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I would also agree they are not worth much.  A few years back I hired a PR firm out of LA for about 6 months.  We talked about PR and how important it was to get some good quality links.  They told us from the start that they were great with SEO and they would get us tons of backlinks.  Everytime we had a press release it was getting blasted all over the place.  We got links from yahoo, marketwatch, msn, etc etc.  We also received links from PR directories.  Over time I started realizing that nearly every press release was hitting these same "newswires" and that many were hitting the directories.  It did not seem to add value from what I could tell.  Directories are so easy.  I join them more to look inline with my industry than for SEO value.

Gina,

The 301 is exactly what you should do.  No big deal.  Since it is still early it makes sense that you would want to go with a more "perfect" url.  I own a network of blogs and we have found that the right URL can be very important to long term ranks.  Good luck!

I've gone through this many times.  Here are some high level points to consider.

1.  Keep as much of the content the same as possible

2.  Keep as many urls the same as possible

3.  Be sure you have managed your potential 404 errors prior to launch

Many times people just accept that some new commerce platform uses a different url structure for products (as an example).  I personally don't accept that answer from the dev team on the surface.  If I have 5000 product pages then I'm not really interested in changing that URL structure unless it is ABSOLUTELY necessary.  Sure, 301's work great but if you are trying to minimize potential downsides it would be better to not have to place 5000 301s.

I'd recommend considering content that isn't moving over.  Have you done your homework on how much of it is getting traffic?  Or, is everything moving over?  When I switch platforms the goal for my teams is to make the switch in a way that the average user would never know.  Google certainly will know when you have gone from volusion to magento but making it less noticeable to users is important.  It is difficult enough to switch platforms so you don't really want to bring new potential CRO issues into the conversation.

I saw a person on here yesterday that had 10,000 404 errors after the switch.  To me this is just poor planning.  You should not have to wait for webmaster tools to tell you there is a 404 problem.  Google has a history of penalizing sites that are inaccessible or have a large number of 404 errors for even a brief period of time.  I had a blog that I purchased and switched the PHP handler on.  After 3 weeks I realized that every post was getting 404 errors.  I fixed the issue but never got back 1/2 the traffic I lost.

All in all, Google does a fantastic job of handling your changes.  If your titles, content, and urls are the same for your main traffic pages then you should expect it to be a fairly seamless transition.  Hope this helps.

In this case I would not change anything.  Google sees links in templates all the time.  It is natural for websites to link to places in the header, footer, sidebar etc where those links will get duplicated.  A natural backlink profile will have some links that look like this. Let me argue from the inverse.  Are you suggesting that I should just simply find a site that will link to one of my competitors for their main keywords from 2000+ sidebar pages?  Very rarely have I heard of Google penalizing anyone over a single link.  It appears you got the result you wanted so now go out and build some additional trust.  Keep building the case for that keyword to rank.  Hope this helps.

I do see that it is a large site so managing these kinds of things becomes more difficult.  We are getting ready to change platforms in May.  My approach was to keep every URL the same as possible.  I understand that 301's work but that doesn't mean that 301's are ideal.  Cutts will say that these should pass the value but we really don't know what other factors are involved.  In our case we will map every url and we will keep all the urls the same as possible.  In the end we will still need to do a bunch of 301s.  One area where we were able to fix a lot of problems was by requiring all product page urls, sub category, and main category urls to stay the same.  Hope you figure it out.

If there were 10,000 404's after launch then I believe something in the rebuild/redesign of the site was not worked through thoroughly enough.  I have found that overall Google doesn't penalize sites for 404 errors but if I woke up one morning to 10,000 of them I wouldn't be surprised if Google kept me down for a while.  For example, I purchased a blog last year.  I didn't pay much for it but it had about 200,000 pageviews a month.  I failed to pay any attention to it after purchase but one day woke up and my servers were spiking.  I realized the the php handler was different than all my other WordPress sites so I had a developer switch it over for me.  After the switch the server calmed down and then I didn't pay any attention to the site for a period of weeks.  Then one day I went out to the site and clicked a link and it took me to a 404 page.  Within minutes I realized that nearly every link was going to 404.  When we changed the php handler the urls were changed for some reason.  We quickly corrected the problem but Google has never restored our ranks.  Now the site gets about 120,000 pageviews a month.  It was 3 weeks but once I lost the ranks I never got them back.  I don't have an exact answer for you but the fact there are still 500 404's is a huge problem.  In my organizations we don't tolerate 404's for long.  As soon as we find them to work to get them corrected.  Woke up yesterday to 98 404's and sent over a spreadsheet to the dev team to fix.

