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There is no limit to 301 redirects and in my opinion it makes your site much more crawl friendly for the search engines.

Here is Matt Cutts of Google on the subject - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1lVPrYoBkA

The article is still applicable today and here is more info on your topic from a Q&A earlier this year - http://www.seomoz.org/q/duplicate-content-and-http-and-https

You will notice the top endorsed answer (endorsed by DR Pete) uses this method and points to this article

You will also notice a 301 redirect is recommended solution as I mentioned above though they do it the other way around. I would do it to the secure version as that is the one I would imagine you want to be the page that is used as it is secure. Search engines can index both protocols so doing it either way won't harm you...

If you decide to go down this route the best way to minimise SEO impact would be to implement 301 redirects from the .html to the new .shtml.

Have a look at the Redirect While Changing File Extensions section on Moz's Guide to redirects here - http://moz.com/learn/seo/redirection

This page is well worth a read in order for you to get a better understanding but I thought I would draw your attention to this section to help put your mind at ease -

"There are multiple options for doing this, but in general, the 301 redirect is preferable for both users and search engines. Serving a 301 indicates to both browsers and search engine bots that the page has moved permanently. Search engines interpret this to mean that not only has the page changed location, but that the content—or an updated version of it—can be found at the new URL. The engines will carry any link weighting from the original page to the new URL"

In terms of what loss of value a 301 redirect will have no one is sure and what impact this will have. 301 redirects would be the best way to do what is being suggested by your developer with minimal seo impact. I think you might find this post interesting - http://moz.com/community/q/how-much-juice-do-you-lose-in-a-301-redirect

Hope this helps

Well what I would say is that when you do a 301 redirect from one domain to another you will lose some of the link juice that has been gained (a 301 passes around 90-99% of juice), so there is chance that when you do this you may see a difference in your SEO rankings. However if done correctly the impact is likely to be minimal and there are plenty of us that have done this successfully and it has worked out for the better. Remember as you said the website is poorly optimised and you are going to be pointing to a new site that has been optimised sensibly and will contain more content, so long term you are on to a winner and you should see improvements in search rankings and traffic generated by your site. Also remember online marketing and SEO is about the long term goals, as well as quick fixes and low hanging fruit that can be picked up, so explain this to the accounting firm and explain how your strategy will cause minimum impact and in the long run it will work to their businesses advantage.

Hope this helps - remember when you do your 301 redirect and tell Google in Google Webmaster Tools that your site has moved it does take time for the search engines to catch up...

I have never had an issue having two sites setup under one webmaster tools account - what verification problem are you having when you add and verify another site in your account? Have you tried alternative methods in the options?

In terms of Google Merchant Center how have you set this up - you may find this useful regarding having multiple websites under one account

- https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/188487?hl=en

Hope this helps!

No problem Rob - domain age won't be passed through a 301 redirect

However in relation to the age of a domain and how it impacts your ranking have a look at this interesting Q&A from a couple of months ago -

http://www.seomoz.org/q/how-does-your-urls-age-affect-your-ranking

I think you will be fine if you create a 301 redirect from the old domain and make sure you take the time to build a decent natural looking link profile and have optimised the site for the visitor and not the search engines. Taking into account all the on-page factors without going overboard....

Hi Adrienne

This means that Google has processed that number of items in your feed but there is an error with them - go on feeds and then click on feed name - you should see a message at the bottom that tells you what the error is with the items in your feed - this can be one of several things that mean you items aren't eligible for shopping.

I think the issue you are having is because you are redirecting a dynamic URL and this is what is causing the problem. There was Q&A on here regarding this ages ago I will try and find it and let you have the link - unless we have an expert that wants to step in..

Try adding a rewrite condition before a rewrite rule:

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} route=product/product&product_id=51 

Hi Adrienne,

In terms of the URL not claimed error can you confirm how you are doing this - there are several reasons why this can be lost including - trying to claim more than one URL in Merchant Center - for this you need a multi-client account which I linked to in my original response. You can also lose it if your site becomes unverified in webmaster tools - what I would suggest is that you look at this Google help article in relation to this and see if any of the reasons apply to you - https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/176793?hl=en-GB

In short you can't as that content requires paid access to be able to read it so anyone who isn't a subscriber that comes to it won't be able to view the content - Googlebot is essentially a none paying visitor so it can't crawl and index information that is blocked by pay wall.

You could allow a certain portion of each page to be visible to anyone visiting the site (maybe the first some many lines), this will get it indexed and has been carried out by other companies successfully. Call it a teaser to draw visitors in and increase subscribers if you want more search traffic...

Hi Marina,

I have come across issues with redirect plugins on WordPress when trying to deal with http and https. They can have bugs which can cause redirect loops or other issues causing your page not to load. When you say your design is messed up do you also get a warning about the page containing insecure elements or similar? This often happens when moving a site to https - you may find this plugin helpful for dealing with this issue - https://wordpress.org/plugins/ssl-insecure-content-fixer/ - then you can choose to have your site fully https if desired.

In terms of the redirect what server are you on? If you are on an apache server you can easily take care of this redirect by logging into via FTP and then editing the .htaccess file.

The following code will allow you to redirect the whole site to https if you fix the layout with the above:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} 80
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.domain.com/$1 [R,L]

replacing your www.domain.com with your domain.

I personally would go down this route and have your whole site on https once you have dealt with design/content issues - but in order to help with your decision take a look at this great post from Cyrus Shepard - https://moz.com/blog/seo-tips-https-ssl

*Note many sites have now moved to https - look at Moz for example.

