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First off, I like the way you're thinking through this - it's critical to understand that no one solution should be applied to every scenario, so here are my thoughts on what you should do: For programs no longer offered, I would leave the page up with a notification that it's discontinued plus related products ('this program is no longer offered, but here are some other programs you might like'). Your idea of having a custom 404 for discontinued products (with the same type of language) could also work. If you do 301 redirect visitors, I suggest going to the category page & also incorporating some way of letting the visitor know. You basically want to avoid confusing the visitor by taking them somewhere different than expected. For the programs temporarily on hold, do not 302 redirect them - 302s should be avoided in almost all cases. Instead, leave the page live & let the visitor know that this program is currently unavailable, with a CTA to be alerted via email as soon as it's available. Also have related products in case they need the program/service now. There's an old Moz post (that I can't find atm) where Rand explains how he dealt with this situation - I believe he had the same idea as I shared, followed by closely monitoring the traffic to the pages; then adding 301s to the very low trafficked pages & working to improve the messaging/CTA/UX of the ones still receiving traffic. I hope this helps!

Hi Linda, Thanks for the advice, I was doing some reading of canonical URL's and your suggest does appear to be exactly what they are suggesting.  Looks like Ill have a bit of work in store for me!

Fantastic! Thanks Dean

I think you need to wait a little bit. The decrease in traffic could just be because of the 301 redirects that are looping around. Don't make to many changes at one time. Once the 301 redirects settle, the links from your old site should start to drop. You are telling Google that the site has moved, and if the back links aren't connected to the new domain, aside from the 301, they will start to fall off naturally. A disavow action at this point would hurt more than help. Just be patient and give it a couple of weeks.

Are you referring to the GA dashboard as this can be customised to show any widgets? If you are referring to GA in general then the percentages are calculated as a percentage of your overall sessions for the selected time period.

Personally, i try to avoid this approach and focus on quality over quantity. A single, well written and shared piece of content has the potential to earn many times more links and traffic than 50 purchased or hastily written articles when the quality is in question. Really, I don't care about how many posts I've written or how many comments I've made (and by directory submissions I hope you mean Local Directories What I do care about is how users engage with those activities, how often my content is shared by authoritative influencers, and how these activities contribute to SEO success. Sticking to a structure and/or schedule is important, but I would avoid the cookie-cutter approach to SEO. A couple presentations by Rand that may be helpful. Why Content Marketing Fails Building a Marketing Flywheel Hope that helps! Best of luck with your SEO.

No problem! You can monitor your usage at apidash.moz.com

Hi Kristina, I just responded to you on the other (related) issue at http://moz.com/community/q/mobile-search-results-show-desktop-crawled-content#reply_270529  before seeing your response here.  Sorry about that. Thanks for your response.  It really hadn't occurred to me to allow mobile users to use those pages because the experience would be pretty bad for the most part, and a lot slower for those pages, but it definitely is a thought for solving my indexing issue.  I could give the mobile user a popup the first time they venture into the 'unmobile-friendly pages' as a heads up about which parts are mobile friendly and which aren't...I wonder though if Google will penalize the site or those pages in some way since it will not be able to render them as mobile friendly for a mobile device..EDIT: just saw this: http://www.cnet.com/news/make-web-sites-mobile-friendly-or-face-google-search-wrath/....anyway,  interesting alternative, It wouldn't be as easy as it sounds because of the degree of customization in menus I've done for the mobile pages, but may well be a lot easier than other alternatives..  Thanks very much! Ted

Never shift a website from one country to another country by myself but let me tell you what theory tells us. -          Map Changing If you website was associated to any business registered in Google Maps and other yellow pages than you carefully need to remove all listings and re-register it on another country. These will defiantly going to hurt your rankings on specific country where you were ranking before. The problem is results for every country are different from others so if the rankings didn’t really changed (most probably it will fluctuate for local keywords) the rankings that you had in US will not be the same in AU. What you should be doing. Change your NAP and Re-register your maps in Google and other Yellow pages. Update content accordingly Get new links from .AU domains Change your targeted country in Google Webmaster Tool Get links from local keywords And you will see your rankings will start appearing in google.com.au Hope this helps!

I would update the canonical tag on your end to reflect that Page A (that's being redirected to Page B) is no longer the canonical/preferred URL. Add rel="canonical" href="http://domain.com/page-b" to the old & the new page. I would also send the new tag to the 3rd party with something like 'Hi there- I know you're all super busy, so we thought sharing the new canonical tag with you might help get things updated more quickly' - or something to that effect.

First situation: for both options, in theory, you will be maintaining the same link power, however, I would choose option two. You won't have to worry about GoogleBot crawling the old URL to find the new one. Depending on the keywords you are targeting, you might lose some ground by changing the URL structure. If the old URL structure fits into your new web navigation model, I think you should stick with it to maintain the same results. Second situation: if you feel that the pages aren't of valuable on their own I would 301 them to the one URL. If they made sense to keep from a user experience perspective you would want to add "rel=canonical" tags pointing to the one URL instead. Hopefully that clears things up!

Re-launch s directly proportional to traffic loss but proper planning and launching strategy can help you keep this drop to minimum. If you are relaunching with keeping everything document, redirections, 404, content updates and more than this temporary dip can be minimum for a small amount of time. Whenever relaunching it is important to keep few things in mind -          Get a PR for the relaunch -          Get new quality links back to the profile -          Update new content more actively. This will give Google a hint that you are serious about your business and people wants to see you more in SERP results. Hope this helps!

There's no good reason to measure your content purely by quantity, simply because there's no inherent reason to have 10 pages on a site versus 10 million. The "right" amount of content for any particular website will be entirely driven by your business model, you marketplace, and the actions of your audience. If you're looking for a way to measure the value of each page of content you're producing against your actual revenue and business goals, then to do what you're asking, you need to have a website set up to perfectly track multi-touch attribution across the entire customer lifecycle, and that's a hard task for most business models. For us mortals, GA is the simplest way to get closer to this. By assigning e-commerce revenue or goal values, GA will assign values to pages, allowing you to see the total sum value of that page. The content groups features of GA will allow you to analyze content in bucketed groups as well, rather than page by page. Using GA is limited by the goals you are tracking - if you don't attach a dollar value to a newsletter signup, then GA will never assign more value to a page that generates tons of newsletter signups. Marketing automation/analytics tools like Hubspot, Mixpanel, and Kissmetrics have similar features allowing you to track the value of a piece of content. So, setting up the right analytics environment is the best way to justify your efforts on a per page basis.

You have answered many questions I wasn't even sure I was asking!  Thank you for being clear and detailed, so many great people at Moz!

By block, I assume you mean not index them? If you're using Yoast, all you need to do is select "noindex subpages of archives" under the Titles & Meta menu. So if simply not indexing is the desired result, that's the easiest bet - and then you will not index all other subpages such as /category/page/2/ etc

well said

OMG! Yes, I see now, I was doing this: header("Location: $goto "); and I need to do something like this: header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently"); header("Location: $goto"); What a dunce...Thanks so much!

Hi AMHC, It makes sense that without hardly any backlinks built up Google wont find my upper case URLS since all the page links have been changed, however, I am writing out all of the urls that are redirected into email, and from that I can tell that Google is finding them--I guess they may have a list of urls from prior indexing that they crawl independent of what their crawler comes up with. I'll keep looking to see what they have indexed and if it turns out they just aren't crawling certain pages, will put them in a sitemap to be crawled..It's a good idea for taking care of the problem quickly--so if it progresses too slowly I'll do that. Thanks very much for your answers!