Good luck!

Your site looks pretty decent to me.  According to OSE you only have 1 backlink to that page.  I would suggest a better internal linking strategy to that page.  Following that I would consider trying to earn a few links to that page from outside.  I've seen this kind of thing lots of times.  Many times Google indexes content but doesn't actually start populating it in SERPs until you give it a good reason to.  A few quality backlinks and better internal linking structure and this content will be ranking very well.

Overall I saw many of the sites that I monitor falling 1-3 points during the last update.  It seems that the scale was raised a bit.  However, one site where we are working very hard to earn quality links moved up 3 points against the trend.  Maybe the data I'm seeing is flawed but it appears that the trend was that a lot sites saw a subtle drop.

I think your concerns here are very valid.  If they have such a strong backlink profile and then you change the focus it is opening up several cans of worms.  For one the bounce rate could go through the roof.  The new meta descriptions could lower the over CTR which could hurt ranks.  I don't see this affecting DA but this seems like a very poor decision.  How about a landing page on the site and a promotion link to the sweepstakes from the homepage?  Seems like an extreme change in direction from a casual observer.

Hard to give a definitive answer on this.  So many factors to consider here.  Have you run an analysis on opensiteexplorer for the sites in spot 1-10?  If so, how close were you from a DA, PA, Linking Root Domains, etc standpoint?  If the leads from the aux site are not that significant then it would be a good experiment.  Of course you could always consider doing some link earning to the main site page.  If you think you are close then 5-10 new links might seal the deal.  If I were you I would probably do the 301 based on the info you gave.  However, then I would get focused on some linking earning to that page.  Building up some new link equity is probably your only chance at really making a dent.  Spot 11-20 can be further than it seems from where you might want to be.  From experience I have seen there is a huge difference when you have a site that falls out of spots 3 and 4 to spots 6-8.

I own a site in the custom t-shirt space.  We deal with a similar issue to what you are talking about.  Each product comes in lots of different sizes.  To make matters worse we have several products that are nearly identical with just minor difference being the manufacturer of the goods.  For example hanes, fruit of the loom, gildan all sell a main t-shirt that is pretty much identical with the exception of the tag.  We have always had the sizing information on 1 product page.

I believe you are going to want to focus on 1 page with all the shapes and materials.  I clearly don't know our business but I think I disagree with your assessment about the usability.  I believe it will be more familiar to users as well as easier to manage.  We have had a lot of results filtered out by panda updates because our "commodity" shirts described above are not unique enough.  If you create 36 different pages I think you will be fighting duplicate content for a long time.

This is pretty dangerous business.  Not sure what they spent on all those domains but I could quickly see Google stripping out all the value if this isn't handled properly.

I recently acquired a small competitor.  There were good business reasons for the acquisition but we still wanted to tread carefully with the new domain.  Here is what we are doing.

The domain was actually a website that we did not want to maintain so we 301 redirected all the urls up to the homepage and then placed an announcement on that page of our acquisition.  The announcement is an image that clicks through to our website.  We intentionally did not include any anchor text.  Next we issued a press release of the acquisition.  The press release is a good line in the stand in case Google did anything crazy to us.  We would be able to point back to the date and let them know this was a business move.  Next we started reaching out to all the backlinks and making a friendly request to move their links from the previous name to ours.  In our eyes any site that moves it to us is a long term win because the risk of the value being stripped out goes way down.  Next we sent an email to the customer base informing them of the acquisition and a discount code for trying out our services.  Finally, once the outreach to change links is done and the smoke clears (3,6, 12 months down the road) we will place the 301 redirect on the domain to our site.

