Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I think we would all need a little bit of clarification (at least I do) as to what exactly you are trying to do before I can truly give you an adequate answer, but my general advice is as follows!

What is your website? Are you selling something? Providing information? Answering questions?When you say "new platform" what exactly do you mean? Wordpress to Drupal? HTML5 to Magento? Or are you going as deep as switching from a LAMP server to a Linux Server running Bootstrap & NoSQL?

Depending on the size of your website and the amount of traffic there is a lot to consider, like if it's even worth it. And what your website does will drastically effect which platform you choose.

Switching from Wordpress to Drupal for example is pretty much guaranteed to change your URL unless you fiddle with the preferences. And switching from a Static website to a CMS is 100% going to do the same. You would have to spend a decent amount of time making sure every URL is the same. Remember URLs are not only important for the structure of your website, but every other place on the interwebs that links to you.

Anytime you switch a platform, regardless if it's on the top level or at the sever level, there is no way for it to be 100% seamless. Spend as much time as you can making sure you really want to make this change. Clean up as many loose ends as possible, and organize the structure of the site. Make SURE that this is the platform you NEED & WANT so you don't have to change again later down the road.

I agree with Jedi RobertFisher about Screaming Frog, It will scan 500 URLs for free. There is also Xenu's Link Sleuth. Other than that, you are gonna have to spend some time doing some good old fashion QC on the website making sure everything is A-OK!

Good Luck!

UPDATE

So as of 7/9 I have removed 423 Tags and redirected them to 2 of the our main tags.

I isolated the 2 most effective tags and  spread them across the 160 posts that we have. I limited it to one tag per post as to not create duplicate content, and because I am leaning towards removing tags all together.

Part of the other reason that I am doing this is because our categories seem to be gaining more traction than our tags.

My thought moving forward would be to take all of these, and fold them into the categories.

My Audit reads as follows:

• Pages Crawled dropped from 624-240
• High Priority Issues Dropped from 42-4
• Medium Priority Issues Dropped from 141-102

It is much to early to tell how things are going with traffic. Our visits are down 2% (and nobody checks into rehab until at least a week or 2 after the holiday weekend) but our keywords sending visits are up 9.

I will keep you all informed!

I would love it there was a project tracking feature!

Something where I can plug in any changes that were made things like that. Almost like Basecamp + Moz Yet something that I could share with the forum.

I will def keep that in mind and make sure I update my questions!

Yeah, I did notice that, I wasn't exactly sure as to how it functioned. Thank you for clarifying the timeline too!

So this is just a thought. I am not Rand, therefor I am not the Moz man himself, and therefor I am not telling anybody how to run this website or forum. But, I've been thinking... and usually that a dangerous thing. So many times when I answer a question I end it with:

• "Keep me posted"
• "Keep us updated"
• "Good Luck"

In the same light there have been plenty of times when I have had my questions answered by people like EGOL, RobertFIsher, KeriMorget and they have said that they have wanted me to keep them posted.

Now sure, some of you are sitting there being Melancholy Mozzers thinking that all those wonderful people are just being polite by adding some nice parting words... but what if I they are being Sincere Seoers? What if I WANT to fill them in and don't want to ask a question? What if... THEY REALLY LIKE ME?!?!

I could also send a DM to those 3 people, I mean let's get honest I'm not THAT popular.... but I can dream can't I?

Again, this isn't really an SEO question, more of a thought on where I'm supposed to give updates on my project. In all honesty I do want feedback on what I'm doing, and sometimes I don't even know what questions I'm supposed to ask!

I do in house SEO right now for a company, and I feel your pain. I'm in a very similar situation! I get to blow off some creative steam on these forums. I'm doing basically the exact same thing you are doing. I literally just finished 421 301's about 15 mins ago. Sigh.

The woes of upper management! If only they would listen!

Ketan,

I'm going to encourage them to publish only fresh content on their real blog, would you agree?

If you look at pretty much any of the blog posts on these forums you will see that more and more everything comes back to content. Original content. Original Content. Did I mention original content? EGOL shared a link with me and I'm sharing it again on another post but it's pertinent.

http://www.thesempost.com/google-rewrites-quality-rating-guide-seos-need-know/

Content used to be king and he wants his thrown back!

Can this actually harm the ranking of their blog and website - should we delete the old entries when migrating the blog?

Duplicate content is something that I am working a lot with right now. There is a difference between duplicate content and plagiarism. What needs to be determined is how the are using this content. Matt Cutts said that roughly 25% of the internet is duplicate content, and a lot of duplicate content is ok, for example if you were writing an analysis, or writing commentary on one of those blog posts then of course there is going to be some duplicate content. That sort of this would be ok.

