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The first thing I would do is look at Google Analytics for the past year (or more) to see if those pages have any traffic. You've mentioned that you looked at that, but didn't say how long of a time it was.

Typically, we do recommend redirecting those pages to the most appropriate current page on the website. If those pages don't have anything to do with what you're current selling or offering, then you might want to simply server up a 404 error (ideally a 410 gone error).

I would also look at the links, such as by using Open Site Explorer or Majestic.com to make sure there aren't any external sites linking to those pages. If there are external links to certain pages, you'll want to redirect them.

Brian, that's definitely an issue. If it's not delivering a 404 error when you go to a non-existent page on your site, that's the problem. I could theoretically go to yourdomain.com/aslksjdltkjlkjalskdj.html, make a link to it, and Google would index the page.

Check with your web developer to see how you can make sure that 404 error pages (page not found) delivers a 404 error in the server header.

There are lots of ways that Google will discover new URLs (even someone browsing with Google Chrome might allow Google to discover a new URL and then crawl it). So, you'll want to make sure that you have this fixed on your site.

What you do with the content really depends on how much content you're talking about. If it's less than 50 posts, you may want to remove the content entirely and 301 redirect to a new post--which explains that you're no longer providing those services, and then highlight the services that you do offer.

I would, though, look at your site's Google Analytics to see how much traffic those posts are getting. If there is a lot of traffic, but it's irrelevant, consider moving them to another domain and 301 redirecting them from your domain to the new domain name. You could then advertise your other services on that site with banner ads or be a "sponsor". That way others may see the posts and then click thru to your main site because they're interested in the services you do have to offer.

If the posts just don't get much traffic, then it may be worth it to just delete the posts entirely (keep a backup of them, though) and that will allow Google to re-evaluate the content and topic of your site.

Luke, generally speaking, the others are right--you'll want to get going as quickly as possible to recover the lost traffic. Most likely they didn't set up 301 Permanent Redirects from the old URLs to the new ones, and that's what I would concentrate on first. I'd recommend looking at Google Search Console's crawl errors.

If you can get ahold of the site's log files and analyze the site's 404 errors for traffic, then you'll want to set up 301 redirects for pages that have traffic coming to them first.

You'll also want to crawl the site and look for site issues, as most likely someone who didn't know to migrate a site properly may have missed major SEO-related issues when they built the site.

Finally, looking at the site's links and which pages those links are pointing to will be helpful, as that may "save" some link juice. If you can, get some of those links changed or updated so they point directly to the new page and not to a page that redirects.

Welcome to Moz! It looks like the site has about 169,000 pages indexed Google currently. So, if that's the number of pages you have on your site, then they're crawling and indexing it just fine.

Since you did bring up the fact that you're dealing with dynamic pages, or dynamic URLs, it is important that you have a sitemap (probably multiple sitemaps) available so that Google can quickly crawl and have the proper URLs indexed.

You currently don't have a sitemap file here: https://jane.com/sitemap.xml which is where it should reside. I recommend also listing the sitemap file(s) in your robots.txt file here, as well: https://jane.com/robots.txt

Your site's web development team will need to auto generate the sitemap files, which currently isn't happening right now. I recommend having up to 50,000 URLs in each file, as it can get quite large if it's over that number. If you're able to generate the files based on certain criteria (such as main pages in the site, categories, or something else), then that would be helpful, as well.

vtcrm, I'm not sure what you mean by "external redirects', although I suspect that you're referring to links from other websites that are pointing to a page on your site that doesn't exist. So, you are redirecting that page to another URL on your site.

If you are able to create content on a URL that's appropriate for the link that it's pointing to, then great--that should actually help your site's overall SEO. You'll be able to recover some traffic, as well. So, anytime that you can get rid of a redirect from an external site and replace it with content, that's a good thing.

You may also want to look at your crawl errors in Google Search Console, there may be pages that have traffic and links that you can also create content on--if you previously removed those pages from your site.