This is the only way I would suggest buying domains and redirecting.  Buying domains for search purposes is blackhat, period.  Buying competitors or other sites that help your business but also could help you in search is not.  We have decided to take a safer approach to maximize value and mitigate risk.

I think it depends on what your goals are.  I own an ecommerce site with a blog but also own are large network of design & development blogs.  Merely having a blog on your site won't help anything.  However, if you are going to product quality content on that blog that relates to the topic of your site then it can be very effective for building links.  High quality video, infographics, etc have proven to be good for grabbing some links.  They are easy for media/bloggers to promote.  If your goal is more along the lines of "I want a blog to see if I can gain readership or ad revenues" then I would probably start something.  Blogs that are attached to existing brands don't do as well from a perception standpoint.  Users will tend to thing you are just trying to beef up your existing brand.  On the other hand, a stand alone "brand" for your blog will be free of any perception like that.  If you producing quality content on the site then over time it will have an opportunity to take off.  One other thought.  You might consider making a small acquisition of someone in the travel space.  Getting the initial traffic to work with could prove to be the hardest part.  There are probably thousands of little travel blogs out there you could buy up for 5-10k that already have some content and some earnings.  Hope this helps.  Let me know if you have any followup.

Brett,

It sounds like there are more business reasons other than search visibility.  Given that information I can see this is a more difficult issue for you.  I don't envy you.  I stand by my assessment that managing 3 brands that are so similar is going to prove to be difficult.  In my business we attempted to manage 2 for a very long time.  Ours was more driven by search visibility but we also had a brand associated.  Ultimately we decided to perform the 301s and certainly lost some business by doing so.  In the end I stand by the decision.  I think the focus on 1 hurts in the short run and pays huge dividends in the long run.

I think there is a bigger issue going on here.  Why are you operating 3 different sites where you are just swapping out logos?  I don't see the multi site causing you any specific problems but my gut tells me your long term prospects are not good.  All the effort that you are going into for this elaborate scheme are probably causing you to not do as well in search as you would with one brand.  I would suggest instead of trying to maintain 3 brands (for no other perceivable reason than search visibility) that you bite the bullet and reduce to 1 site.  Take your best one and 301 the others to it.  Maintain one platform and you might be able to cut some operational costs internally.  To me the strategy you are outlining above was a good idea in 2005.  Not trying to be harsh.  Hope this helps.

I'm curious to hear what you find out about this one.  I'm not an authority on this but it sure doesn't seem very clean.  I would want to take site A and 301 all the old to the new and get rid of this structure completely.  I'm sure you have already considered that.  When I talk to people I always tell them we are trying to be the least imperfect.  Having this frameset A certainly doesn't seem like the least imperfect approach in most competitive spaces.  Good luck!

Bing Webmaster Tools should be able to help here.

http://www.bing.com/webmaster/help/submit-urls-to-bing-62f2860a

You can submit up to 10 urls a day for immediate crawl.  I know the point is for new sites but this should be effective for you as well.

At least they don't all require you to sign up for a new yahoo email address...

We rank first page for nearly every phrase we want.  However, competitors of ours that have been actively buying links are still being rewarded and it has hurt us a little in the last year.  We used to be 2-5 for our key phrases.  Now we are more like 3-7 for hundreds of phrases.  Is there any evidence that buying a domain with a lot of relevant backlinks and redirecting has created long term value?

I'm thinking about buying a competitor and 301 redirecting their site to mine.  The high level stats are as follows.  My site has a DA of 46 and the homepage has a PA of 55.  375 root domains, 170,000 links.  The site sells millions of dollars worth of product each year.  The competitor (who I had never heard of) has a DA of 58 and a homepage PA of 64.  They have 634 root domains and 260,000 links.  They aren't selling much of anything (less than 100,000 per year).  We might be able to operate their site but I'm concerned about maintaining 2 platforms.  My question is about the value of buying this site and 301 redirecting it to my site.  Would this create long term SEO value or not?  Any examples that have been documented are greatly appreciated.