Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Since subdomains are essentially different websites it makes sense to have separate site maps for each. This will become evident once you start looking into using Google analytics and webmaster tools as sub domains get treated like individual sites.

The solution I came up with was: Create a list of all the source URLs you have, and all the destination URLs you want Create all the destination URL pages Work out what the Ugly versions of all hashbang (pretty) URLs should be and record them (ref: https://developers.google.com/webmasters/ajax-crawling/docs/specification) Implement 301 Redirects for the Ugly URLs Deploy a Sitemap with Pretty URLs Submit Your Sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools Wait for Google to re-index all your pages Check that the new URL(s) show up in Google search results too Clean up – Remove the pretty URLs from the sitemap Job done! I created a detailed page on this with examples on my blog at www.thedriversgarage.com/web-technology/redirecting-hashbang-urls-wix-urls/ Disclaimer - Make your own enquiries and do your own tests.  I'm a pragmatist, I really don't care if this complies to standards.  It worked for me and that's all I cared about.  Google, etc. may process this stuff differently in the future. Do your own tests.

If it is unlikely that a webmaster will reply or looks as though the site is trying to hide contact details then you may not need to contact webmasters before disavowing as it is a waste of time. But in a lot of cases it is more beneficial to you to have a bad link removed than to just disavow it, so it can be worth contacting a webmaster to remove a link. If you are under a penalty though, Google will want to see you are doing everything you can to remove unnatural links and may want to see evidence that you are trying to contact webmasters to remove links rather than just putting everything into a disavow file, because links that are disavowed can just be taken out of the disavow file and be 're-avowed'. Kind Regards

Hey Zeon! For Factual we will need to submit removals of duplicates manually from the backend. Because of this change we haven't been able to update the link to fix duplicates since it's not a quick change we can make but will be updated very soon. For now please email us the link to the duplicate and we can submit it for removal for you: help@moz.com

All links in Q&A are nofollowed, but we still ask that you not use unnecessary/unrelated links in your answers. Thanks!

I would imagine that the best solution would be to point the sub cat canonically to the parent this making the parent category page the dominant authority page.

I think it should be safe to do.

Absolutely no reason why not - you can read more about how DA works here:  http://moz.com/learn/seo/domain-authority -Andy

No more needed than EGOL's answer

Yes, I think that may be the best use of the company's past investment in that content.

I had never even heard of 904 errors before encountering them with Moz. The first time I ever saw it come up it coincided with a bandwidth usage issue that the client was having as well as the most significant/sudden drop off in organic rankings I've ever seen personally. Despite the fact that the client did make changes to his hosting plan to alleviate any bandwidth issues, the 904 errors continue to persist and the organic rankings continue to be less than stellar. Can 9xx errors like have a significant negative impact on organic rankings?

The Beginner's Guide to SEO at http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo is a good place to get an overview of SEO and increasing your links.

Hi Lisa, Thanks for writing us! I have sent a response to your request so you should be seeing that soon. If you have any questions please feel free to respond to that email and I will be happy to help.:) I wish you a wonderful day! Cheers, Sean

Fergclaw, It may boil down to the quality of those slim back links you mentioned.  You call them relevant, but you don't attest to their quality. I think if you can honestly say that the few links you have are quality, editorial links, then redirecting those domains (not necessary the specific urls (for appearances sake)) to appropriate subdirectories on the new site could be a step towards keeping the whole thing under the filter threshold. As an additional appearances-sake step, you may choose not to redirect any of the other non-linked-to domians--I mean, what value is there in redirecting them, anyway?

There are two kinds of content that Google sees. One is evergreen, the other is fresh. Evergreen might be something that doesn't need to change (not all sites and pages change all the time), with fresh being the likes of articles and news. If there is a thread with good information on it, then it might still be useful. However, if you think there are a handful of forum pages that could be redirected to main internal pages, then you can do this as well - there is no need to redirect every thread though. You could redirect 10 pages and 404 everything else. -Andy

It's currently not a massive ranking factor. It will only really come into affect if there are two very closely matched pages, then if your page is HTTPS it may rank higher than the other page. The sooner HTTPS is implemented the better, but it's not something you need to rush into as Google is only currently applying a lightweight boost so that webmasters have time to implement it to their site. Also, it appears that AdSense and Trusted Stores programs don't work well with HTTPS, which I'm sure is something Google are working on. Within 12 months or so there is every chance that Google may decide to make this a stronger signal as more sites migrate to fully HTTPS. Regards

Presuming your product pages sit under a /products/ subfolder, you could use this code in your htaccess file: RewriteRule ^products/(.*)$ /anotherdirectory/$1 [R=301,NC,L] Or to redirect all to the homepage: RewriteRule ^products/(.*)$ /$1 [R=301,NC,L] Obviously you can change the words "products" and "anotherdirectory" to whatever is applicable to you. For more info on htaccess redirection you can read the Moz guide here.

Hi there! Thanks for reaching out! My name is Erin, and I'm on the Help Team here at Moz. In order to help you troubleshoot this, I'm going to need a little more information. Can you email us at help@moz.com and let us know the domain you're referring to? Once we have that, we'll be able to look into this further! Cheers, Erin