If they are simply taking the article, and posting it, yet still giving credit, then no its not really doing anything except potentially giving your blog traffic. Take social bookmarking websites for example. Let's look at digg.com. A long time ago digg used to take the entire article and post it to their page and you could actually view everything within their website and everything was all gravy. Now, that doesn't work so well. Now, digg usually writes a little blurb, and provides a link.

Google will look at duplicate content, determine which ever is the best representation of the content, usually who wrote it first, who has the strongest domain etc, and gives the credit to them. The other thing too is that these websites, Havard, NPR, etc have in their favor is that they are prob indexed often enough to guarantee that they are going to get credit first.

As to the question about deleting them. I don't think you necessarily need to delete them, depending on how many articles exist, how much traffic they generate etc. There is a lot to look at. If nobody is looking at them, then sure, you can always do a 301 to one of your new blog posts later down the line. Or maybe your first posts are rewrites or analysis of the articles. Regardless I would provide a link on all of the pages letting people know where you got the information, that way nobody can say you were trying to steal the information.

My thought on this whole thing. If it makes you uncomfortable, it's gonna make Google feel uncomfortable.

Hope that helps! Good luck!

Matt Cutts on Duplicate content: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQZY7EmjbMA&feature=kp

Matt Cutts on Original content: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LsB19wTt0Q

Brad,

"I'm sorry this Moz Response is so long, I didn't have the time to make it short" -Blaise Pascal

I agree with everything said above and I want to expand on what Mike said about replacing the pages. Just looking at the two pages from an analytic standpoint your PA drops 10 points. That is probably a combination of how the pages are optimized, the amount of links going out, links coming in, etc.

In my humble opinion, and trust me I am merely a peon amongst SEOmnipotent members on this forum, it might be worth the time putting some calls to action & to make the home page LOOK more like the store, and from there it just ports you over.

You said yourself that the homepage is getting a lot of traffic. Personally, before taking the risk of switching the homepage and doing something drastic like altering the architecture I would look at trying to drive traffic organically to your store.

Your website is full of great potential resources which will help you rank. Google is in the business of providing information. The boating community for example, could be a GREAT place to throw some extra time and try and generate more traffic and interaction.

EGOL & RobertFisher both answered a question for me the other day and provided some great insight about general SEO best practices and driving traffic. EGOL also followed up with a fantastic article which talked about Google's EAT program. Having a boating forum could help your SEO immensely, which could help your ranking, which in turn could help your sales.

EAT Article: http://www.thesempost.com/google-rewrites-quality-rating-guide-seos-need-know/

It's all a big cycle. Good luck!

I think that was a lot more than you were asking, but I couldn't help!

As much as I wish that these pages were not a problem, given the fact that I could probably write a blogella (a short story blog) about just how messy this website I inherited actually is, I am inclined to think that they are doing more harm then they are helping. Our numbers are staggering,

We have 660 indexed pages, As you can see 440 of them are from wordpress tags.

From our links we have 145 different root domains that account for 11,000 inbound links

We have something like 18K internal links.

Things are not good over here.

Almost none of the pages have meta tags, alt tags, proper h1, h2, h3 etc,

I don't want to speak for EGOL here, but I don't think he is suggesting CUT everything. What I got from his post was pull what's worthless and redirect (or as you say consolidate) to whats worthwhile.

The webmaster before me was writing articles with a Spinner. At least I believe he was, so we end up with a Title and then 30 WP Tags. Of the 30 keywords maybe 5 will be tagged to 5 other posts, 5 will be tagged in at least one other post, 2 will be branded and the rest are 1 off keywords that are very random and are almost partial sentences.

For example we have 27 articles, and 440 tags.... that should give you some insight as to the website I'm trying to clean up....

"I don't trust having Google do stuff for me that I could do myself, because plenty of times Google says how they are gonna do things and then change their mind without tellin' anybody." -EGOL

That may be one of the best industry quotes I have ever read....

EGOL strikes again! That was my thought.

It would be better to remove the tags and do a 301 as opposed to remove them from the index with the URL Removal tool? Or are you saying add a 301 to them?

Simple as that.

Pointless random tags that are serving no purpose other than adding apparent bulk to a website. They are just showing duplicate content and literally are random keywords that serve almost no purpose. And the tags, for the most part are only used on one page.

If I remove them however, they will probably drop our site from around 650 pages to 450 (assuming I keep any tags that were used more than once).

I  have read through some of the other posts on here and I know that Google will do some work as far as duplicate content is concerned. Now as far as UX is concerned, all these tags are worthless. Thoughts?

Thank you! I do value the criticism, that's how we learn!

I want to make it clear as possible that I am not engaging in anything Blackhat in anyway shape or form. If you look back at some of my older posts, for example the one that you and EGOL commented on, it begins to paint the picture that I am working with.

I am trying to remain vague to protect the company that I am working for, although realistically I'm not sure how much that matters.

