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I would second this, it is a very last ditch approach but in a worst case scenario, what else can you do? Has anyone actually done this? Any other considerations? Would you think it would be worth noindexing the original site first to get it out of the index before launching on a new domain? I am actually working with a few companies and upon reviewing the link profile, it is like 99% junk so in this instance, starting again with some outreach to the few good links is certainly a more attractive prospect but I would be interested to hear any feedback from folks that have done this.

Hi, For user engagement and cedibility the FB plugin might be better but I don't think Google will pick up the content (whereas it will if you cut and paste).

i did the cleanup before the dropdown.. this was the firs thing i did after i upload new version of website and i sent the new sitemaps...

I would do page-to-page 301 redirects to the webpages with topics that are most closely relevant to the old webpages' topics. Yes, you can do page-to-page redirects to webpages with different domain names.  It's going to take a lot of work if you have to do that with 50k URLs though! I suggest that you consider this:  Keep hosting it and replace the main page's content with a paragraph explaining that the website is on pause. It can contain a link to some of your other websites. Here's why I suggest that:  I have a client with a website with a Google PageRank of 3.  He closed the business and wanted to ditch the website since he was starting a new biz.  Instead, he let me put up a blank page with a paragraph stating that the business was closed. And I reduced my hosting fee for that website. There were no longer any internal links to the inner webpages, other than on the sitemap.xml.  Nearly six months later, the website still has maintained Google PR3 (and PR2 for inner pages), and someone has approached him wanting to buy the website!  Yay! One last idea:  You could contact the websites that link to the soon-to-be-retired website and ask them to link instead to one of your other, relevant websites. Hope this helps!  Good luck!

One thing that I noticed is that your doctype is HTML but you are using an XHTML canonical tag. You have: whereas in an HTML document, you shouldn't use self-closing tags. It should be: It's possible SEOmoz is ignoring the tags for this reason.

Eppie, do you still support these methods? These are very risky grey methods that I'm very surprised you're still recommending in 2012. Would love to hear your updated input. You're very smart and I love the Link Detective tool you created which is why I'm surprised to see this.

You've also got to imagine that would be pointless from an end user perspective.

Thanks for the responses. If there is a penalty, how is that penalty implemented? For example, does Google take a "fixed number" and subtract that from you, as in a -25 "point" one time penalty? Or do they limit the ceiling of your overall ranking? The reason I ask is if it is a one time penalty then earning more links should gradually take the rankings back up. But that isn't the case with my site. If it is an issue of google devaluing all links due to a penalty, then I will need to start to take action to remove those penalties.

Some great responses here and although I agree with contacting webmasters first and requesting manual removal of links, I think its good to mention what to do if you are hit with a negative SEO blast where all the new links are from spammy blog networks and de-indexed domains etc where conveniently, there are no contact details on site or with WHOIS. In this case, its probably better going down the disavow route using caution and common sense before submitting final disavow file.

Yes David your link is very helpful..

If you don't have access to the root of your website (either via cPanel or FTP), you'll need to ask BigCommerce if it's even possible. Such proprietary platforms often don't provide the ability to do such redirects. Paul

This is what we have done with pdfs.   Assign rel="canonical" in .htaccess. We did this with a few hundred files and it took google a LONG time to find and credit them.

Different for sure, but use a keyword in the title and in the alt text.  Alt text should really be pretty tied to the actual video.

just what I was looking for thanks

The best way for me to address this is to tell you how I would structure the products. I would have non state specific category pages for each product.  These pages would talk about the product in general.  Within these category pages, I would have a product page for each state.  On these pages I would have content that explains what is different about that particular state. I would have a separate category for each state.  This page would talk about the states issues in a general way.  This page would link to all the same state specific items. document type  - document A  - Alaska docA - Ohio docA document B - Alaska docB - Ohio docB States    -Alaska  -Alaska docA -Alaska docB -Ohio       -Ohio docA -Ohio docB

Hi, I too have a volusion site, and have had my ups and downs with SEO. I was not as prepared with 301s when i switched over so i took a hit, but after 3 months went back to normal. I would say that volusion is great for seo, no need to purchase an additional package. I recently took a gamble and gave all of my products unique URLs via unique "product name short" and i dropped 50% of my traffic, bad idea. After 8 weeks of lower traffic i am now going back to having the same product name short for all produtcs in a subcategory. That was my mistake not volusion. I find that SEOMOZ + Volusion import/export is a pretty good combo to make sure that my site has all relevant info and is updated quickly.