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That helps lots, Matt. Thanks for being on the ball.  I'll sleep better tonight. Cheers.

In December 2008 I helped a company transition from BV4 to Volusion. Like your situation, our URLs were years old at that point (the original Website launched in 1996). I really only have 2 pieces of advice: 1. Make sure you've set up your 301 redirects properly (we didn't, and it took 6 weeks to sort out the mess). 2. Hang on for the ride. Be prepared for a major dip in traffic, particularly if you are re-writing all of the URLs. But take heart. Sometimes the dip is necessary to move onward and upward. Seth Godin wrote a whole book on The Dip. Now might be a good time to buy your CEO a copy. Cheers! I hope all goes well and that it moves you one step closer to awesomeness! Dana

Valuable content. That is it. Allow ONE link to their site and keep other links that are actually helpful. Use CopyScape do check plagiarizing. But to be blunt guest bloggers are only the quality you look for. I suggest looking for other sites where they have published content and figure out if they are worth the content. You should know when you have a REAL guest blogger or just another spammer with spun content.

Sometimes things seem so confusing but yet they are extremely simple. Thank you, you've helped

Hi, Usually when you redirect to the homepage, Google will still allow it and you get the link juice.  By as a best practice, that is kind of a waste because that is not where the visitors want to visit.  If the visitor wants to visit website A's topic A page, the best practice is to redirect the visitor to website B's topic A page so the visitor is still viewing what they wanted in the first place. To answer your question, you still still get the link juice redirecting to homepage but your bounce rate might increase because that is not the page where visitors were expecting to visit. However, I have a question, if you are closing down the community section then how are you redirecting?  I am a bit confused/lost on this part.

Video are good, and have always been good for the SERPS. It is always good to have keyword relevant content around your video embed, especially as the H1 title of your video. Google doesn't hit you for adverts above the fold unless it is a lot. Look at it from a user perspective. When you open your page are you blasted with adverts. A few nicely placed are okay, just don't have all adverts and very little content above the fold.

Again, it's really hard to hypothesize without knowing the specific site because there could be a ton of other things at play you may just not be seeing. Videos are content so if they have a lot of videos, then they don't have 0 content. Especially if they have a transcript or CC file attached to it that can be crawled. And, if they have a video sitemap and how their hosting is set up all factor in to some degree. Even with the changes to Google's algo, links are still powerful, especially links from .gov or .edu - just a few of those can mean more than tons of links from regular .com sites.

Ha, okay, got it! Go after some long tail content and start adding some value to the site and you should have a broader scope and some pages that will rank on their own merit. Gives you something constructive to do and some possible link targets!

Can't emphasize how useful your answer is, that will solve the problem for us, thank you very very much

Jason, Thanks for the update. Yeah it seems pretty clear that it's a bug at this point.  Not fun while it lasts though

If there are links pointing to your old pages, whether on your site or from external sources, Google will continue to try to index them and return 404s. The best way to tell Google that these pages have moved is to add 301 redirects from your new content to your old content. This will eliminate the 404s and help you retain and link juice the old pages had.

Hi Andy, here you go: www.consumerbase.com/robots.txt I know we want to block the .html files, but I am unsure about the other folders. I guess I would need to know for certain from my programmers that none of our content is in there?

Hi, I would use 301 redirects from the old pages to the specific pages of the new domain.  Make sure you redirect a page about rome A from the old domain to a page about rome A on the new domain.  The page on the new domain should be something similar to the page you are redirecting so that when visitors visit the old domain and get redirected to the new domain, they will still find what they are looking for. Although your new domain does'nt have much authority but with 301 redirects, it will redirects 99% of its link juice and authority to the new domain.  So 301 redirect will help a bit with the new domain's authority. in conclusion, your first plan will work. Hope this helps.

Hi Andy, Thanks for your speedy response. In answer to your 1st question, our website sits on Hubspot's CMS which allows us to track the rankings for our main keywords in Google.co.uk This tells us that we currently have 239 Keywords ranking in the Top 10 and 138 Ranked in Top 3. (Many of these are for our long tail keywords that are less competitive) Driving close to 4,000 visitors per month to the site via Organic search. I see the reasoning behind the GPS but our competitors also have these terms on their sites but don't have similar results? It doesn't bother me necessarily but thought it may have indicated that Google couldn't really place what our website is about. Which does bother me.

Well, considering there will be only one page which will probably mention the words, christmas, and all related words (not so much phrases), plus the category that will contain posts with those same words, it's a fight i can't really avoid! But I understand what your saying, the search engines should figure it out. Ok, i'll get on and create this website! Many thanks for your insight! c

Kent is right. You need to check the CTR in Web Master Tools prior and during the impression spike. That spike in impression is correlated with either a spike in rankings for current keywords you had or a lot of new pages you've publish in the past or recently got in the index with good rankings. If your CTR was low, so your entries didn't appeal to the users it means, from Google's point of view, you don't really deserve to rank. More then that check the organic traffic time on page (for entry pages) and pages view for each organic entry to see how users did behave once they click in. If those numbers are not very "friendly"  there is a high chance that the users bounced back in search looking for a different result - and that again can cause a massive organic drop. CTR and low organic user behavior patterns will drop your organic numbers and in most cases as far as we've seen it's always more visibile after a spike in impressions. Hope it helps.

I would have to agree. If you keep to a single domain, you don't have to spread your budget and effort out between other domains. Any piece of content you create can then, possibly,  influence your entire domain.