Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks for getting back, Dan! Doing these checks definitely satisfies me that it's a non-issue.. Content Keywords gives me "facebook", "strutta", "contest", etc. Interesting bug with Adwords though, they should consider doing subdomain-specific "research", since I think that in the case of SaaS businesses especially, this makes a lot more sense. Cheers, -Danny

Great to hear. Let me know if you have any question when you start that project. Casey

Thanks Peter! Much appreciated for opening the ticket. I just tried logging in now, and it happened again. So hopefully Moz fix the issue. Clearning cookies browser wide isn't an acceptable fix for me as I then lose my Google two-authentication cookies which is a pain.

Yup I've seen that about Bing too.. although after discussion with our front-end developer, we're going to stick with it in the name of good HTML. Our traffic from Bing doesn't represent a big enough ratio to use improper syntax.

Hey all, I wanted to add one more post to this thread as I believe I've found the better solution I was alluding to a year ago: Divshot. Definitely worth a look for anyone hosting a static site, has great libraries for SEOs like redirects and slashify. Cheers, -Danny

Oh I'm sorry I clearly misunderstood the question. I have not seen any studies or testing done on this, but I have to assume that they are ignored by spiders entirely. I certainly don't think they are more damaging than a 404 would be. A 404 tends to be ignored and only registered if a certain amount of time passes and the page is still not found. Google doesn't make it a habit to instantly remove URLs unless you ask them to. At the very worst, the 403/404 error would de-index that particular URL but this should not affect the rankings of your other pages and your actual site. And I think it'll take at least a good 30 days before Google will stop crawling those. That said, it shouldn't be crawling them at all if there aren't any links pointing to them either internally or externally. And if there are links pointing to the pages in question, you should be redirecting them via 301. That is of course if they are links you want. Hope this was more helpful.

Wow. I wasn't expecting such a detailed and awesome answer Danny. Thanks so much, I'm in the process of migrating away from S3 anyways (for other reasons) though you're right in that I'm going to miss the cost & load times. I'm using Middleman for now, though the technical part of my brain is indeed interested in how you're going to accomplish the Jekyll solution. I'll look out for your post! And thanks for the tip on my site. Another thing to add to the list Arun

Thanks all who replied! Our brand term is pretty specific ("Strutta") so I decided to try it as exact match for a while with a few variations (geographic, service related, etc.) I'll see how that affects traffic, QS and cost

Thanks Adam! Luckily the campaigns weren't built out that extensively yet, so I didn't get hit too badly with a drop in organic. But I'll definitely factor that into reporting nonetheless.