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Ok thank you for your input

So if the placeholder domain you're using here -- "site.co.uk" -- is the same for both the Hubspot blog and your primary domain, this is more than likely what's going on. The only way Hubspot could serve pages on your domain and prevent you from redirecting them would be if you have CNAME records for your domain set up to point to Hubspot's servers. (Essentially this creates an alias.) So if you want your redirects to work, you need to go into your domain name registrar and look at your CNAME records. If there's something in there for Hubspot, then remove it. To answer your questions in order: You can check the index by googling this format, not in quotes: "site:blog.site.co.uk" If it's not indexed, no. Even if they are indexed, no. It just means you probably would not get much, if any traffic to them. I would just make sure the old hubspot blog is down and then add them at your new location, as long as they actually got decent traffic. Then, provided you've taken care of the subdomain/CNAME stuff, write 301s from the old locations to the new ones.

Agree with Martijn.  Technically, Google does not want any pages in the sitemap that 4xx or 3xx or have any other result than a 200. I would say this, if your site is being rebuilt, having a sitemap that is accurate and that updates when you update the site is a basic requirement.   The fact that there is a high cost for fixing this issue is baloney. It sounds like the devs did not build the site correctly the first time if they do not have a way to update the sitemap automatically. You could generate the sitemap yourself You can use tools like http://tools.seochat.com/tools/online-crawl-google-sitemap-generator/ Or read tutorials on how to use Screaming Frog to create a sitemap http://www.hmtweb.com/marketing-blog/dirty-sitemaps-how-to-download-crawl/ Frankly, the annual cost of Screaming Frog (about $150 a year) gets you so much more than just sitemaps.  Buy Screaming Frog, have it generate your sitemap and ask the devs to upload it.  If you have a site with several thousand pages, just running Screaming Frog monthly would help you find issues on your site that is well worth the cost.    Search "Screaming Frog" here in the forums and you can see that this is one of the "swiss army knives" of technical SEO.

Glad you've got the load time down, if you've get any benefits in terms of rankings/conversion from the change i'd love to hear about it. Best of luck with the site.

Dirk Thank you for your response it is very helpful.

Hi, Do you have both http and https active on the site? You can use something like siteliner.com to check this. I've noticed rankings, clicks and impressions drop off in Webmaster tools on a client site before, and it was actually just registering on the http webmaster tools property instead of https, due to a change made by the developers. Has your traffic also dropped off in Google Analytics on the same day? Or has it remained the same? I notice you say that orders dropped off also, but if traffic hasn't, I'd investigate any dev changes which might have occurred and test through your order process in different browsers/setups. You could also segment your Google Analytics data by browser/OS and check conversions, compared with the previous period, to see if any particular browser has stopped placing orders. Is your website fairly new? I definitely notice more fluctuation in newer websites, and websites with less traffic. Hope this helps, Zoe

What a great response!

Hello, To answer your question in short, there isn't really a way to "speed up" this process, but that shouldn't be the goal in the first place. Keyword research is the foundation upon which you build your rankings, so you should really be prepared to put some serious thought into it. In terms of making the process more effective, however, there are a few tactics I have used which have helped me. Feel free to follow this checklist: Assess your product categories Presumably you are not dealing with 1000 different products from unique niches. Start by assigning each of these products to a category and using that category as a landing page. Then you can research each category for relevant keywords. Assign keywords for each category I would take no more than 10-20 keywords for each category unless the products you are selling are well-known (and therefore, well-searched). No e-commerce site can rank first for every item they carry. Determine the ranking difficulty of your chosen keywords I use a national keyword checking tool called Authority Metrics (www.authoritymetrics.com) for national keyword research. It shows you organic competition levels and PPC costs along with national monthly searches based on multiple countries. It is not particularly useful for local clients, but as an e-commerce website, I doubt this will impact you. In any case, it will give you more information than Google's Keyword Planner Tool. Create your sitemap/category pages This should be done after you have determined what keywords you can/will be ranking for. My strategy tends to involve a 2-pronged approach where I use 1 sales funnel for low-hanging fruit (long-tail keywords or unique products) and another for large-scale keywords which will take time to rank. This allows you small-scale income very quickly, while also allowing you to build your site organically. Create content for each category, and your top-sellers Obviously you need quality content to rank. I like to focus on a percentage of products that I feel have the best chance of success. There is no hard rule about this, but I typically go for about 5% of my overall product list. Generally speaking, 10% of your products will yield 75% of your overall sales. Find the balancing point between your keyword's monthly searches and the ROI you stand to gain from ranking each of these products. This has gone beyond keyword research and into sales and CRO, but I hope it helps to give you a helpful outline of my approach to the e-commerce landscape. This process will put you in good shape for establishing your site and getting purchases. Feel free to follow up with me if you have further questions. All the best, Rob

Hello! Thanks for writing in! There could be a couple of reasons, the first being that sadly our September index update broke I'd like to direct you towards Rand's Q&A post which discusses the latest regarding the Oct index update and our plans for the future :). The next update is scheduled for this week and you can always check our update schedule at any time, as well. If you're still not seeing your site in the index after the Oct index is released then it's likely that we've not been able to locate your pages through the links we follow to gather data for the index. We're not able to add sites by request. To give your site the best chance of being crawled and indexed it's worth double checking your site doesn't block web crawlers  (i.e., with "noindex" or Robots.txt). You'll also want to work on building links from sites with high Mozrank. I hope this helps!

Sure, I did this: http://bfy.tw/2hTu

Doesn't seem to be a way yet as it's still in early stages. But many users have requested this feature, and I've read that they plan on adding it soon. Fingers crossed very soon!!

Google recommends blocking all Internal Search Results in the Robots.txt file. I suggest creating a product collection or category for Edward Scissorhands Themed Costumes and linking to that instead. This way you can customize the content on the page just as if it was any other category page.

Hi Robert! Are you able to provide any more information?

This only works if you have downloaded all the HTML files to your local computer.  That said, it works quite well!  I am betting this is a database driven site and so would not work in the same way.

Sorry, "it won't be considered duplicate" is what i meant to write. You are in the clear!

Thanks Cyrus. I appreciate the the multi-faceted answer along with the links. I'll see what I can do with this. Ruben

Great thank you!