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Yeah, then just let it be and keep doing what you're doing

That's great - thank you both. Stu

You definitely can. Also, here's a whiteboard Friday on the topic of cross domain rel="canonical" tags: http://moz.com/blog/cross-domain-canonical-the-new-301-whiteboard-friday

It's always a good practice. It also depends if you are using a CMS that has an automatic 301 for the WWW vs the non for the site. For simple sites that's the only real reason that you would need it. I still like to have the tag, the major search engines have been recommending it and I usually do whatever makes Google happy if I can. You can see if you have duplicate content if you subscribe to Moz in their campaign tools. If not there are a few free tools that will allow you to as well.

I know it's not any bankruptcy related directories or poor citation building, because we've just started building out for this location a few months ago. And, we've never stressed bankruptcy, but thank you for the suggestions. Those are definitely sold point to consider. It's starting to look like I may just have to delete the other categories, but I worry because, if I do that, I won't have a "complete" profile and that could cost me in google's eyes as well.

Thanks Andy for the infographic point, it is something we have not not done yet but we are conducting a client survey and have generated a lot of good feedback that lends itself to this approach. I guess for all of us the issue is one of client buy in. We are very good at coming up with the ideas and carrying out the campaigns and outreach in house but if we need to go and stand on the street corner for a few days talking to end users that has to be paid for. How does everyone else manage this? Tom Roberts - I would appreciate your views on 'green light' back links for 2014 excluding  Ezine. Thanks a million everyone. K

I would suggest doing it. I made a module for some of my clients a while back that essentially turned search results into category pages. It worked out very well for them, one thing I did was exact matches redirected to the real categories, because the way the module was written there would be a url collision. One thing I would keep in mind is that the search results should not differ too much from what the category shows. Another thing to keep in mind is that you should have a disallow rule on your search directory and a canonical on your category pages. That should also settle any duplicate content issues as well.

If you do have links sending traffic, those should be the first to update to avoid the slight but unnecessary burden and delay of a redirect. For Google, though, it doesn't really matter. As long as you 301 the whole site correctly to new URLs and change the address in Webmaster Tools, there will be no additional load time. It's true that you want to avoid big .htaccess files, redirect chains, and inefficient redirects, but that's a rule for live sites. For example, if you were wanting to maintain the domain but move the entire category around, you wouldn't want to add 3000 lines to .htaccess. You should still write a rule rather than going line by line, but it doesn't really matter if it's on an old site that's moving. Search engines will only have to access it once per bot before they get the message and start crawling the new site. In any case, redirects from the old site to the new won't impact load time unless the redirect is happening all the time, which should never be the case in a site migration. Do make sure to get the right redirect rule and check that it's working, especially on your most-trafficked pages.

Hi Andrew, The best practice would be to come up with search engine/user friendly new URLs each corresponding to the month/year blog posts and then redirect them via 301. Essentially, you will be implementing a one-to-one or page-to-page 301. Redirecting a whole bunch of old pages to the homepage via 301 is not recommended especially if these old pages have some organic or referral traffic coming in. This would have a negative impact from your user experience perspective as well as from an SEO standpoint. A blanket 301 approach (bunch of pages being redirected to a single page, in this case the homepage) is the last resort that you should think about. Please do not even think of letting those old pages giving up an HTTP head status code 404. This is a big NO, NO. If I were you, I would have come up with new pages (URLs) for each of those old pages and redirected those via 301 to the corresponding new ones. Best regards, Devanur Rafi

Hi Chris, Frankly, don't have a perfect answer to the situation but, its just not the purpose that pagination exists for. You go in for pagination under the following scenarios if you wish all your paginated content to appear in the search results: (Taken from Google): https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1663744?hl=en 1. News and/or publishing sites often divide a long article into several shorter pages. 2. Retail sites may divide the list of items in a large product category into multiple pages. 3. Discussion forums often break threads into sequential URLs. Moreover, the pagination mark-up provides a strong hint to Google that you would like them to treat these pages as a logical sequence, thus consolidating their linking properties and usually sending searchers to the first page. This would not be the desired outcome in your client's case Chris. So, you can convince them not to implement the pagination mark-up for generic top-level navigation pages as these pages should rank individually for respective search terms if any and they are definitely not the part of any logical sequence and this defies the very purpose behind paginated content. Those were my two cents friend. Good luck. Best regards, Devanur Rafi

OK, thanks Dean. I'll update the sitemap and look into rectifying the errors identified by screamingfrog. Thanks for your assistance!

As an addition to what Tom has said, you should also setup parameter exclusions in webmaster tools to make sure pages with these appended parameters do not get indexed.

Just use subdomains redirection from cPanel right? By the way what do you mean by.. "Hi, I am assuming that coriate.com is the web designer, if so they should have blocked search engine/public access to the site via something like Htpasswd.". Block search engine to access Coriate folder on cPanel -> File Manager? What for? Oh, I get it. I need to block coriate[dot]com/japracool[dot]com right?

Maybe do half and half. Load a decent amount to start with and then you still have some left to keep a trickle of content coming whilst you create more. If you are sitting on a lot of good custom content you are in a good position.