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I tend to follow the rule of thumb that states, if you have a close match to a page being removed, then setup a 301 there. If not, it is better to remove it altogether and give it a 410 (Gone) rather than a 404 (Not Found). I hope that helps a little. -Andy

Great to hear Andrew Have a great weekend. -Andy

Having the same issue Browser ---  [keyword] Snow Report      [ranking url]  www.domain.com/snow-report       [rank]  #2 CSV --  [keyword] Snow Report        [ranking url] www.domain.com      [rank] #2

Yes, this is what I was thinking. I guess I'll just let the old WMT account for product.com just deactivate itself once it notices that validation file is no longer there.... Just feels a bit weird "not telling Google what we've done" through WMT....

Thank you

Thanks

Hi!  Try checking out this link and see if it helps.  Faceted navigation can get tricky. http://moz.com/blog/building-faceted-navigation-that-doesnt-suck

Hi Remko, This depends on where you'd like to direct the majority of your authority, so if your primary target for authority / rankings is the "real estate in 2015" page (which acts as a page and a subfolder under which other content sits), your perfect example could look like: www.example.com/real-estate-2015/find-best-prices. I would consider placing both guides and news like this, without a separate subfolder for /news/ and /guides/ after /real-estate-2015/. A few years ago, the British newspaper Evening Standard resolved its home page on www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/ (they used the "This Is London" domain until recently). Articles sat on www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article1234. They redirected their home page to the root - www.thisislondon.co.uk. All articles continued to sit on URLs like www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article1234 Soon thereafter, their share of voice and traffic took a very big drop. It looks like redirecting authority away from the /standard/ subfolder was the cause: all the millions of articles sitting under /standard/ appeared to lose authority. Reversing the redirect reversed this trend and the site gained its lost rankings / traffic back. In your case, I'd suggest that 2015 real estate authority should focus on the subfolder (acting also as a page in its own right) that you wish to have rank for related terms, unless it's more important to you to direct authority to a guides or news subfolder. This is different from the tummy tuck example, and in truth you will be able to build authority to the 2015 section with either option, but it does appear that Google sees subfolders as accumulating authority in the manner you suspected initially. Thanks, Jane

Can I use the same content? Website is new, only 1 month old.

Although Google say you site needs to be quick enough for visitors, there are also times when it doesn't matter because what you have is an experience. There is an increasing trend to build specialist sites that require a bit of initial loading - sometimes as much as 10 seconds or more, yet Google will continue to rank them well because people love them. If you were still on a 9600 baud dial up connection, then yes, speed is critical. But that isn't the case today. One of my own sites takes almost 7 seconds to load, yet I am 1st-4th for a range of highly competitive phrases. As long as the content is worth it, the wait (to a degree) doesn't matter. -Andy

Hi Dave! Thanks for writing in to Q&A! Oi, I'm sorry to hear your PDF's are looking blurry! I looked into your account, and from what I can tell they look like all the "normal" PDF's we've been generating. That said, we've been getting some feedback about blurry PDF's lately. I'll note that you've noticed this as well, and pass this feedback up the river! I hope this helps! Let us know if you have any other questions! Happy Thursday! Erin

Thank you Keri - I suspected that this was the case. It is good to have it confirmed by you.

I was in a similar situation. I noticed a website is resolving my server IP address and hence duplicating all my content from my main domain. So I added a Google verification file to my maindomain.com . Then added duplicatedomain to my WMT and verified using same google verification file. The duplicate domain got verified. I submitted a request in WMT to remove all content from Google index. Let us see will see if there is any impact to the ranking.

Hello Hasit, and welcome to Moz! This might be a tough one to diagnose without someone spending a decent amount of time looking at your site, your analytics, your backlinks, etc, but the Q&A community will do what we can to help. First, can you give us a URL at all so we can look at the site? When the major site redesign happened, do you know if any redirects were put into place so that people still got to the right pages if URLs changed? Is the site verified in Google and Bing Webmaster Tools? If so, are there any notices there about any actions taken on your site, or problems crawling your site? Your traffic has dropped, but from which sources? In your analytics, look separately at traffic from search, direct traffic, and referral traffic. Did you have some links that were bringing in good traffic, and those sites removed the links? Is the traffic down from all of the search engines, or just one search engine? Have there been any other general changes in the marketing of the site, or in your industry as a whole? Maybe TV advertising stopped, so fewer people were looking for your site, or email newsletters stopped, or paid spend was reduced in AdWords?

Thanks Takeski , I put this into the footer and it worked!

No backlink checker is perfect, unfortunately. Nobody has the resource of Google to crawl the entire web (even Google only crawls a section of it). In my experience Majestic & AHREFs have the largest backlink counts, and Moz can show some of your newer links through their "Recently Discovered" tab. If you can afford them all, it's best to combine data from all sources and de-dupe them. Bing Webmaster Tools can provide some additional backlink data as well.