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Quite often.  At least once a year I get a call or email from someone saying "where'd my site go?" and it turns out the domain expired, they didn't see or get the email notificaitons, and some scraper stole the domain.  80% or more of those turn out to be CRS

Google's multi-layered multi-algorithm system has come a long way in being able to "figure it all out", yet at the same time, falls far short of always successfully "getting it right".

Robots.txt files are no longer an absolute directive.  They're now "just another signal", as are canonical tags, meta robots instructions, and their own Google Webmaster URL Parameters system.

Because of this its critical to be consistent across all signals.  If you've got the robots.txt file set to not index pages, but also have inbound links from affiliates, that's a prime example of where inbound link signals can override the robots.txt file's instruction if they're not nofollowed links.

While they technically SHOULD not index them after discovering them off-site (because the destination says "index this other version"), that's part of their confused multilayered system.

I have a question though - from what limited information you've provided, this example is based on a url parameter of ?ec=

When I search Google using site:http://www.oakfurnitureland.co.uk/ inurl:ec

I see only three such pages indexed AND where those pages are "fully" indexed.  All the rest (over 1,000 additional URLs), are in the Google system, however every one of those others has a meta description of "A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt - learn more."

What that means is they are NOT fully indexing those pages - there is no worry to be had about duplicate content for those. Google is simply tracking that those URLs exist.

So - is that the only URL parameter you're worried about? If so, it's not a major problem on your site. Except for those few exceptions, Google is doing what you need them to do with those.

A very common myth exists related to the age of the domain.  If the new site is going to have different content, the age of the domain is not going to be helpful in the long run.  If you have any content on the old domain that you can use on the new site, you can make use of that value.  How much value you get and then keep over time depends on how much of the content you can keep, and how many of the links pointing to that content you can retain.

The further away from the older domain's topical focus you go, the less value it has as well.

Until and unless someone directly from Google chimes in, it's always guess-work because we don't have access to their many algorithms, let alone the database that shows how an individual site is assessed by them.

In your case, it MAY be a Penguin issue, however if you're seeing a steady decline, that's not likely to be Penguin. Penguin is most often seen as an immediate major drop over a single day or a very short time-period.

On the other hand, I've seen countless sites that have had ongoing declines, and in every case, that's been due to a cascading trigger effect situation.

For example, if a site is weak overall, and then an algorithm update (one of their many algorithms, including but far from limited to Panda, Penguin, Above the Fold, EMD...) might flag a site as "deserves to have ranking drops".  Then once that happens, as the full spectrum of their other algorithms then get updated, that "now flagged" site is more vulnerable to those other subsequent algorithms that get refreshed.

If you go back far enough in the Google Analytics timeline for Google organic visits, you can often see where a decline first began and pinpoint it to being "near enough" to a known Google update as that "trigger" point. Yet you can't always because they make hundreds of updates every year, and most are not announced or given a name.

Only thing I can figure is it's a lag in their update due to the switch in March.  You're doing everything you need to / can / should for this type of situation, and I see you even have the rel=canonical set.

It's essentially impossible to know whether one individual signal is or is not going to cause a penalty (algorithmic or manual) unless the shear volume of instances is bizarrely big in the extreme.

Some things to consider:

Is that "10%" due to the number of sites out there that have posted a copy of the press release?

What's the total "bigger picture" footprint in regard to how many high quality links you have compared to those?

What's the rest of the link footprint look like in regard to borderline or spammy inbound link signals?

How many links are in that press release? What's the ratio of links to overall text and number of paragraphs?

All of these questions matter.

So while it's not necessarily good to spam link anchor text, if the overall message across all signals is "strong brand trust", one press release issued one time, with one or even maybe two links that have exact match anchor text may not be so severe or toxic.

It is SEO best practices to be consistent with case use, however upper case and Lower case are interchangeable on some server systems, while they are different/unique on others.  If the new system allows for you to use upper and lower case interchangeably, you should not see anything but 200's.  If that's true, then you should be okay.

Without seeing the site and example subdomains I can only speak from experience with other sites that have similar problems.

While a subdomain is "technically" a separate site from Google's perspective, one factor that can change that is interlinking - how interwoven are the subdomains to the main site from a linking perspective? If interlinking is heavy, this clouds the "stand-alone" site notion.

However, even then, what is the status of analytics and webmaster tools account assignments?  Are all the subdomains tracking with the same account IDs as the main site?  If so, it would be important to split them out.

