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Hi Kristen, I did this recently and it worked. The important part is that you need to block the pages in robots.txt or add a noindex tag to the pages to stop them from being indexed again. I hope this helps.

Thank you Donna. We have seen a lot of success with the pruning method for outdated content. I'm glad the article has helped you.

Ha! Hi Liam - as you can see STILL no technical knowledge from me

Hi there. Of course it can! The crawl rate is in pages per day, so if you remove pages (especially 1.5 million), there won't be as much to crawl Also it can happen, if you have the same static pages and the crawl bot has crawled them all. Google doesn't crawl all pages all the time, they have limited resources. So, if you have launched or updated website recently and now not really updating it, you can see the change in crawl rate. However, you can change crawl rate for 90 days, if you need them to crawl your website constantly (usually good for websites in process of reconstruction). Here: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/48620?hl=en

Unfortunately, there was a lot of speculation around the unnamed February update, but not much solid data. Here's an analysis that SearchMetrics did: http://blog.searchmetrics.com/us/2015/02/08/google-brand-ecommerce-update-causing-fluctuations/ I've certainly seen confirmed data that some big sites got hit. When the signals are unclear, it becomes a task mostly of segmentation. Were specific pages hit? Were specific keywords hit? What's the pattern across those pages or keywords? Some quality issues are fixable, but these days, you run into situations where pages that probably shouldn't have ranked stopped ranking, and there isn't always something to fix.

We used to do a lot of infographics, which were very often found through image search, so we found it very important then

Hi Liam,  A little late to the game here, but we put together a sample of how to organize this. https://www.odddogmedia.com/seo-blog/json-schema-for-businesses-with-multiple-locations/ Essentially you first want to establish the Organization, logo and any "same as" social media properties for your brand.  From there you can begin to list each location with its details, location specific social media, etc. The secret with the GMB is to ensure each location has a dedicated webpage on your website and that the GMB page links to its pertinent location page on your site.  As you build citations for this location, be sure to keep the location specific URL.  This will be different with each location, thus why Local SEO is a ton of work. Hopefully you  have already been able to figure this out, but it not feel free to reference our code sample.

Hi, Yes we use the SKU's on the other pages too. Thanks for everyone's feedback

This temporary set-up idea makes little sense to me... migrations are tough enough anyway, and the temporary middle stage is increasing both risk and complexity.

And don't forget to set your holiday hours.

Say I was going to fully build out these pages with content, how much unique content should I have per page (minimum)?  Would several paragraphs do the trick?

Hi, I did a quick crawl of your site with Screaming Frog - your site seems to generate a lot of time outs & 5xx errors - could be that these are seen as external links by Moz. Response times are very bad for most of your pages. Dirk

Hi Matt, Many thanks for the very comprehensive answer. I didn;t realize any of this at all so thanks Pete

No difference for SEO; main difference is the Green bar which is displayed for Extended SSL certifcates  - these are the ones which tend to be more expensive than the "standard" ones - on top of that they don't allow wildcards - so you'll need a certificate for each subdomain. Could increase confidence of your visitors in your site - but as stated before - no direct SEO impact. Dirk

Hey There! Have you checked out this recent Whiteboard Friday? https://moz.com/blog/how-to-hack-the-amplification-process-whiteboard-friday I believe it may give you some good ideas!

I agree with you, Alan.   That's how most people do it. I've found through a few small retail sites and a couple of information sites, that publishing useful or interesting content can be enough that other people will share it for you.  There are still niches out there where one or two people, working as a team, can produce, in two or three years, more content and better content than all of the competitors in the niche combined.  Once you have that, then some of the people who find your site and see the depth of content, will share it for you.  And, there are some topics where people will search deeply for the right information. If you have a hardware store or a toy store or a jewelry store, you don't have to attack the entire industry.  Instead, focus on a very small niche of products that are typically not represented well in local stores, and that do not have an online champion. The niche must be chosen carefully. I don't have any interest in social media, or making personal connections, or in soliciting others.    But, I do have an interest in learning the deep technical details of things and enjoy writing about them.  Through that, I provide the community service similar to what you provide.  Then a steady stream of visitor questions coming in and being answered, first by email and then published to the content library that provides a service to a consumer community - these are coming from people who may have first purchased at amazon or or some other vendor who places 100% of their effort in making the sale but places zero effort in helping the customer after the sale. These people are out searching deeply.  They feel like they have been abandoned. This is today's internet -  Walmart, Amazon, Jet, and others are all focused on the aggressive price competition.  Service after the sale and deep information for the consumer has been abandoned at the very time when you think it should be abundant.  Nobody wants to write it.  How many times have you purchased something and could not understand directions that were written on another continent and then translated into English by someone who knows the language poorly. That leads to a problem in that you become the default service department for amazon!  They don't do it.  But if you step into that role you quickly obtain a knowledge of what information people need and when you answer an email, you also place another brick in your relevant content library.  So, although I am not making any direct outreach at all to advocate a brand, engaging a community, or soliciting on my own behalf in any way, the questions keep coming in, the content mass continues to grow,  and it attracts more and more traffic year over year. Most business owners are not going to do this because they don't like to write content and they don't have a situation that allows them to invest a lot of time now and not be paid back until years down the road.  No SEO will do this because the upfront labor is very high and the return isn't fast enough to satisfy a client.  These opportunities are perfect for the person who enjoys working from the cloister. 

As long as the 1k of traffic is strongly engaging with your site, then yes it is good. Alan details the no follow attributes.

If you have your sitemap xml file(s) set up properly, you can resubmit them each time you update that specific content. If the site is very large, I would suggest having a separate sitemap file just for those review pages within the site, and resubmit that one specifically.  That can help motivate Google to recrawl that content sooner. Also, do you have "last-modified" meta tags set up? That can help as well. Depending on how high the quality of the content is, it can also help to send other signals Update the home page with a link to the newly updated review right in the upper portion of the home page's main content area. Consider a quality, not over-optimized, press release you distribute through a trustworthy release site - where you issue a press release describing the full review and only linking ONCE in the body of the release, directly to that review. Tweet a link to the review page on the day you post the review as well.  Now that Google is integrating Twitter more, that can further help visibility.

yup