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Awesome responses everyone - really appreciate this. It seems I have my work cut out across the various tools to try to identify root cause. At first, quick glance I don't see anything obvious popping up (for example to organic vs. direct) but I have more to check, based on the excellent input from the three of you. Thank you again! Mark

Any thoughts on my question about availability, Russ? I understand you may not be able to offer a precise date but I have no idea whether we're looking at a month, 6 months, a year, etc. Just some sort of guideline would be helpful. For the particular research workflow I have in mind this is really important to me. I have signed for a trial account for AHrefs this morning and they seem to have very good coverage here. But, having been with Moz for a long time, my very strong preference would be to stay with Moz - but something as little more than "one day..." would be helpful Thanks. Mark

It does, Tom. Thank you. Mark

So far so good - every URL I try to my site is now redirected to the www subdomain and, to date, I am unaware of any side effects. I will keep monitoring but all looks good at this point. Thanks again to everyone who helped with this. Mark

I would definitely at least clean up the article HTML and structure before launching the pages, since you don't want people who might land on them before they're updated to have a weird experience. As far as optimizing them for SEO, I think you could go ahead and make the pages live and roll out edits as you make them. Prioritizing the pages based on highest-traffic/best-converting first is the way to go. If switching your platform is going to make your site easier to crawl, you definitely want to do that sooner rather than later - plus, having the new pages live will allow them to start accumulating some links even before you make keyword-related changes. In general with a major change like this I recommend changing as few other things as possible simultaneously. It's OK to make more gradual changes, and it gives Google fewer things to get used to at one time.

You're very welcome Mark!

Note: I didn't understand your comment that tags should be mutually exclusive. If I have an article about saving money on flowers, why would I not tag that with both "budgeting" and "flowers"? You absolutely would want to tag the article with both "money" and "flowers". Mutually exclusive means there should be no overlap in the meaning of two tags, in this example, "money" and "flowers". Clearly these two tags reference different topics. An example of undifferentiated or non-mutually exclusive tags would be "money" and "cash", or "flower". "flowers" and "flowering". All articles belong to one and only one category, as implied by their URL structure. This creates some challenges because some articles may have some relevance to more than one category but I think I can live with this You could actually replicate the article in more than one category, but you'd have to pick one as the primary and tag the other as canonical. Hopefully this would the exception as opposed to the rule. Am I making sense? Absolutely. Good plan.

"a significant rankings boost" Here is how I see it..... If a page of mine moved from #5 to #4, I would call that a significant rankings boost.   If it moved from #50 to #40, I would call that trivial.   If I am on the first page and get any movement up I would call it awesome. About domain authority...  I almost never look at it and can't tell you the DA of my websites.  It has just slightly more than "entertainment value" to me.   But, plenty of people worship those numbers.

No problem! Glad to see Cyrus' response!

I'm surprised it's pulling anything after the ?. Usually those parameters are saved for things that aren't a real page. In your example, it's GA's tracking code for your RSS feed. So I went into my own Wordpress sites in my SEOmoz account, and I'm not getting the same warning for the overly dynamic URLs. (In fact, I'm running 3 Wordpress blogs on my domain.) This to me says there's something up with your Wordpress. Do you have the latest version up and running? Do you have a plug-in that's causing problems? Is there something not on the correct setting in your robots.txt?

I would not try to remove the bottom level as any sites with lots of links should have some bad ones. I would be more concerned with unnatural linking patterns, if you have 90% of your links coming from blog comments, then I think you may have a problem, but from the sounds of it I would not worry at all. Unless they are porn sites or the like, even then you would have to have a high level to raise a flag. I think you may end up doing yourself more damage than good.

Your best bet right now is to contact the SEOmoz help desk with an email to help@seomoz.org. They may (not sure) be able to have your crawl start on a different day of the week so it's ready for you by the weekend, and should be able to answer all of your crawl-related questions in general.

Hi Mark, I've forwarded this to the crawl service team and they are looking into it. Sorry you've had an unexpected delay, and we'll get it on track for you as soon as possible. Walt

Thank you, Kate. Yes - that's exactly what I was after. A good, thorough explanation of the challenges involved and a response we can all use, not just the original poster of the thread. Thanks again - much appreciated. Mark

Thank you. Yes, that's pretty much the plan I am executing now. Right now I'm struggling to get this working with the URL rewriting module in IIS 7 but I am sure it's possible. Thanks again. Mark

OK, it looks like I will have to bite the bullet and host WordPress Looking at that now but a few more SEO-related questions... With WordPress.com I set up the domain feature such that my blog was at http://blog.<mysite>.com</mysite>. The default installation for WordPress (if I host it) seems to be http://www.<mysite>.com\blog</mysite>. Are there any specific SEO-related drawbacks to using the second format? I have no idea how easy it is to modify the installation to support the first format but I am happy to switch to the second if there are no drawbacks. Also, given that Google, etc has crawled against my WordPress.com blog (so, the first format above) would you anticipate a penalty in switching from the first format to the second? Would this not show up as (yet another) duplicate content hit and, if so, how long would this typically take to work itself out  (once the first format above is no longer available)? Thanks again. Mark