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That's how I see it....the old homepage was at ..../af/index.asp -- this will definitely get 301ed, its just about the other 800+ random URLs. There is no penalty for redirecting a page that could otherwise have a 404? Or, once GoogleBot views a 404 on a particular page, is it too late at that point to 301 it? With the "index.asp" page, it still makes sense to redirect because there are links around the web pointing to that location, and those visitors need the redirect.

What you are likely experiencing is the effects of personalized search results. That is, results when you are signed into Google (hence the differing results on different computers). First you need to check that you have correctly implemented the authorship markup here: http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets Remember, there is no guarantee that a rich snippet will be shown in search results. If you need help implementing the markup then there are several guides you can find through Google. Hope this helps, Adam.

Hi Bob, We're all always learning! A blended result is one that combines information from both the website and 3rd party sources (so, let's say it links to the website from the title but is accompanied by a link to the place/+ page). A purely organic results has no third party data. This would be your typical old-style result of the title and meta linking to the website. Most local results are blended these days, but the first page of results typically included both the blended results and some organic results. Do a search for 'pizza san francisco' in Google. If your results are relatively similar to mine, you will see the page start with a purely organic result from Yelp and another from SeriousEats. This is followed by a set of 7 blended results in which the title element is linking to the websites of various business and is embellished with reviews from Google and Zagat, contact info and links to Google Maps which lead to the Google+ Local pages. Then, below this, we return to pure organic results (2 for businesses and 1 for Gayot). I hope that makes what you are seeing in the SERPs really clear to you.

It definitely did. Thank you!

Google announced several changes the day before this, but that does not mean they necessarily rolled them out that day. My guess is that you received some sort of penalty, but we would have to know the site. You can private message me if you are interested in me taking a look.

Neither access denied nor not found crawl errors are dealbreakers as far as Google is concerned. A not found error usually just means you have links pointing to pages that don't exist (this is how you can be receiving more errors than pages crawled - a not found error means that a link to that page was crawled, but since there's no page there, no page was crawled).  Access denied is usually caused by either requiring a login or blocking the search bots with robots.txt. If the links causing 404 errors aren't on your site it's certainly possible that errors would still be appearing.  One thing you can do is double-check your 404 page to make sure it really is returning an error of 404: not found at the URL level.  One common thing I've seen all over the place is that sites will institute a 302 redirect to one 404 page (like www.example.com/notfound).  Because the actual URL isn't returning a 404, bots will sometimes just keep crawling those links over and over again. Google doesn't necessarily crawl everything every day or update everything every day.  If your traffic isn't being affected by these errors I would just try as best you can to minimize them, and otherwise not worry too much ab out it.

Joel - Fantastic replies. I Love SEOMOZ... some many passionate folks here. You have given me some real food for thought that I will take away and break the project down a bit with. Thanks again

Hold on & wait. It sounds like the pages you're waiting on recache for are deeper pages within the site (product pages) so it's likely that they are visited less regularly by Google. You can always check the cache date with a 'cache:http://pageurl' search to check when Google last visited & cached the page. Hope that helps. Thanks, Greg

Well put , also keep in mind that to many no follow links are also not a good link profile Variation

I like all of the answers here and I would definitely focus on how the user is searching for the lawyers.  If you have a site with millions of lawyers, they would each have an area of practice so it would make sense to develop a structure around this first: lawyerz.com/practice-area/state/city/attorney-name WIth this structure, a searcher that types in "estate planning lawyer" would be sent to the estate planning lawyers page and allowed to search further for their city and then lawyer names.  I would attach the contact info, reviews directly on that lawyer's page. Since your higher volume keywords are going be found within the "practice areas", this would seem the next step after the main domain target of "attorney" or "lawyers".  Then, location can come third, attorney name is most likely a lesser searched keyword but using a url structure such as "attorney-john-doe" reinforces. I would LOVE to hear all the expert opinions about this as I am a newbie to seomoz but am finding some great experts and advice over here.

Hi Donnie, If you're vacating the old address and will be located solely in the new office, you need to change all existent listings and citations to reflect your new address. The reason this is so important is that Google can become very confused if they find two sets of NAP (name, address, phone number) for your business and may not trust your new information because the old info is hanging around out there. As Guy has pointed out, this is a time consuming process. Do a little every day and you can get it done. It really is necessary. Good luck!

Google isn't seeing the "hover", Google is seeing the code for the page.  If your menus are made with html, Google will be able to read the links just fine.  If you are using Java, Google has historically had a difficult time reading Java Script.  I have programmed menus that are html, but will substitute fancier Java code when the client can use Java.  This has given the best user experience while making sure that Google can read the links.

Crimson offers a great reply and gets a thumbs up from me. I'll just add a bit. Whether or not you submit a sitemap, Google will visit your site as long as it knows the site exists. If your site offers solid navigation, there is absolutely no need to submit a sitemap. Google will find and crawl all of your pages. If you have coding issues on your site, navigation issues, island pages, etc. then a sitemap is helpful so Google can be aware of these pages it would otherwise not be able to find. With the above noted, a sitemap is easy to set up and automate. You can pretty much "set it and forget it" so it's still a good practice. About your questions, 1. It's your call. If a page is linked to in your main navigation such as About or FAQ then Google should find it 100% of the time. There is no need to include it in your sitemap but there is no harm either. Either way works. 2. Yes, as per the above as long as Google can find the page it will index them. You can even have horrible coding and navigation and Google may locate your pages if you have earned external links to them from credible sources. 3. Last I checked a sitemap can hold 50k URLs. If your site has more then 50k URLs, then you can break up the sitemaps into smaller files. The advice Crimson shared is correct. In summary, if you implement all best practices in your site design and do not have any island pages then a sitemap is not needed but it is a nice backup.

I find this to be a good starting point with Bing: http://www.bingforbusiness.com/ Also make sure to sign up for a webmaster account with Bing: http://www.bing.com/toolbox/webmaster If you're based in the US then this is also a good place to check out: http://www.bing.com/businessportal As for Yahoo, it is basically the same as Bing so what you do for Bing will be reflected in Yahoo. Hope this helps!

If you're trying to completely remove the domain, Anthony's suggestion about using Google's URL removal tool is the quickest way to go. You'll first want to block crawler access in your robots.txt, then choose the option to "remove directory" in webmaster tools. http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1663427 (Note: robots.txt by itself DOES NOT prevent Google from indexing your pages, it only blocks them from crawling. Using only robots.txt means your pages are likely to stay in the index for quite some time) That takes care of Google. Bing's process isn't quite as smooth. I'd also throw a meta robots "NOINDEX, FOLLOW" tag on all your pages - this will help with other search engines as well. You may want to include a message on your old site instructing visitors to update their bookmarks and links - this may help aid with the transition. Keep in mind, this will severe all links from your old domain, and none of your built up link equity will transfer over. Obviously, you've given this some thought in order to take such a move. Hope this helps. Best of luck!