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If the actual site have decent keywords in the url and is old enough, you should keep it.

Switch to another domain if the domain name is extremely good.

What domain authority do you have on the actual domain ?

This won't make much difference, I usually use these urls though :

/blogs/

/blogs/p2

Remember to 301 /blogs/p1 to /blogs/ and to 404 pages with a page too big /blogs/p10000 or strange urls /blogs/p01

1 - A tool that may give a hint : http://builtwith.com/

2 - Being a coder will help but it may take time to understand the old database. Software solution may exist but are probably not free.

3 - You can use opensiteexplorer's top pages, but if you have a developer to make the database migration, he will be able to create a redirect script to have ALL pages redirected to the new url

I would recommend keeping the old page forever, if possible, with the 301 to the new site.

For the products which were not redirected, I would add the 301 over time or put a link to the site with appropriate text in the top of the content. These pages need to be kept forever if possible.

Google can keep the pages in the index for months or even years if they have backlinks, so you should keep the 301.

Example for the NYTimes :

Q: A 301 REDIRECT QUESTION! How long do you leave up the redirect?

Forever.

Marshall managing 301s forever isn't easy but necessary. We've moved entire parts of NYT movies and understand we have to manage 8 million redirects for ever. If tech doesn't understand don't move forward

_source : http://www.seroundtable.com/smxw11-seo-tech-13054.html_

Got disconnected by seomoz as I posted so here is the short answer :

You were affected by Pand so you may pages with almost no content. These pages may be the one using crawl budget, much more than the paginated results. Worry about these low value pages and let Google handle the paginated results

I would not dig too much in the crawl budget + pagination problem - Google knows what is a pagination and will increase the crawl budget when necessary. On the 'thin' vision of your site, I think your right and I would immediately allow pages > 1 to be indexed.

Beware this may or not impact a lot on your site, it depends on the navigation system (you may have a lot of paginated subsets).

What tells site: requests ? Do you have all your items submitted in your sitemaps and indexed (see WMT) ?

On a side note, if you were impacted by Panda, I would strongly suggest to remove / disallow the empty pages on your site. This will give you more crawl budget for interesting content.

I would put noindex,follow on those page and wait a little until they disappear for Google index. Of course, if you have only a few pages, I would do it manually in GWT. If you have rather big site with a good crawl rate, this should be done in a few days.

When you don't see them anymore, you may use DISALLOW */beerbottles/ but this could be annoying later. I would recommend to use the meta robots as you have more control on it. It will allow page rank to flow in the beerbottles pages too !

If you have pages on your site without any internal link to them (I mean pages reachable by Google Bot when he visits your site), they won't rank well, and your site won't be ranking well too.

That's because your pages will only be visible to Google through the sitemap. The Google Bot will think "Hey these pages are not accessible to the user through the site links? I should not rank them then."

You will penalize your whole domain too because you will be losing additional pages in the site. Especially if those pages have good content (I suppose this the case anyway).

BUT, given your example, Google Bot should be able to access them with you strange link. Question is, what is the anchor text ? Is the anchor a generic text or a good keyword for each page? If you have bad anchor text, I would make a specific section on the site which allows the user and GBot to access theses pages with good anchor text.

Maybe a HTML sitemap, as you may see one on rotten tomatoes :

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/sitemap/movies

If you are planning to put the content on the deep page very soon on the home page, you may use a 302. If this is not the case, you have to 301.

Disagree with that, the only case when this could be used is the following case :

Service in unavailable (503) for any reason, and you can't display a 503 on the homepage. In this case this could make sense to 302 to another page displaying a 503, because your home page will soon be back.

I would not recommend doing so, google will index you pages but he won't be able to find them anywhere on the internet, event on your website. They won't rank.

You should make, at least, a way for users and google to access theses pages without the buttons.

For the code / content / style issue, you should really stop putting all together - it's been 10 years since people started to separate content and style

A good Q&A will have only one answer (editorial content) or have several ways to make the question and the answer have a good quality (content and SEO). This is done with moderation or social features (best answers, etc.). Content is targeted and under control.

A forum will be much more free, their is no best answer put in the first page just after the question, the topic may not be a question too, you can have very various contents. Also, forums have some very difficult SEO problems with duplicate content, empty pages and more.

Hi maximise,

The url you gave is wrong, beware there is your site's url. Anyway, the vietnamfuntravel website won't give any juice, it looks really suspicious and link exchange is in the menu !

I don't think these backlinks could impact negatively your site, but I would recommend to remove them anyway. They don't give you much, and this would sanitize your backlink profile.

Hi gregster,

Your trailing slash does matter although this is not a major problem. To keep things clean, you should choose one format and redirect the other one with a 301.

You will find more informations about it :

http://www.ragepank.com/articles/68/that-trailing-slash-does-matter/

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-url-canonicalization/

The duplicate item pages will not be indexed but visited the google bot. He will consider this page to be the one linked in the canonical tag.

I hope you won't have to set the urls manually !

I would suggest keeping the 301, Google is well aware of these type of problem so you should keep it simple, just 301 home.aspx to / once your able to do it.

Toddy,

For every product of your site, you should identify its main category (the one that will be indexed). When seeing a product with a different category url, use the rel=canonical tag to give google the good url. This works well with e-commerce site.

You may also apply this logic between categories, as some listing between two categories are sometimes very similar.

For more information about the rel=canonical tag, see these resources :

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/canonical-url-tag-the-most-important-advancement-in-seo-practices-since-sitemaps

http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394

I've read several article about keyword posiiton in the url, my thoughts on this is simple : put it close to the left if you don't have a good reason to put it farther.

In your case, having /category/category/ is useless. At least remove one category, right now /category/ is a duplicate of the home. Even if you remove one category, you should put a breadcrumb on the site to make /category/ indexable, and usefull.

My final advice is to have the category slugs in the root, ie : /lathes/. But this means having a good developer which is not the case I guess.

Hope you don't create link from visitor's researches, like find-a-recipe.php?course=salad**&q=tomatoes** as you would get penalised !

Two quick things I noticed :

On ESP, your top menu, which are the first links of the page, are not about machines. The effect can be seen in the site: request : http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.esp-machinery.co.uk&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozillaofficial&client=firefox-a

You should put the most important menus here : machines ! BW does this.

Second thing : /category/category/sheet-metal-work-machines on ESP vs /sheetmetal-machines.asp on BW. ESP keywords are far from the root whereas BW has a page in the root with the good keywords.

There is several other improvements possible, especially for long tail ranking. For example, you don't have a single item page linked in a category : http://www.esp-machinery.co.uk/category/category/sheet-metal-work-machines. Optimised text on this page is missing too.