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My issue is similar, except Google is reporting 404 errors on its own JS tracking code! This bug appears not to be isolated to Google tracking code, as GWT is also reporting 404s for 3rd party scripts on our page that use the _trackPageview call.

I did some digging and found the following excerpt from Do 404's hurt my site? on the Webmaster Central Blog:

"If you see 404s reported in Webmaster Tools for URLs that don’t exist on your site, you can safely ignore them. We don’t know which URLs are important to you vs. which are supposed to 404, so we show you all the 404s we found on your site and let you decide which, if any, require your attention."

Based upon the above info, my plan is to follow suit and mark the 404s as fixed.

By the way ... did your 404s return?

Thanks for taking the time to answer my question Claudio.

Thanks for taking the time to detail your explanation, Nakul. Your method is a good one for testing. Cheers!

Thanks for your feedback and experience Mark. I appreciate it.

I really appreciate your encouragement, Brad. Your experience provides me with some hope of further boosting organic rankings and besting the competition. Thanks for sharing.

I've been doing SEO for a decent amount of time. You would think I would remember "when in doubt, test it out."

It's funny how when you're in the thick of things that the most obvious of answers can elude you.This is why I love the Moz community. Thanks for the reminder Ade!

I recently began work for a company and discovered that they are not using h1's (using h2's) and rank in the top 5 for ~90% of their keywords.

The site is one of the original players in their industry, has massive amounts of domain authority and tens of thousands of linking root domains. However, they are currently being beaten on some of their top keywords by a few of their younger competitors.

Moving their current h2 text into h1 tags could be helpful. But to what extent? Since they already rank well for so many competitive keywords, Is it worth it to rock the boat by moving their h2 text into h1 tags and risk affecting their current rankings?

Thanks for your help on this question Ryan, irvingw and Gianluca.

Being that I am still an SEO newbie, looking back at my original question, redirect probably wasn't the correct word to use and my example could have been clearer and more concise, my apologies (still learning).

There's nothing black hat going on here, so no worries; but thanks for the words of warning. The links being discussed are from sites like Wikipedia, and other public profile pages. We're making sure that those public pages point to the correct URL. And since Company B was acquired by Company A, those public profile URL's should no longer point to www.CompanyB.com. They should all be pointing to www.CompanyA.com, instead.

"If you are talking about generating 1000 unique links to Company A's site from 1000 linking domains, there is a concern about having such an unnatural growth in links. It is dependent on the Company A site. If the site has a million links, then no problem. If the site has only 1000 links and you double overnight, that can possibly trigger an algorithmic penalty."

Actually, this is exactly what I'm talking about. What then would be the ideal number of links to redirect so as not to be penalized?

Company A is set to acquire Company B. As part of the merger agreement, Company A will be redirecting the linking domains of Company B's website (over 1,000 links) to company A's website.

Will Google penalize Company A for redirecting Company B's 1,000 linking domains to Company A's website at one time? If so, would it be better for Company A to redirect Company B's 1,000 linking domains in waves?