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No problem at all. The legal implications certainly make it more complicated! Unfortunately the only suggestion I could really offer here is to block out a time where you can get through them all at once or withing a day or two max. The longer they're down, the greater the chance you'll drop in rankings and not see an easy recovery. It may even be worth doing them in batches of 10 - 20 posts and re-publishing them as you finish each batch. At least this way you're steadily minimising the number of pages that are offline rather than taking the all or nothing approach.

You should remove it if possible. No reason to link to a dead link (poor ux, waste crawler time) or call a non-existent resource (slow site down). However, I don't think it will make any noticeable effect on your rankings.

you can ping google to recrawl those pages and see the new status codes. Aside from that, you just need to wait.

Anytime you relocate an entire site's worth of URLs, you should always redirect them to their new counterparts, it's the quickest way to ensure search engines and people are able to access your new content. Updating your URLs in the index can take a very long time without this step.

If your products are ranking well for their target keywords, I would try and avoid changing their URLs (especially to a different domain). Keeping on your own domain also helps improve your product rankings when you grow your main website. Not sure how the masking will be set up, but in some cases there is no "internal links" since they are all masked by the root masking domain. This would definitely prevent you from building more links (and further improving your rankings).

Google's official stance: they are equivalent. I prefer using the subfolder structure. If the content on your subdomains is significantly different from your root domain content, Google may treat them separately. Check out: https://moz.com/community/q/the-great-subdomain-vs-subfolder-debate-what-is-the-best-answer

As long as each page has useful, unique content, shouldn't be an issue. e.g. I create a page for each town that a restaurant delivers to. I include some random facts about the town (large companies, population, etc - stuff you can grab from city-data.com), directions from that town to the restaurant, some popular dishes and a paragraph of unique text tailored for visitors from that town. Google has an issue with you scraping a database of every city in USA, templating out some content and tweaking your same keyword across all of those pages.

In addition to the benefits from a UX and SEO point of view already mentioned, you're also destroying your Google Analytics data. When users go from a HTTPS page to a HTTP on your site, the original attribution is lost and that HTTP page will show up as direct traffic. Measurement becomes a nightmare real quick when you have users going back and forth throughout their session on your site.

First, here is my opinion. I believe the parent company wanted to retain the identity of these sites as being related to the Gap as related subsidiaries of it, so they kept gap.com as the canonical domain. Much as Google has done with their products and services. Next, let's talk about information architecture and business goals, versus SEO. Pros to using subdomains: it differentiates different arms of your business. Each subdomain can be SEO'd individually, and yet you retain the brand name and recognition on the domain level. I think they may have done it this way to make it easier to manage the content in some way. Cons: Subdomains all require as much work as having separate domains, so you need to use them sparingly. Compared to subfolders, they don't share link equity. The pros to having each business have its own domain or to be established as a microsite, is that it allows for more targeted marketing. I.e., you can niche your product or service, or offer a specific service. Each unit can control their subdomain, but not mess up the larger parent site, which might happen if folders and subfolders are used. Also this snippet says it better than I can write it: "A subdomain is a a separate website on your brand’s domain meant to host content all relative to a common theme. The most prominent examples of subdomains are from Google, who uses them to host their different subdivisions such as Google News, Google Maps, and more. The benefits include better organization, an ability to capitalize on your brand’s domain authority while building upon its own, and creating a separate entity that is still on brand. Many brands opt for a subdomain because they are often easiest to set up, especially if you’re using a third-party host. Subdomains are most beneficial for brands looking to organize specific content that many speak to different audiences, for example by region or product. In addition, brands use subdomains as a way to separate different product lines, divisions, events, or digital publications. Unlike a subfolder, which is often hosted on the main domain’s site navigation or footer, subdomains are a little more independent." From: http://www.skyword.com/contentstandard/marketing/should-i-host-my-content-on-a-microsite-subdomain-or-subfolder/ My guess is that gap.com, the parent company, followed Google's lead in wanting to brand the products to the parent company while allowing the divisions to maintain control over their niche product, and yet still speak to the target demographic. If you want to read more, this page has some great advice: https://www.stonetemple.com/subfolders-subdomains-microsites-and-seo/ -- Jewel

So long as www.citi.com points to https://online.citi.com/US/login.do, via the platform code and/or the .htaccess file, then it doesn't matter. The primary issue is a domain name that is easy for users to type in and remember if they know the site and want to access it directly, rather than from a search engine results page. The cleaner the better. Once the user is on the site, then it is fine for the domain to point to a site in a subfolder. For example, some WordPress users prefer to have their blog in a subfolder to keep their main directory tidy, and this is even when the blog is the purpose of the site in the first place, and not a subset of the site. It is quite common to see www.mysite.com/blog, where www.mysite.com redirects to the blog folder and that is then the index page for the website. IOW, a user might type in "mysite.com" and then will be auto redirected to mysite.com/blog via the PHP code and the .htaccess file. One drawback is that the location of the main site in a folder may add a small amount of latency to load times. A slight redirect as you show in your example is quite common, so search engines are used to it. No, I don't see there being a penalty from a search engine company. As to which is "better", you have to think through your business goals for the site and determine the best information architecture and site design for your services, products, company, or organization. That will drive the correct answer to that question. -- Jewel

Have you tried contacting your hosting company or CDN to see if there were any gateway issues that might have blocked your home page? It seems a stretch, but it is the only thing I can think of outside of what you have tried. I am assuming you made no changes to your robots.txt file, either.

Are you going to replace each of the old sites to a subdomain, to subfolders, or are you combining all of the content into a new site? IOW, have you decided on a site structure, yet?

Hi Martijn. How to create trigger for such things via tag manager? via event? or let me give some idea how to write script on page? Thanks!

I know that this is an old question but I just started using Snip as well and I want to know, are you still using it? How has it affected your SEO? I read the info on the link too but I am still curious. OR has anyone used it long enough to know how this can affect SEO? Thanks in advance.

Oleg, Thanks for your response. I hadn't considered that Moz had gotten it wrong. I just checked Majestic and everything looks fine. Thanks for taking the time to respond, Matt

Hey, If you check today's whiteboard Friday with Dr. Pete (https://moz.com/blog/arent-301s-302s-canonicals-all-basically-the-same-whiteboard-friday), he mentions this case: "Some types of 302s just don't make sense at all. So if you're migrating from non-secure to secure, from HTTP to HTTPS and you set up a 302, that's a signal that doesn't quite make sense. Why would you temporarily migrate?" So answering your question, Google probably considered your initial http -> https redirects as 301.

Hi, At least not in above case. As you mentioned that you also have rel canonical tag that means you don't want to index query string URL. Thanks

Hi Oleg, Thanks for the response. Unfortunately our child theme has no header and footer files. And it is not located in the parent theme's header or footer files as far as I can tell. Is there any other solution for this?