I am a little confused by your question, but let me see if I understand what you are saying:

You have a product page, then you have any accompanying pop-up for it, and you just changed all of the URLs for the pop-ups and the old pop-up URLs are redirecting to the product page?

Were you getting a lot of people linking to the pop-up URLs? That is really the only reason you'd need to 301 them (in my opinion). If not, then ONLY redirect the popular pop-up URLs. This would definitely help with load times.

And your dev team is probably correct. If you have 100,000 lines of redirects, that is going to slow things down. Depending on your environment, you could potentially set up rules that would redirect things; however, it may be difficult depending on your URL structure/pattern.

As far as 410 or 404, a 410 usually alerts Google to remove the URL from its index faster than a 404, but in the end they essentially work the same.

Hope this helps,

Mike

Sure thing.

Yes. I was referring to the URL in the second portion of my original comment.

Right on. I wasn't completely following the reasoning behind "new", so that is why I suggested just /a4 or /audi-a4. After you explanation that you are having new and used, that makes perfect sense.

You are correct. It is another level deep and that makes it appear as though it does not hold as much importance from a structural point of view - that is why I would suggest it being /new-audi-a4 vs /new-audi/a4; however, it all depends on your site structure (although URL naming doesn't have to follow site structure). If you have /new-audi landing page, which has links to different cars, a4, a5, etc. then it would make sense to use the /new-audi and /used-audi format. If your site does not use that type of structure, it may seem confusing to someone who is just looking at the URL.

Does that make sense?

Mike

Sounds like you have the right idea.

I am a little uncertain as to whether you are saying you are merging one website into another or merging 2 websites into a brand new URL - but essentially you will do the same thing - 301 redirect any of the old URLs that were driving traffic to your site OR were linked to by many other sites to the new URL.

You can use Open Site Explorer to find all of your highly linked to URLs on your old site and redirect those to the applicable pages on the new site.

Make sure to submit a new sitemap in Google Webmaster Tools once you have everything setup.

Hope this helps.

Mike

Right on.

Yeah, I would just leave them as 404s and if they are indexed by Google, they will eventually be removed from the index.

Mike

No problem.

So, having keywords in your URL is really helpful for SEO, but don't over complicate it and don't stress about it

In the small amount of testing I have done, you probably wouldn't see a huge ranking difference between the different naming conventions as long as they are at the same level. Meaning you'd "probably" have the same ranking for /new-audi/a4 as you would /new/audi-a4.

To answer your question, a flat architecture is awesome to have from a crawler standpoint and from a user standpoint. If you have a landing page /new-audi and a "product" page /new-audi-a4 at the same level, that is great. It is easier for people to remember and share on social vs having it go down another level.

The only time this flat architecture can become a headache is when you have a ton of pages and trying to remember where everything is from a site structure point of view when you are managing things.

Hope this helps.

Mike

If you cannot create and update an XML sitemap for your site, you should consider creating an HTML sitemap. While you cannot submit an HTML sitemap to search engines, spiders can crawl your HTML sitemap and crawl pages deeper into your site.

Matt Cutts says that if you can only do 1 type of sitemap, do an HTML one, because it helps both users and bots.

Hope this helps.

Mike

I saw Sha Menz speak at MozCon this year. She works for rmoov and she seemed to really know her stuff - so I would probably go with rmoov.com.

Mike

Hi James,

I personally feel that it is a great overview and is still relevant today.

Matt Peters has a good blog post about the 2013 Search Engine Ranking Factors which you may also find useful.

Mike

Hi Matt,

Bummer to hear that.

Contact the Moz Help team: http://moz.com/help/contact

Good luck,

Mike

Yes. If you cannot use a 301 or if it does not make sense to use a 301, then using the canonical tag to show that the page is a copy of another page would be your best route.

http://moz.com/learn/seo/canonicalization

Hope this helps.

Mike

Hi Ross,

I am seeing it when I do that same search.

The SERP uses Domain.com > Reviews vs the actual URL, but when I click on it, I am brought to the URL that you were looking for.

Mike

PHH6dMy

I spoke with some of the Moz team about this at MozCon 2013 and from the sounds of it they are moving in that direction - where people can create Moz accounts and admins can great access to their analytic data.

