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If you could just show the 404 error and custom message on the original URL it would save you a redirect. Otherwise, that sounds like a good plan.

Adding a blog is a good way for you to publish unique, useful content for your visitors, which will help with organic rankings if you don't allow the other pages to be indexed.

However, if you allow the other pages to be indexed and Google determines that the content on those pages is not unique, or doesn't provide added value, then the entire domain could be penalized (i.e. Panda) so in that case a blog wouldn't help much.

I would be concerned with even having a site like this these days. I know other large brands get away with it, but it won't be long before Google takes over those niches completely. If it's scaleable and automated, Google will own it.

Best practices for sites like that involve adding value above and beyond the curation of the content from other sources. If you have an audience already then user-generated content could be one way to go. Editorial content that is 100% unique and useful is great too, but difficult to scale on a site like that.

Another best practice would be to limit the amount of pages Google has indexed. Don't ever allow pages with zero listings to be indexed (i.e. a search that returned 0 results).

Good luck.

Are you asking how to rank better on meta search sites, or how to rank a meta search site on Google? If the latter, you're better off keeping your internal "dynamic" search result pages unindexable by Google.

Hello Kelly,

If you feel like you need a professional SEO to come help you recover from a site migration / redesign then I'd say you're probably right. Moz keeps a recommended list of professionals here if you need help choosing one.

I agree with Chris that you should probably switch your SEO plug-in. I wouldn't use anything but Yoast for that, and it could solve a lot of your problems. Don't let that stop you from getting a professional audit though. You should make sure the contract also states that they will provide implementation if you're not comfortable implementing all of their recommendations yourself.

Good luck.

Hello StoryScout,

I apologize for the wait on this. You may get a response sooner next time by providing more detail. Could you please elaborate on the situation and what you're trying to accomplish? What content management system or shopping cart system is your client's website on now? What do you mean by "link their website to eBay"? Do you mean linking an affiliate feed so your client can earn eBay affiliate revenue? Do you mean hyperlinking to a page on eBay, such as your client's eBay store landing page and/or product pages? Do you just want an "iframe" of their eBay store on their site? Or are you looking to migrate their entire store over to eBay?

I look forward to helping further if I can.

Nicholas,

Did the link Lynn provided answer your question?

I want to be sure I understand your question correctly. Are you saying you want a tool that will tell you who your competitors' affiliates are so you can poach the best ones? I don't know of a tool that does that, sorry.

Hello Billy,

As you're probably aware, load balancing services are for distributing traffic to more than one server in order to maintain high performance even when traffic levels spike. There is nothing wrong with this from an SEO perspective, as it all happens server-side before the user agent (e.g. Google) ever receives anything. It is a common practice amongst enterprise-level websites.

However, you are right to be concerned about this implementation, as it is definitely not the intended use of the technology, and sounds like a workaround instead of an actual fix. It may be a good workaround if you only allow one version of the content to be indexed, and ensure proper use of cross-domain rel canonical tags. Or you could even simply block anyone, including Google, from accessing the non-canonical version (on your subdomain, I take it) by returning a 401 (unauthorized) or a 403 (forbidden) status code.

Iredeto,

I do this on a few of my sites and it works out well. Saves on crawl budget, keeps google from accessing my affiliate links, and keeps any pagerank from passing through the links, which keeps me in-line with Google's webmaster policy on links.

One thing to keep in mind is that Google may show those URLs in the search results with a message that they can't show the content because it has been blocked. If you want to keep this from happening you may have to remove that directory GWT using the URL Removal tool. If they get re-indexed in 90 days (or whatever the reset time frame is) you will have to do it again. Hopefully that won't be an issue once you get them all removed the first time and block the folder.

Using rel = "nofollow" tags on the hyperlinks going to that directory wouldn't hurt either.

Hello Shawn,

I like the logo resizing on that page.

It looks like you're including star ratings, and I don't see any ratings on the page. If the page doesn't include the information it shouldn't be in the source code either. Otherwise it looked good. I tested it in the Structured Data Testing Tool and didn't see any errors reported, and the ratings showed up int the SERPs. Are you still experiencing problems or is this resolved?

You will probably have to use Data Importer if you can't get what you're looking for after the user returns to your site from Paypal. But I would think this article could help you accomplish what you need.

If you remove a URL and allow it to 404 you can either remove it in GWT as well, or wait for them to update it. I would remove it in GWT as well just to be sure.

There is no difference whether you have the files on the server or not unless the redirect comes down someday for awhile (even for an hour), which could result in all of those pages being reindexed. Other potential issues are if you have the site available on another domain or sub-domain that points to the same folder, in which case your redirects might not work on the other domain, depending on how they were written.

For these reasons, I would go ahead and remove the files from the server just to be safe. You can back them up somewhere local or at some point before the "Public HTML" folder on the server.

Does this help?

How to Edit Your Magento Success / Thank You Page

Where Is the Default Success Page in Magento?

JStrong,

Just to make sure we're all on the same page: Although Google uses the phrase "Structured Data..." I don't think they mean it in the same was as you would use, for example, Schema markup in the code. The example there is simply a meta description, which you can use for whatever purpose you like. It could be worth testing the Click-Through-Rate on meta descriptions like that (a metric you can see in Google Webmaster Tools) to decide if you want to use it, though for my money I'd bet on a description with a clear value proposition, offer, call to action, emotion, etc... that will also have their keywords bolded if they appear in the description.

If you do test it out please share what the effect on CTR in the SERPs was from GWT. Just because I'm curious.

Hi WiIl,

I believe this issue was resolved on your other thread. Please let me know if not. I see prices and ratings on the sample URL you provided in that thread. Great work on this. Pat yourself on the back and ask for a raise.

I've done this many times with good results. If the page has no traffic and no external links just remove it, and allow it to 404 so the URLs get removed from the index. If the page has traffic and/or external links, 301 redirect it to the most appropriate page about the topic. In either case remove/update internal links, including those within sitemaps.

Simple as that.

Hello WillsWales,

I just checked the Si Francis Bacon Skis product URL on Google and see this in the SERPs:

Rating: 4.5 - ‎2 votes - ‎$649.95 - ‎In stock

I am assuming it was just a delay and that now everything is on-track. Let us know if otherwise.

Ruben I wanted to mention also that Hubspot can be set up as a Wordpress Plugin so you're not creating a new subdomain at all, but publishing content on your existing domain if it's on Wordpress. I'm not sure if that is possible with other content management systems, but it's worth a question to support. This is how we use Hubspot on our site, www.GoInflow.com, which is on Wordpress.

Hello Robert,

That I know of there is no micro-data markup for your specific need. However, you should be able to use the review rating for now. You can show the skull and crossbones or happy faces or whatever you need to show to the user, and then use the Rating or AggregateRating schema to translate that into what Google needs, which is essentially a number range from 1-5. These would show up as starts in the SERPs, but you could show them with whatever icons you like on your website.