Hope this helps!

Matt

Hi Tony

I would consider setting up a 301 redirect for all the urls you have mentioned to your www.ckpoole.co.uk/ this will take care of the issues you have mentioned and it will pass link juice from the others and help increase the authority of that page essentially amalgamating it all into one - 301 redirect will pass 90-99% of link juice from each url helping increase authority.

look at this for more: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection

You must make sure that all your navigation points to that version of the page as well and not /index.html for instance.

For your canonical tags question SEOMoz doesn't pick this up when doing a crawl even if you have done it correctly and search engines will recognise it see  SEOMoz staff responses here -

http://www.seomoz.org/q/canonical-tag-and-duplicate-content-report

I think Moosa and Andy both make great points which I agree with. I would definitely give it more time and it would be easier to give input with your domain. In terms of the content you have added in the form of new pages are these targeting new keywords or ones you were already ranking for? The reason I say this is because I have seen people cause themselves issues by creating new pages targeting terms that current pages were ranking for and this lead to keyword cannibalization. Jon Earnshaw gave a brilliant talk on this at Brighton SEO earlier this year - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASsxh8ZwseQ

I just thought I would mention it on the off chance

Best

Matt

It won't have any impact defining the format of a class in terms of SEO as he is still defining the actual headers in the code. I have defined h1 and h2 headers as the same class before and had no issue with decent rankings for that content...

Hi Kerry

I have had a look and it appears that you do have one link on each page that is causing this - the link with the anchor text permierdoorco.com which I believe is in the address block in the footer of each page - it isn't properly declared but has a href on it which is premierdoorco.com rather than http://www.premierdoorco.com/

Here is the copied element from your source code -

premierdoorco.com

just login and make the change to the link and all should be fixed.

Hope this helps

First thing I would look at when considering the changes your are is how well is the current website doing in the SERPs - does it get much search engine traffic? Is the domain name itself important to the business?

I would look at keeping the domain and look at either addressing the current duplicate content issue with canonicalization or changing your CMS and pointing the old urls to new corresponding ones using 301 redirects. I have done this successfully in the past when changing the URL structure of a site and I didn't have a negative impact on search traffic, in fact quite the opposite. That way you are passing on most of the value gained by any links to the old URLS and then you can concentrate on the new CMS and all of its benefits including implementing a new user friendly structure, without having to worry about the old structure and following it..

Hi Caro

Just before I directly answer your question can I ask whether you have done a backlink audit on their site? If not I would strongly advice it in order to make sure they don't have any penalties or links you don't want associating with your site. I like to work this way, yes it does take longer but you are going into it with your eyes wide open and avoiding any issues down the line, which will inevitably take up even more time trying to rectify. I would recommend further reading on the following:

Link Audit - http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2207168/how-to-conduct-a-link-audit

Link Removals & Risk Mitigation - https://moz.com/blog/link-audit-guide-for-effective-link-removals-risk-mitigation

As the others have already said I would look to redirect individual URLs to similar corresponding URLs on your site in order to get the best from this. As we know 301 redirects pass authority from the original URL to the new one.

However I would also take this one step further and look at the Google Analytics and Google Search Console Search Analytics Report for the other companies site if you have access to it and I would look at the most popular pages in terms of organic traffic. I would also look to analyse current rankings for that site and see if it is out ranking any of the corresponding content on your site. If so I would look to use it to improve my own content and then still do the 301 redirect. I have done this in the past and when moving across a popular blog from one site to yours I would look and see what are the most popular posts in terms of organic traffic as mentioned above but also other factors such as social interaction (I find https://socialcrawlytics.com/ ) and referrals. Then if my current site that I am redirecting too doesn't have some content that is on the same subject and very close in nature and popular I would look to migrate the content itself to a new post with the same content and then 301 redirect the original to that new piece.

Too many times you see people rushing this and just blanket redirecting things, however they forget that 1. you need to redirect to similar content to get the most benefit as a redirect is essentially telling the search engines the content has moved to a new location and 2 you won't always get close matches so why not take that content and publish it on yours if it is already working rather than trying to fit it somewhere it doesn't (basically don't force a square peg in a round hole).

Obviously I don't know how strong the site you want to redirect is but taking time over this now will pay dividends.

Hope this helps!

Matt

Hi Sara,

I am assuming that you haven't used the noarchive tag in your new pages source code?

How old are these pages?

Is there any chance of an example so I can see exactly what you mean?

Please keep in mind the fact that if it is new content it will be indexed on Google before it is cached, so if you are getting a 404 not found error when you click on the cached version this is because the cache hasn't caught up on your new content but should within a few weeks.

Hi Zora

Yes I would 301 redirect your old URLs to their new corresponding ones (passing around 90-99% of the link juice from your old domain) and then set change of address in Google Webmaster Tools under configuration for your old domain. You need to be patient as it will take time for Google and other search engines to catch up with this change.

For more information have a look at this blog post which is very useful in your situation - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/achieving-an-seo-friendly-domain-migration-the-infographic

Well a 301 redirect is a permanent redirect so it passes on 90-99% of link juice gained by the page your are redirecting. Therefore it would be better to 301 redirect an old page domain with a healthy link profile as you will pick up benefit from the multiple links gained as opposed to one link from a site of reasonable authority if you were to build a site around that page. The ranking impact from the redirect will be far greater as you are essentially gaining multiple links in one hit once the search engines catch up and recognize the redirects, thus having the greatest impact on ranking in relation to the two methods you mention above. Hope this makes sense...