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I agree that the 301 redirect would be your best option as you can pass along not only users but the bots to the right page..  You may need to get a developer in to write some regular expressions to parse the incoming request and then automatically find the correct new URL.  I have worked on sites with a large number of pages and using some sort of automation is the only way to go. That said, if you simply want to kill the old URLs you can show the 404s or 410s.  As you mention, then you end up with a bunch of 404 errors in GWT.   I have been there too, it's like damned if you do, damned if you don't.  We had some URLs that were tracking URLs from an old site and we are now here a year later (been showing 410s for over a year on the old tracking URLs) they still show up in GWT as errors. We are trying a new solution for how to remove these URLs from the index without getting 404 errors.  We show a 200 and then we put up a minimal html page with the meta robots noindex tag. http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=93710 "When we see the noindex meta tag on a page, Google will completely drop the page from our search results, even if other pages link to it. " So, we allow Google to find the page, get a 200 (so no 404 errors), but then use the meta noindex tag to tell Google to remove it from the index and stop crawling the page. Remember, this is the "nuclear" option.  You only want to do this to remove the pages from the Google index.  Someone mentioned using GWT to remove URLs, but if I remember correctly, you only have so many pages you can do this with at a time. If you list the files within the robots.txt. Google will not spider the files, but then if you remove the page from robots.txt file, they will start to try spidering again.  I have seen Google come back a year later on URLs when I take them out of robots.  This is what happened to us and so we tried just showing the 410/404, but Google still keeps crawling.   We recently moved to this option with the 200/noindexmeta and it seems to be working. Good luck!

Looking at 6 to 8 pages, you providing the content (images, video, text) somewhere between $1,500 to $3,000. The reasons for the range are myriad, but typically if you have content, a site like that should run toward the $1,500 more than the $3K.

I think it’s a great question that most people don’t ask. SEO while development: This can also further divided in two different parts depending on your budget and goals. Like if you are a simple local business then one way to go with SEO while development is to make sure that website is building currently from Navigation, Content, links, hosting and domain point of view. Other way to go is to have pre promotional plan to engage the target audience even before the website go live and at the same time making sure that website is fit from all development and on-page areas. Continuous SEO In this SEO service you expect results, you expect to get yourself on top of search engine from the desired key phrases and get leads and sales for the business out of it. There is no time limit to it but usually one can expect to start seeing results within 4 to 6 month of time (depending on niche and industry) I believe you should go for One time SEO, with or without the promotion plan is up to your business strategy and budget for SEO.

Hi Capitol, This isn't a fair question. HTML is a browser language. Wordpress is a CMS (Content Management System). Wordpress uses HTML, html doesn't use Wordpress. The purpose of Wordpress is to make web pages easier to generate, manage and archive. A website built outside of a CMS system can work great but can require more time to create. My company's website is done in straight development (HTML/PHP/JAVASCRIPT/JQUERY), but we also run a site that uses a CMS (Oscommerce). Each one requires specific requirements. The main site requires more of my time, but the CMS requires knowledge of specific Oscommerce requirements, Wordpress would be the same.

Being a web designer I think that a lot of designers really don't know a lot about SEO. Keeping up in one incredibly fast moving industry is hard enough none the less keeping up with both SEO and Design. That being said, it isn't impossible. If you say Panda or Penguin and they have no idea what you're talking about, they don't keep up with the SEO industry. On page SEO disregarding content (think of it as your sites skeleton)is important but from a strict design & development perspective there isn't _that_ much you can do. Of course the code should be clean, semantic, and make sense without overuse javascript or any of flash, but what really matters is how they'll structure the site and place content. It also can't hurt to ask what they'll do about mobile. I recommend responsive design but that does tend to get pricey because of the excess work involved. (Semantic code would be proper use of heading tags (h1-h6), use of alt on images, proper meta descriptions and titles. Flash is bad, stay away. ) For example the basics I would ask are what content management system they recommend using and how will they structure the links along with what will they do about your current links.  You want them to make the link structure so that it makes sense (/contact-us) vs (page?2329422.html) and that if they are changing your current link structure they'll 301 them. You'll also probably want them to say they'll use caches and a CDN along with limiting images and the size of images to keep page load speed time down. If a designer is component and uses a CMS such as Wordpress, and aslong as they have clean code, it isn't that hard to make the site really SEO friendly by installing a few plugins.  I have seen some badly coded sites that have weird redirection issues and are just plain badly coded so you still have to be careful. It really depends on what you're expecting out of the designer. If you want them to just build you the site and you'll take care of the rest such as off page SEO, content, etc, most reputable designers/agencies will do. However if you want them to link build and write content for you that is totally different and they would require much more knowledge and skills and a ton of other questions I would ask. If I design and build a site for a client it is SEO friendly. My code is clean and semantic and I use best practices. However that is only part of SEO and it's up to them to do everything else required such as link building, testing, content, etc. So you can't go strictly on what rankings they have achieved in the past unless you are paying them to do all the other aspects of SEO as well. I would look at their portfolio and see if you like the work they do. If you're going to do all the other aspects of SEO by yourself that is really all that matters because you will be responsible for link building, content, etc.  Still question them about the basics I mentioned above and see what they say but most good designers should know those basics. But most importantly, educate yourself. If you look at SEOMoz's beginner SEO book, you'll be in a better spot to ask the designer questions and save yourself from being upset with your choice in the long run. There are so many variables that come into play that being educated and perhaps even getting an SEO audit or consultation beforehand would be very beneficial especially if you have good rankings and/or an established site. Good luck.