Ultimately, the PROPER, best practice recommendation regardless of any of that, would be to have those subdomains migrated to an entirely different root domain.  The topical focus is radically different.

The bottom line factor is that subdomains DO impact a main domain because they are subordinate to that root domain.

Link equity is not equal across a page.  The two most important types of links are main site navigation and in-content.  Sidebar navigation is close behind.  Footer links are not what they once were.

Think about it from a user experience - how many sites do you go to where you primarily navigate through a site by scrolling to the bottom of pages to find the links you want?  Even high ranking sites that fill their footers with lots of links also have those higher up on the page and those footer links not only don't help, but with so many of them, it just causes topical relationship confusion.

Couple options:

1. change the main nav links to images and use alt text.  Alt text does have as much value when it's images in main site navigation because how else would search engines know the anchor information on those?

2. See if you can get links to some of those internal pages from within the content area of high level pages on the site - within or directly near descriptive text that talks about the focus of those pages you're linking to.

3. Something that hasn't been mentioned so far is also off-site factors.  Without inbound links pointing to some of those internal pages, you're not going to get as much ranking value as you probably need and are trying to get from internal linking.

With inbound links you have more free reign to get the anchor text you prefer, though inbound links should be a mix of keywords, brand and generic words like "for more info".

Local pack exists, yet is far from complete or consistently helpful.  Business directories thrive even in an age of local packs.  It's all about finding the best way to provide value, and the internet is large enough that many players can play in the game.

400 posts and 400 pages is not very many pages or posts, not by any stretch of the imagination.  How much lag are you seeing in tests with the permalink URLs?  If it's significant, it's not a WordPress issue - more likely a database corruption or server problem causing the slowdown between the front end and database.

In regard to shorter URLs:

The goal is to find a proper balance for your needs.  You want to group things into sub-groups based on proper hierarchy, however you also don't want to go too deep if you don't have enough pages/individual listings deep down the chain.

So the Moz post you point to refers to that - at a certain point, having too many layers can be a problem. However there is one one single correct answer.

The most important thing to be aware of and consider is your own research and evaluation process for your situation in your market.

However, as far as what you found most people search for, be aware that with location based search, many people don't actually type in a location when they are doing a search.  Except Google DOES factor in the location when deciding what to present in results.  So the location matters even though people don't always include it themselves.

The issue is not to become completely lost in making a decision either though - consider all the factors, make a business decision to move forward with what you come up with, and be consistent in applying that plan across the board.

What I mean in regard to URLs and Breadcrumbs:

If the URL is www.askme.com/dehli/saket/pizza/pizza-hut/  the breadcrumb should be:

Home > Dehli > Saket > Pizza > Pizza Hut

If the URL is www.askme.com/pizza-huts/saket-delhi/ the breadcrumb should be

Home > Pizza Hut > Saket-Delhi

I'd just add that if the solution chosen is noindex, to do the noindex, follow method, just to give the extra cue if there are links on those pages.

Regarding 404/301 issues. The numbers I gave were for a small partial crawl of a hundred URLs. So a full Screaming Frog crawl would help to determine if it's worse.  Even if its not, think of the concept where a site might have a dozen core problems, and twenty problems that by themselves might seem insignificant. At a certain point, something becomes the straw that breaks the camels back.

Regarding content - how many courses offered are actually up against competitors that have entire sections devoted to the topic just a single course page has on that site? How many have entire sites devoted to that?  Understanding content depth requires understanding the scale of real and perceived competition. And if it's a course page, it may not be a "main" landing page, yet it's important in its own right.

Regarding panda timing - the site took the big hit three years ago.  Waiting for, and hoping that the next update is the one that will magically reflect whatever you've done to that point isn't, in my experience, a wise perspective.

While it's true that once Google has locked a data set to then be applied to a specific algorithmic update, not taking action at a high enough level, and with enough consistency is gambling.  Since true best practices marketing as a whole needs to be ongoing, efforts to strengthen on-site signals and signal relationships also needs to be ongoing. Because even if Panda weren't a factor, the competitive landscape is ever marching forward.

Once you fix the noindex, here's some other stuff. It's a "quick hit - what stands out" kind of an audit to see if there are any really obvious red flags.

1.  Odd Links

Looking at the source of your POS Nightclub and Bar page I found some odd things going on related to links.  Specific examples:

A) You've got a link off to the right side of the page just under the main navigation bar (under the "News" link).  This link is titled "News" and it rotates different links to different news items.  One of them goes to a site called Spoke.com and the rest go to other DInerware.com pages.

