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Patrick is right, the migration guide is an excellent source to make sure you've covered all the bases.  That said, setting up 301 redirects is gonna have to happen.  It may hurt, it may take a lot of time, but it's the best way I've found to minimize any negative impacts to rankings and traffic.  There are, of course, ways to speed this up, but I wouldn't suggest looking for a work-around.  It sucks to do but that's why new sites and new content on new domains can be such a nightmare. It's mind-numbing as a task but your manager/client will be very impressed by it.  Make sure to look over the inbound links to your site to ensure no pages are missed thereby breaking some of your link network.

What I have done in a similar situation is to make the vanity URL the preferred URL. I created the vanity URL as an alias of the landing page URL and used a canonical to indicate that the vanity URL is the one to index.

Laura The boys have you covered above. If looking for a specific "story" for the next plane ride - read the blog from Pete below. https://moz.com/blog/the-colossus-update-waking-the-giant This is what I am watching/monitoring, the unfolding impact of https -v- http I am making it a rule - to recommend for all sites just in case.

Hi Timothy! Thanks for writing in about this. I am looking into this more on my end and will send an update to your Help ticket when I have an answer Thanks! Kevin Help Team

Like already answered above it's quite hard to get to the 100% indexation rate for your webpages. What's your current indexation rate? If it's below 90% you might still have some issues somewhere.

Hi Gareth, I am excited to let you know that Moz Local UK is now live, whee!! If you check it out yourself, I'd love to know what you think about it. Cheers, Christy

Tom, It is using the index page URL. Hence, I am stuck in removing using webmaster tool. Do you have any suggestion on this scenario?

Actually all of my sites are info sites and all of my sites are retail sites.  I'll explain below.... INFO SITES My info site has thousands of content pages, but it also has a store that sells hundreds of items.  That's an info site with a small store. All of the info pages display ads from adsense or another ad network.  Some of the info pages have a very closely-related product in the store and we have house ads on those pages to move interested visitors to the store.  The info pages usually outrank the store pages, but that's OK because they also outrank almost every competitor too.  If we don't make money from a sale we make money from the ads.  Its all good.    Most of the revenue comes from ads. RETAIL SITES My retail sites have lots of info.  Lots.  More than all of our competitors and the manufacturers combined.  They also have more info pages than retail pages.  That is how much content we are attacking with.  But, these sites produce more retail revenue than ad revenue.  So they are retail sites, but they really are content sites. All of my sites are content sites, but a couple of them produce more retail revenue than ad revenue.  All revenue is good.  I don't worry about my competitors ads taking a sale.  I took a piece of their ad budget and their ads on my relevant pages usually pay pretty good.  And I am under the assumption that they are wild ass bidding and don't realize that they are losing money.  :-0

Thank you!

Yeah, I'm somewhere in the middle on this one - as Richard said, an off-topic domain with low authority isn't going to buy you much. If you want the domain for the name or something, great - but don't expect much SEO benefit. Google has gotten pretty savvy about ignoring this stuff, as buying and redirecting domains has been heavily abused. I doubt you'd be at much risk here, but you'd probably see very little benefit.

Hi EGOL, I see that you have quite the opinion on SEM! I think you have some really great tidbits in your response (like not trusting published recommendations because it can be coming from someone like Google who just wants your money, recommending to do the math before new advertisers dive in, and that there are too many variables to determine if you will be profitable your first go). However, there are a few areas that I think are necessary to provide an alternative opinion on for the sake of discussion and public information. I was completely in agreeance with you until you mentioned that people who run SEM accounts don't care about profit margins and business owners barely know their own profit margins. I've been working in paid search for 5+ years and never once have I ever met a business owner or dedicated paid search specialist who wasn't concerned about their profits and overall business impact. I'm glad that you've done the math and have decided that it isn't going to work out for your business, but there is a lot about PPC that doesn't fit well with the math - unless you assumed a 10 QS for every KW and your product still doesn't sell in that atmosphere. As you gain positive account history, you essentially get "discounts" on your bids. From my experience, the Keyword Planner is only a tool to give you a general idea of what you will need to bid and rarely have I seen my actual bids match exactly what the planner suggested - they've been both up & down on the suggested CPC. It's very difficult to assume profit or volume of conversions in a system that is very fluid. As you've already mentioned, when working in PPC it's very possible the target market can be quite competitive. If you're in a competitive niche it will be harder to turn a profit on a per-product basis. And even that has conditional standards against it, like how large your orders are, how many times you have return customers, how optimized your PLAs are, if you're driving the right traffic to the right pages, your conversion funnel. If you make it difficult at any piece of the process then PPC is going to be costly because the experience is poor and competitor experiences are likely much higher quality. I agree that there are many opportunities for failure, however there are just as many times PPC succeeds - or else companies wouldn't continue paying for traffic or putting $500,000+ a month into Google AdWords. This is also a question from someone who is interested in experimenting and seeking generalized recommendations for how much to spend with no inclination to their intended market or vertical. Things that may not work for one company might work incredibly well for another. I appreciate the comprehensiveness of your response on the aspects of what make PPC hard, but I definitely challenge the notion that it's not worth investigating.

I highly doubt it would effect rankings due to low quality issues but it will show that you have site map error warnings in your GWT console. That issue is technically classified as 'Warnings' and not 'Errors'. The right thing to do in that scenario is take the robots.txt block off and just use a 'noindex' tag on the pages. That way they can stay in the site map but they won't show up in the index. Otherwise you should remove them from the sitemap if you don't want the warnings in GWT.

If that was the final product page, then yes, you should be using a standard htacess rewrite command to ensure that the final product urls are always www.domain.com/productx But in saying that, the way you had it is totally fine if all the other url possibilities have a canonical tag that points back to optimised version (original product url - www.domain.com/productx) The htacess rewrite it's not something you should be handling manually. Magento has that option inbuilt into it. It would be a fair amount of work if you had to do that manually. and I would just run with the canonical option if that were the case. Any good eCommerce platform should have the inbuilt ability to automatically remove the category folders and other search queries from the final product url. Sometimes it's ok to leave the category folders in the url, it just depends on the products being sold. Below would be an example where I would leave the category folders in the url if I was selling different colored soccer balls. www.sports.com/soccer-balls/black-white/ www.sports.com/soccer-balls/blue-white/ www.sports.com/soccer-balls/red-yellow/

Facebook changed how things work, it is not possible anymore.