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Well I maybe biased because this is what I wanted to hear but personally I think spot on, particularly the Kissmetrics article from a later response. I have set geo-targeting already and will also sort the HREFLANG tags. I plan to leave both sites on .com domains - In the UK .com's are just as 'normal' as .co.uk's.  All content has been updated to US english and with specific relevant info so I think it's just down to the usual link building and adding content to get it to rank. I genuinely appreciate all the responses, fantastically useful, thank you! Mat

I have a similar situation. I've run an A/B test that indicates that the existing home page (let's call this A) doesn't convert as well as a deeper page (call it B), even for visitors who have seen no other pages on the site. Until the new home page (A) is ready, I want to take advantage of the immediate gains available by redirecting traffic, in the short term, to B. I'm confident that 302 is the "correct" way of doing this, since the redirect is temporary, but I'm spooked about how Google will treat this. Matt, both A and B are already indexed, and both will remain "live" after the permanent fix is in place. Would you still have concerns about a 302?

A side note first.  Something to consider on transient content for job listings like this that I have used on job sites I have worked on and worked pretty well - The unavailable after meta tag http://searchengineland.com/more-info-on-googles-unavailable-after-meta-tag-new-x-robots-tag-in-header-support-11714 http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-seo-advice-unavailable-e-commerce-products-186882 "The “unavailable_after” Meta tag will allow you to tell Google that a page should expire from the search results at a specific time. " This way your pages would be removed from the index on the date you list and if you have also removed the links from your sitemap etc, Google may not need to crawl them and find the 404 and/or soft404 to begin with. The soft 404 (according to Google) means your server is not showing a 404 server response for the HTML snapshot version.  I would try fetch as Google on those pages to see what Google is seeing and that may help you diagnose the situation.  I may be that your server is giving a different response than the 404 and Google is questioning it.

Just Discovered Links in Open Site Explorer could help, as well. I'm not personally aware of any tool that does all of what you're looking for, though.

Agreed.  No SEO ding directly, but as donford said, be careful that you don't mess up UX.  One thing to be aware of.  If you use a 3rd party to host the pop-up, it can slow down the site if the script blocks the downloading of other assets on your page.  You could then have a page speed issue that can indirectly cause issues with SEO.

Hi Timothy, I agree with CleverPHD here, a couple hundred crappy links won't likely hurt a strong brand, and the amount of time it took to get them is not indicative of a spammer. In general 150 links from a true link spammer would be few hours or less. I will add another thought, up until last year when panda come down it was some what routine for people to still use link directories, and in some case there still are a few industry specific directories that actually make sense. I would certainly ask your freelancer to look up the Google Panda update and ask him to self evaluate what he has been doing. Hopefully, he will see the light. Here is a decent article over on SearchEngineJournal.com Hope it helps, Don

If it is not done properly it will affect your site greatly. it is important to use a tool like Deep crawl or screaming frog make sure you have a copy of all your URI's then when you go to Create Redirects Use this tool to generate redirects from your old permalink structure to the /%postname%/ permalink structure. Your Redirects Add the following redirect to the the top of your .htaccess file: RedirectMatch 301 ^/home.asp$ http://domain.com/?p=$ Please note that this relies on WordPress to do a second redirect, from the post_id to the post. Remember when you switch platforms expect a drop before it rebounds on Google treat it as if you're changing a domain https://moz.com/community/q/how-to-keep-old-url-juice-during-site-switch https://moz.com/blog/achieving-an-seo-friendly-domain-migration-the-infographic larger version of photo below http://www.aleydasolis.com/images/seo-website-domain-migration.gif https://moz.com/community/q/changing-domains-how-much-link-juice-is-lost-with-301-redirect For WordPress this is an extremely helpful tool https://yoast.com/wp-content/permalink-helper.php https://yoast.com/change-wordpress-permalink-structure/ I hope this helps, Tom JqUSVWt.gif

It's my pleasure. Have a super week!

Cheers Everett. Thanks for your response. That was my feeling on the tool (you were correct when asking which tool it was, BTW), but always good to get confirmation. Nick.

Thank you Clever PhD, really valuable insights!

You certainly don't need to include every page of your website in your top navigation menu. Your plan of having a Locations page that then links to each of your location pages individually is a fine way to go. That said, the deeper into your site architecture your page is, the fewer ways there are for people and search engines alike to discover it - to your point, there is now only one page on your site linking to all of these location pages. One reason internal linking outside the navigation is important is that it provides additional ways for users and search engines to browse to your content. I would recommend taking a look at the pages on your site and thinking about what pages a user might want to visit next, and linking to those. Providing an intuitive next step for your users keeps them engaged, and provides additional ways for your content to get discovered.

Thanks Jordan! Appreciate it!

Thanks Cyrus.

I agree with CleverPhD - personalizing content to the user isn't necessarily cloaking. It's fairly common to show search engines a "default" page with all the available options when personalizing results to the user based on location. I doubt that this instance will result in a penalty - although, as CleverPhD points out above, it's not the best solution for other reasons.

Thank you very much. This is helpful. Sincerely, Koki

That's really usefull

That makes sense to me.

Thats great advice, i'll be sure to put it to good use! And thanks for the Yahoo analogy, i'll keep it in mind!