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Hello Mathew Edgar, To make it simple for you, we give you few steps here to implement in your client's website that could results in possibilities of no penalty from search engines [ especially from Google ] 1. keep the content & URL unique from other pages 2. Avoid flash or scripts that makes the web-page to load slower 3. Try to keep ONLY 3 - 5 Ads [ max of text based with low portion of images ] maximum in the web-page 4. Do not OPTIMIZE the page i.e., for keywords rankings, organic results, back-links etc 5. Give the images Name & ALT Text for easier crawling Also usually Bots just crawl a web-page / domain instead making clicks. Bots only make sure that the page is crawl-able with search engine [ Google ] guidelines.

Thanks for the reply! Yep, it is the same company (though each country's website is managed by a different group). Good idea on just doing the home page for the brand terms. Could maybe extend that logic for top-level pages too - target similar topics even if the content is a bit different per site.

Hi Matthew, Our job as SEOs is to try and get authority for a website on keywords relevant to their niche. We do that by using related topics on blog, on-page SEO with right title, Headers, content on the pages etc. We analyze the results on SERPs, organic keyword traffics in analytics etc., to understand whether our strategy is becoming successful and google is looking at us the way we are projecting ourselves. In your situation, it seems accidentally you have got traffic and ranks for not so relevant keywords, google will look at your website as an authority website for keywords related to this off-topic page (since other pages are not ranked). How to overcome this situation, you can find solution here : https://moz.com/blog/wrong-page-ranks-for-keywords-whiteboard-friday https://moz.com/blog/wrong-page-ranking-in-the-results-6-common-causes-5-solutions As Rand Fishkin has rightly suggested, you would have to let go of off-topic page ranks along with doing the right steps to ranks right topics. I hope this helps. Regards, