Questions
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301 redirect hell.... How do you de-commission an old site
Hi AABAB, This is pretty common. Unfortuneatly, Google can keep your old URLs around for a long time, especially pages without much authority. And yes, this can have a negative impact on your SEO - especially if Google in situations where Google is indexing both the old and new URLs, and hasn't processed the 301. Muhammed has a good suggestion. Create or put up a sitemap of your old URLs, and submit this sitemap to Google via Webmaster Tools. The idea is that Google will re-crawl these URLs, finally register the 301, and drop those pages from the index. The URL removal tool would be a great option if all the pages are in the same directory, such as /old-pages/xxxxx, as Google allows you to remove entire directories in bulk. But unfortunately it looks like your URLs are all at the root, so this isn't an option. Regardless, hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cyrus-Shepard0 -
Getting Google in index but display "parent" pages..
If you really didn't want them to show up in SERPs you could add a no index tag. There's no way to pass the content value from one page to another. This is attributed to the page that the content is on. Google will want to deliver the searcher to the page that the content is on, not another page. You will have to really work on making the category page as useful as possible. Make sure you have plenty of content on these pages and that your SEO efforts are focused on them. You could also start pushing the organic traffic as one of the benefits to having a listing on your site. If traffic is coming directly to the listing, this is still positive for the businesses advertising.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Audiohype0 -
Looking for re-assurance on this one: Sitemap approach for multi-subdomains
Thanks Ben. We'll look to do this in the future. Maybe with a virtual directory or something. Cheers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AABAB0