So, as I have stated before, I am pretty new to SEO in the scheme of things (seriously for about 1 year). And I am new to this company (about a month). As you pointed out in the last paragraph I have no idea what I'm doing in this realm. I understand SEO theory, but the problem that I am running into, and probably part of that makes my questions appear blackhat, is that I am not even sure how to identify exactly what has been done with this website.

In the last post of mine that you commented on we discussed the various updates and how the may or may not have effected the website that I am working on. Now this post was aimed at trying to add to that data.

I told my boss that I thought we needed to pull the links and restructure the website architecture immediately because I did not want google to remove us from their Index on my shift. His response was:

What was put in place is working. We want to do a rebuild and redesign. All of that will happen, what I want to know is:

1. When will google pull us from the index?
2. Have we already been hit?
3. Do they warn people if their website is going to be pulled.
4. Can we come back from a hit?
5. If we are pulled how quickly can we get back on google?

I will be following up shortly.

Thank you both.

I have inherited a website that is entangled in a very devious web of darkness. And the process of trying to expediently prune the links, dismantle the foundation, and eradicate the poor content while not drastically hurting us more is very difficult to put into words to my boss.

At the end of the day I just want to make it as clear as possible that if we get taken off Google on my watch, that I have given him all the information necessary to make an educated decision.

-TronQ

Hey Mozzers,

So plenty of you who follow these threads have come across my posts and have read bits and pieces of the strange dark dark gray hat webspace that I have found myself in. So I'm currently doing some research and I wanted all of your opinion too.

1. Will Google always notify you before they stop indexing your website?
2. Will Google always allow you back if you do get pulled?
3. Does Google give a grace period where they say "fix in 30 days?"?

What is every bodies experience with all of this?

So, many of you know my current bizarre situation. We are getting some assistance. If you are curious my posts are on here and you have all been extremely  helpful.

To my question:

So in my Moz campaign I am tracking a handful of keywords and such, and then there are all the keywords that are sending results currently. Some of these I feel are pretty reasonable to transfer over to my keyword list. Some are pretty obvious that we should not use. Then there are some that seem to be luke warm.

Are then worth tracking just because they are sending traffic? I guess the better question would be to look at if they are actually converting. Are people who are looking for Ice Cream upset when then end up at a place that doesn't sell Ice Cream.

I agree with all of the comments above. Your homepage is going to be a hodgepodge of keywords and phrases that catch people, and from there I tend to agree with the one keyword per page thought. If your website is only 10 pages deep, optimizing for 200 words is going to be a little crazy. If your website has 2,000 pages and hundreds of products, it's a little easier.

We are still writing content for Google & for Customers. I personally think we have to aim at our customers more that at Google.

There are a few things to take into account for keywords, and in my opinion this part of SEO is pretty similar to good old fashioned marketing and in the big picture you are looking at short-tail vs. long-tail marketing. I'll give 2 examples.

So let's say you sell coffee.

The short-tail keywords for this would be the generic keywords that every coffee company on the planet is using.

1. Coffee Beans
2. Coffee Cup
3. Dark Roast
4. Light Roast
5. Etc.

Long-Tail keywords are obviously more specific.

1. French Dark Roast Coffee
2. Flux Capacitor Blend #88
3. How Much Caffeine Should I Drink to Optimize My Website?
4. How Many Cups of Coffee are In The Great Lakes?

The difference being as follows. Short term keywords are generic, all encompassing. You will be competing with everybody and are going to be much more difficult to optimize for. The long tail keywords are much more specific and although not searched for as often, will be easier to optimize for (generally) and if someone is searching for something as specific as "Flux Capacitor Blend #88" I tend to believe they will probably convert into a sale/lead.

Odds are if your writing good solid content for your website the short tail keywords are probably on there anyway! That coupled with Google's Hummingbird update have really changed how I optimize a website. Keywords are still vital for research, but I will ask you this question.

When was the last time you searched for one or 2 words?

So I would personally pick about 30 keywords maybe a mix of short-tail & long tail. As you progress from there you can add to the list as you climb the ranks!

I'm not sure how many images you are dealing with here, nor the extent of the process you want to embark on BUT there are a few things that come to mind.

Flash is not readable by Google or Apple, nor Pinterest. So right there you may want to consider making a shift over anyway. Google and Apple have dropped some serious money into development and I'm sure Adobe has too, but so far they just can't get it to work.

Anything that is in your flash viewer will not be visible on an iphone/ipad and Google will not be able to read any text that you may have in the images.

That being said, an easy fix, depending on the size of the images, and the quantity would be to just take a screenshot of the images and crop them down to the actual image size and then throw them up on Pinterest and your website.

My advice: avoid Flash. PHP/CSS/HTML5 all these wonderful languages can do everything Flash can do and play very well with Google & Apple.