree that you should look into possible causes for the penalty.  Try the Panguin Tool (http://www.barracuda-digital.co.uk/panguin-tool/) to see if your traffic drop aligns with a specific penalty. Did you receive any Unnatural Link Warnings in your Google Webmaster Tools? (if yes read this http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2013/06/backlinks-and-reconsideration-requests.html) If you know that you have some questionable links, try to have them removed or consider the Disavow Tool.

Dear Thomas and Robert Thanks for your great information

Adulter, Whenever I'm wondering about a site like this, I just pop up the MozBar or use Open Site Explorer. When I see a 15DA and 36 total links, I walk away. I look at it this way - if their techniques work, why aren't they using them on themselves? Anyone have thoughts on this technique for identifying quality SEO consultants?

Hi Cyto, I think the only way you're going to know the answer for sure to this is to try it. Fortunately, the Data Highlighter allows you to markup one page at a time if you want, so I'd suggest choosing a handful of pages and try it on just those first. Measure the results and proceed based on those results. You've probably already considered this, but just thought I'd give it a mention. Cheers, Dana

Chad, Chris makes a good point re the leaders in ranking and what are they doing. I would also look for chinks in armor. But, first I would stop what you are doing and back up: Do you have a sales funnel? Do you have a serious KWA? Do you have a sitemap predicated on KWA and UI/UX (Factoring in user habits? Likely user habits if the company is new?). To me url structure comes to a degree as a result of these items. Once you have those, typically on a site of any size (we have particular expertise in the tourist industries on our dev team) you will have certain issues that you will need to make decisions on based on the clients needs, ui/ux, best seo that really are business decisions and you will likely get right - if you take it in order IMO. But that said, the structure I follow is based on some basic SEO rules - four clicks max, four clicks max, keep it simple for the bot (they all can't be Roger), then: What are the important business KWs I must rank for (destination first or event first or mode first, etc.) I would follow that down the line. Personally, I have never searched on Tour company (ies) nor have I searched on "destinations" or "Sights" so I would not have that in my architecture unless the KWA showed I should. So, instead of destinations for example what are they looking for specifically and can I get that in a menu/ sub-directory etc. Then follow your brain. Sorry that I cannot give you a do it like this: A/B/C but from the fact you are looking I think you will get this and make it happen. My opinion is that after domain what is the first thing they are looking for that is a category then what specifically within that and then other data for a decision. To me you tell the search engine that you are at my domain...this is the most important keyword here, this is next, and this is the final destination that is rock solid. Hope this helps, Robert

What cms are you using? I have a module that I developed that is free for Prestashop if you are using it. What it does is lets you give your search pages a static name. You have to specifically define terms, so it does not automatically make a landing page for each term. It also lets you do title's, meta descriptions, and keywords for the pages. The way the code works might prove a useful framework for adapting it to what ever platform you are using. The git is at https://github.com/Prestashop-Modules/searchterm  there is an explanation of how it works at http://blog.dh42.com/search-pages-landing-pages/

Hi Dan, Thanks for the answer! Indexation is already back to 42.000 so slowly going back to normal And thanks for the last tip, that's totally right. I just discovered that several pages had duplicate url's generated so by continually monitoring we'll fix it !

This is also advised as a part of the on page optimization within the Moz grading system "Although the canonical URL tag is generally thought of as a way to solve duplicate content problems, it can be extremely wise to use it on every (unique) page of a site to help prevent any query strings, session IDs, scraped versions, licensing deals or future developments to potentially create a secondary version and pull link juice or other metrics away from the original. We believe the canonical URL tag is a best practice to help prevent future problems, even if nothing is specifically duplicate/problematic today."

What you're seeing isn't unusual.  In fact, I've seen a single page show rich snippets when it's returned as a result from one query, and no rich snippets for the same page shown in the results for a different query.  Google appears to be doing some analysis of the query itself (and maybe the match between the query and the particular result?) to determine whether rich snippets are helpful or not. Similarly, you'll probably find that your own Google+ authored pages show without the authorship info (photo, name, # of circles, etc.) if you're logged in to Google, but WITH the authorship info if you're logged out, or logged in as a different user.