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Actually, if you Google that (free online software that lets you create product catalog layouts) you'll get a lot of options. And that way you can better review what software or set up may be most compatible or easiest for you to use.

The answer to if it's better to get the links removed or just change the anchor text is maybe to both. If there's an inbound link that seems spammy or doesn't really fit in well with the topic of your site (ex: your site is about cars, but a site about oranges is linking to you), then removing the link could be the better long term plan.

If it's a quality link from a credible source, you want to keep that link so look for anchor text diversity as far as the keywords used.

Ha! Glad to hear it went well

OK, that's different from what I was getting from your original post (which is why it never hurts to double check). I understood it as you wanted improve your internal linking and do anchor text to help your INTERNAL search results w/in your on-site search function/search engine.

Keep in mind that too perfect anchor text can actually hurt you, too: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2172839/Google-Penguin-Update-Impact-of-Anchor-Text-Diversity-Link-Relevancy

Creating dynamic product pages will compete with your regular product pages in rankings for those shared keywords unless you no index them (not the same thing as no follow). No index means that Google can follow the link but shouldn't index it but you want page rank to be passed along to links.

I'd consider reading up on the subject of no index to confirm your comfort level with how to do this - especially since I'm trying to interpret what you want and I may not be correct and don't want to possibly hinder your goals

http://www.seoboy.com/the-differences-between-noindex-nofollow-and-robotstxt-file/

http://eduardblacquiere.com/non-indexed-page-pass-pagerank/

Not ranking in Google won't touch what results you can serve up within your own site; as you mentioned you have your own internal search function/search engine and that's why you wanted to create this in the first place.

Also, not having them indexed in Google means they won't compete w/ your regular product pages for rankings in Google. Of course, this is assuming that I understood your goal correctly.

Here's the concept at its core: how can Google crawl redirects and index new pages if it can't crawl those redirects to get to the new pages and process the 301s?

Fix that to fix your problem. The link I shared has a lot of good comments very centered on this general topic.

And, I am intentionally avoiding giving an absolute solution to you because, quite frankly, I don't know enough or am involved at all in your site to feel comfortable doing so. Strategically, I'm happy to share ideas/best practices.

I've had it happen to me, so it's a matter of if you want to take the risk in the first place and wait it out and hope you like the outcome.

I'm just going to share that Google has specifically mentioned to me there's issues on their end with some of these tools. That doesn't make it any easier when you are on the receiving end, however they are aware of the impact and user issues.

Wanting to use long tail keywords is not really the same thing as keyword stuffing. You're just using anchor text to highlight the long tail keywords ("hiking shoes") that best describe your product vs. stuffing a page to an un-natural level with just the word "shoe" in an obvious attempt to rank for the term.

So I wouldn't fear stuffing penalties, although...depending on how crawl-able your new search page results will be, then be prepared that it can change what page ranks for what keywords unless you use a robots.txt or something to block/control search engines from accessing it. Ex: dynamic pages competing against the actual product pages for rankings for the long tail keywords.

And that's not the same thing as a penalty, that's just possibly what can happen when you make changes to content.

I think I get what you mean and this stuff can get a bit tricky - first and foremost, it can take days/weeks/months to get things unclogged after an issue like this and there's no promise you'll get exactly the same ranking as you had before.

Getting back to your original question, and not to kick you when you are down, however, Google never recommends moving an entire site at once because you don't catch major things like this. Now, to your question, here's answer: "In order for Google to index your new site it has to re-crawl the old site which is redirected there. As each url is accessed, the redirection is found and applied." I think that's what you are trying to get at?

There's more info here that may be worth you reading through:  http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/04/best-practices-when-moving-your-site.html

To your point about a new domain - new domains aren't given as much validity as old ones, which can mean you have to do some rebuilding and re-earn rankings. If the goal was to get rid of old, bad link juice, what have you done to drive new links to your new domain (and PRWeb does not count in any way - it's a scam, IMHO)? That's another factor that could impact a positive improvement.

At the same time, I may not have read as closely as I could have, but how could you do 1:1 redirects from the old site to the new and yet offered up a 404 page to direct people from the old domain to the new? Was there a specific reason why you didn't want to 301 from the old main domain URL to the new one?

Yes, it's normal to see a drop and this all takes time to recoup. It's the trade off you made when you opted to start from scratch, unfortunately. The other thing is, there could be issues going on with the site that aren't related to spammy links - I don't know enough about your site to speak to specifics, but it's another possibility that something else could be wonky.

Great points!

Exciting opportunity - good for you! I, personally, do an audit. I don't usually spend hours and hours on it,  but I look at both content and technical to get an idea of what I'd be getting myself into. It's also a chance to bring up things that the client may not even realize.

So, then you look smart. Better, though, you showed you pay attention to them and their needs. Don't overlook the power of asking questions: What might their content be missing you'd suggest? What changes might you make on what they have now? Why did they layout their site the way they did?

I'd also do a Screaming Frog or Xenu crawl to check the health of the site and see if there's a lot of broken links or missing page titles, content, etc. Also, maybe do a page load test, too, which is really easy and there's a ton of sites that do those. Check backlinks (SEOMoz tool) to get at least an idea of how spammy or legit those are.

Yup; if Google can't get to your content, then people can't get to your content. Loss of leads or revenue or whatever you are aiming for.

Yes, it can hurt your rankings, as if they can't get to your site/pages, then they can't rank and show your content.

That's interesting - it's totally different from what the head of one of the Google offices told me, as they like to keep their PPC and SEO businesses separate to avoid some clients getting preferential treatment.

Adwords employees are also intentionally kept segregated from the SEO side of the business, to try to reduce perceived conflict of interests (according to my Adwords rep).

I'd actually go a different route and do one site with separate pages for each location. It'dbe better for the overall issue of content/avoiding duplicate which can become a huge issue. Four sites is a lot more to manage and track and keep up and running.

But it depends on what the online strategy is, too. Google is constantly working to get localized results, too, so it's not as though there has to be four totally independent sites to get results targeted to a certain neighborhood.

I'm not saying this is the best site ever, but one hospital network that comes to mind, Beaumont, has theirs set up this way: http://www.beaumont.edu/

I agree with Sebastian's follow up suggestions. It's way quicker to de-index yourself than it is to get those rankings back. Even one the robots is "cleared" it can take time to get back to where you were.

You'll probably get way better - and more in-depth - information by reading some articles on reputable sites, including SEOMoz, like SEO5 mentioned. I doubt there's enough room in one of these forums to be able to post the full POV on each of these to give you the value you are looking for.

In addition to Moz, check out http://searchengineland.com/ and http://www.searchenginejournal.com/.

Agreed; I take SF over Xenu any day.