Thank you. I will check again to see if I can change titles on the blog, I hate to get rid of it as it does get some traffic but I have warnings on here about duplicate pages and they are all the blog entries. If Alexa is a gimmick, then is Cubestat and other also a gimmick? Is there any authentic places to use? Thank you!

Hi Cyrus, Thanks for your note. So, if the subsequent links are not indexed by Google (via site command) would that be a sure way to know that the links are not getting followed through by Google? Here's a sample: http://search.veer.com/food is indexed and in the cache version you can see the image links and the text links below. However in the text version the same links are not visible. Now, I did a site command on the first image - http://marketplace.veer.com/stock-photo/Man-shopping-in-vegetable-department-FAN9018482?slot=01&pg=1&skeywords=search&stermids=1115 and http://marketplace.veer.com/stock-photo/Man-shopping-in-vegetable-department-FAN9018482 to ensure that all possible URL variations are covered. It looks like both links are not indexed. This leads to a conclusion that the links are not getting followed. Please let me know if you agree. Thanks!

Thanks for the info Kevin. 'Sales' may be a bad example, all of our catalog, related products, recently viewed products, etc. have the same style of code for the images. I'll keep doing that Thanks again, Bruce

Hello, Check this guide out. I found it to be extremely useful, it takes you step by step over the most common issues faced during a website migration. http://www.seomoz.org/blog/web-site-migration-guide-tips-for-seos Farris

Not only did the doorway page lose it's ranking for its keyword, but so did the main site. This sounds like cloaking. About those doorway domains and microsites.   I used to run a lot of hotdog stand websites.  I thought that was the way to go.  Then I learned that a big kickass site was a lot easier to run, a lot easier to rank and performed better with visitors.  So, now the company that I own works actively on just three websites - each in a different niche. If I had a company like you describe.  I would start putting all future work into a single site in each topic area.   And work on that site until it defeats all of the doorways.  Stop competing with yourself and diluting your brand.

Just a word of caution : When you have a custom theme / plugin .. please make sure thing work as its expected because some plugins / themes wont play nice with each other .

Hi, There isn't a lot negative about a minimalist homepage other than you missing out on an opportunity to attract more organic search traffic.  There are lots of companies that seem to be adopting a minimalist home page look these days --- but personally, I am all in favour of more content than less on the home page. EGOL has listed reasons why you'd do better with more content and I agree with him.

Before I start, I see that some of the changes you suggested are already going into practice.  First thing though, check cross browser compatibility.  I can't read most of that text on your site with firefox.  Adobe has their browser labs and it is handy for cross browser compatibility. All that said, you weren't clear what your intent of the site is so... i'm going to guess and say that you want bookings for event speaking.  In that case,  I'd design the site to sell yourself.  Tell the visitor what you do, who hires you and why THEY should hire you.  I searched through several public speakers (46 sites in total) and this one caught my eye: http://www.lindaedgecombe.com/ Now this isn't a perfect example by any means (poor site title, unclear header text: "Your Re - Set Expert for Crazy Times" - could be clearer on what she does, and no call to action above the fold to name a few).  But as an example, shows a great deal of what does and really sells herself. Not sure if this is the intent of your site, but I hope it helps!

It looks like he did get what he wanted done for now. Thanks everyone!

1.) Looks like great input from the two above 2.) I have used Liquid Web for the last few years and would recommend them. They are a bit expensive, but the incredible support and stable/fast servers makes up for the price.

Paul, Thank you very much for all the feedback. Such great info. I've been working on improving many of these items over the weekend. I'm only using total cache, I set up a CDN, i took off on of the tabs on the activity widget and just let the popular posts. I'm trying to figure out how to resize the images better on the sidebar tab as you're right they are using css to rescale the images. I'm actually saving up to have the site designed by a designer instad of my non-design self. But that's down the road as having something designed professionally isn't cheap (although it is worth it.) I'm going to be working on your suggestions for the rest of the site. Thanks again for the feedback and for the kind words about our site. I'm really trying to help people through this site, and from the feedback we are getting it looks like it's been doing that. Now I'm on the journey to make it an even better experience for people.

That's true EGOL, I'm in the same situation with my personal website, been trying to optimize the architecture for months and at this time I'm still undecided , weekly I'm changing the order, resize the slides, adding content to the page, optimizing the keywords until I get some results. I work closely with theme developers and I make some technical suggestions after i test the template with different tools.