I wasn't given a time frame on the enhancement... hopefully soon!

Mike

Hi Rich,

Physically having the H2 above the H1 is fine. Like Schwaab and Chris say, you won't be penalized for it - it is more a matter of logical hierarchy on your page.

I am guessing you are doing this because you don't have access to the CSS or do not want to modify the stylesheet and you like the look/design of a page with the H2 above the H1 - this is fine, just not best practice necessarily.

Typically your page should be structured like:

- most important - headline for the page

- second most important - sub heading for sections, related to

- third most important - headline for sections, related to

etc... implementing

-

tags where correct semantically.

You don't "need" to have an

on every page if it doesn't make sense (for instance if one page was just a continued section or whatever). If you wanted, you could use the

and not include the

.

Hope this helps.

Mike

If you an agency and can allow Sprout Social to access their social profiles, then you can just setup another group under Settings > Users & Groups. But grouping is only available in Standard, Deluxe, and Premium plans.

If you do not have access to social profiles, you "could" just add the other three brand names to your keywords and it would essentially search for your initial brand + the three others. The reporting may get a little messy, but you could easily filter things out by checking/un-checking the keyword(s).

Mike

I am guessing it is because of how you are implementing your breadcrumbs.

Google is using your breadcrumbs to make a rich snippet.

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/185417?hl=en

Hope this helps.

Mike

If you are changing your URL structure when you change your CMS, you should 301 redirect your important pages from the old site to the new site. If your URL structure is staying the same, you do not need to worry about implementing 301s to maintain your authority/rank.

Your authorship should not be affected as long as your are staying on the same domain.

Changing code (in your case a new CMS) and design can have an affect on your rankings. Having a responsive design is great for users and that is what you should be concerned most about.

301s are perfectly fine and are encouraged if you are changing your URL structure. Your other option would be to maintain your current URL structure with the site redesign.

Someone asked about a Website Redesign SEO Checklist a couple of months ago and Thomas Zickell provided some good resources.

Hope this helps.

Mike

Hi Andy,

First thing fix all of those errors and as many warnings as you can. Those typically are affecting your ranking, as well as your user experience, so those should be worked on before anything social or content related - in my opinion.

Also, my suggestion would be to think big, but start small. It sounds like you have a lot of great ideas for going forward with the website, but I would recommend that you focus your efforts in one area and master it... I mean really knock it out of the park. For instance, if you have Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, instead of engaging half-a$$ed (which I'm not saying you are, I am just saying that managing 3 social media accounts can be WICKED challenging to do right in addition to everything else you are taking on), really focus on one - whichever is bringing you the most traffic or engagement and really dominate in that area.

If you are a one-man-team trying to accomplish all of this, you may be spreading yourself thin in trying to tackle all of these different areas, that's why I suggest going after one area and once it is really rocking and it only needs a bit of maintenance, move onto the next - I fell you'll see a bigger return going this route. But, if you have a whole team pushing the website, I think you are going in the right direction.

Good luck.

Mike

Ah! I see what you are saying.

No. The "title" style will not help you; however, H1-H6 in a PDF will still help you, along with the file name.

You can specify the Title, Author, and Subject on the Description tab under File > Properties in Acrobat.

That should help you optimize your PDF.

Mike

Hi Richard,

As long as your 301s are set up correctly, Google should eventually drop the old URL from the SERPs.

Make sure that you do not have a temporary redirect, 302, set up, which would prolong things.

If you want to try and speed things up, you could resubmit your sitemap using Goolge Webmaster Tools.

Hope this helps.

Mike

Hi Christopher,

You shouldn't need to worry about your high bounce rate in this case. There are many websites that have high bounce rates that are extremely relevant and useful to visitors.

For instance if, if I Google, "pollen forecast minneapolis mn" and click on a link from Weather.com, see the forecast for the day and bounce within 3 seconds... that is actually good. The page is serving its purpose and giving the user reliable information quickly.

Now in your case, with the high bounce rate and the long time on the page, I would assume Google would be able to figure out that you have some great piece of content, like a story, or a video that is truly captivating an audience.

I would not worry about this in the least.

Thumbs up on driving visitors to your site. Keep up the good work!

Mike