There have been some great responses so far--overall, you should be proactive with your clients (and even your own sites) when it comes to links. If you do see spam links or the types of links that Patrick has suggested, be proactive and disavow them.

If you do feel there are links that need to get removed, though, then i would go ahead and try to get those removed.

Welcome to the Moz community, theguildedteapot! Happy that you're here.

When it comes to links, you should look at the number of root domains, and not links from each domain. For example, we typically really only "count" one or two links from each domain. Even though you have 1,000 links from one site, you really need to look at it as if it's one link.

Personally, I'd rather have 10 links from 10 domains than 100 links from 3 domains.

Bruce, whenever you lose rankings, there are a few things that you should check. First, I would crawl your own website using Screaming Frog, Deep Crawl, or another crawler to see if you can identify any issues. I would also look at the links to the site--have you lost links or gained any "shady" or unnatural links recently? Have you done anything related to a disavow file that might have caused this?

There are so many potential issues to deal with that could have been the culprit--but I would first crawl your own website and see if it's can be crawled properly. Then look at the links.

As for the sitemap issue, I don't think that it's going to be a sitemap issue if your pages are being indexed. But, if the sitemap does not have the current pages on your site and is not up to date I would fix it.

Generally speaking, these types of schemes don't work, as Google is quite aware of people trying to do this. With the latest Google algorithm updates in the past few years, we've seen it become tougher and tougher for black hat SEO or gray hat SEO to be successful by trying to manipulate clicks, etc. and faking traffic.

We are aware of other techniques that have been manipulating Google suggest, though, and while that doesn't specifically influence rankings, it can lead to people searching for keywords that they wouldn't normally search for.

Reyzer, there really is no risk when you move from http://domain.com to http://www.domain.com on the same domain. If you were to move from one domain name to another, that would be different--and you'd want to use Google's Change of Address tool to tell them that you're moving from one domain name to another.

But, when you  move from one subdomain to another subdomain (which you are doing in your case), there is NO loss as long as you properly implement 301 Permanent Redirects on the pages. Google has been very public about this, and as long as you move using a 301 redirect and it's on the same domain name, there is NO loss whatsoever.

The same goes for moving from http:// to https:// as well, as it's the same domain name.

Neil, the others are right--you should first show the full content and not hide any of the content on the page like you're doing. Depending on the size of the content, though, you might consider why you're hiding the content in the first place, as you might need to create more pages on your site for that content. Adding the content to new pages on the site might be good for your users, and certainly will fix your problem.

When considering the content and indexing, though, if the content is in the page source code then it will be indexed. Google does know if it's hidden, though, as Googlebot, Google's crawler, is essentially a version of Google Chrome.

Muhammad, while we cannot predict the future of link building, we can actually concentrate on what works. Link earning, earning your links by posting and creating good content on your website, is what works now and what will work in the future. If you post good content that others want to share, then others will share it and do the link building for you. That's link earning.

George, I think it's a great move to move the content over to the company blog. If the content is good, then it should help the overall domain and it's visibility. There are, though, some considerations:

• Duplicate content. Once you move the content, you don't want it residing in two places.

• You'll want to see if you can set up a 301 redirect(s) from the old pages to the new location. I don't recall if this is possible with blogger, though.

• You'll want to check the backlinks to see if you can any of the links pointing to the blogger blog updated to the new location.

Lindsay, there are so many unique issues that could be causing this that it's difficult to diagnose the problem without having a specific URL to look at. However, it sounds as if you've been looking at a lot of the on-site and on-page factors. Have you looked at the links to the site and done anything to evaluate the links to your website and make sure you don't have low quality links that need to be disavowed?

When you mention the thin or duplicate content issues, have you considered consolidating the content and removing the previous year's content (or moving it an archiving it) so that only the current content exists? Besides archiving or removing it from the site, you may want to use the canonical tag. Another way to deal with that content would be to use the robots.txt file to disallow indexing of certain older content pages.