Each of these links has a link "title" attribute that appears to contain the intro text of whatever it's pointed to.  The problem here is it's significantly filling content at the source level that's totally irrelevant to the page.  If this is happening on the entire site,there's a lot of topical dilution.

While this issue itself shouldn't be a problem big enough to be concerned with, I do believe its harming your sites quality from a topical perspective.  And since this is stuff only search engines see, or is only seen when hovering over whatever individual article is viewed in the rotator, it's not good to have so much content there.  Not good at all.

Also, the Spoke directory isn't exactly a high quality directory.  So linking there isn't helping your site's perceived trust aspects.

2. Apparent mass repetition of video content

Am I correct in that you've got some videos posted to multiple pages of the site?  Causing serious duplicate content problems?  Many pages seem to have almost no unique text while having several videos.  If these are then shown on more than one page, not only do you lose out from a lack of HTML text based content (a significant factor), but you get hammered by the duplication.

3.  Links to PDFs

I see links to PDFs in the right column of the Product Training page, and none of them have the php code at the end of them.  Yet within the page itself, PDFs have it http://www.dinerware.com/pdf/DinerwareCFGManual.pdf?phpMyAdmin=6e28a551fa44f2aa65e57201d6164da9

What's that about?

4.   Markup Language Fail - The biggest problem

When I run your site through the W3C Markup Validation check, it fails and can not process.  This alone means you've got a site coding problem that's most likely causing serious problems with search engines.

Go to http://validator.w3.org  and enter in http://www.dinerware.com/pos-product/training/

I doubt the complete breakdown that I got when submitting that URL is temporary - and if you see it too, that's a critical issue.

Nitin

200 words - what is the point / value of having that repeated on thousands of pages? It's not unique, and regardless of what some people think about it being okay because "lots of sites do it" or because "Major brand that's able to get away with lots of bad SEO because they own a market" can do it.

If there are two hundred words based on non-product specific information, this is not a best practice. Instead, that information should be contained on just one page, and if you believe, from a user experience perspective, providing a link to that from each product page is helpful, that's what I recommend.

Andrew's got one path to consider.  I've got another.  My own most recent example is with a real estate site that has 100,000 property pages that all currently result in a 404 not found.  Yes, that's 100k dead pages.  So I too feel your pain.

What I recommend to clients is to 301 based on category level criteria.  So for example, whatever the highest level category a product had been in - that old page should 301 to the current category page, if one exists.  The 301 should append the new URL with a unique identifier for this situation - something like #NLC  (for no longer carried) - the # sign being the key, because you can then have an anchor at the top of the content area of those pages that if the referrer includes that #NLC in it, visitors would see a box communicating that the product is no longer carried, and inviting them to browse your current inventory in that category.

Doing this would also require having a canonical URL tag on each category page - just to cover the bases.  While anything after the #sign should be ignored as far as causing duplicate content conflicts, it's still best practices to have the canonical URL there in the header.

When no current category exists, then I'd send visitors by 301 to a uniform page (either a product search page or otherwise) yet with the same #NLC string and message.

Of course, getting either Andrew's suggestion or mine implemented will be up to the skills of the programmers doing the implementation.  That's a lot of coding that has to be done accurately and thoroughly tested.

If they insist on having brand information, then yes, the alternative is to have a small portion of brand information, with a link to the full brand text on its own page.

Meta robots refers to the < meta name="robots" > tag at the page header level.  This is usually the case when a blog is set up with an SEO program like All In One SEO for example, where you can manually set which content is blocked.  It's common to block archives, tags, and other sections, in the theory that allowing these to be crawled could either cause duplicate content issues, or drain link value from the primary category navigation.

if we're talking about thousands of pages falling off, yes, to me, that's a high priority.  If you go the 301 route, they should go to the highest page in the chain that product would be associated with that's relevant to the topical intent and relative closeness of match..

So if it's a laser mouse, I wouldn't redirect to the top "desktop computers" or even the "laser mouse" category, but I would 301 it to the mouse optical/trackball category page.

The reason for this is two-fold - it's low enough in the food chain to be highly related, but not so highly related that if the current laser mouse sub-cat disappears altogether that you'd end up in a bad loop of redirects.

That does, then, maintains at least some of the original page authority and boost the parent category.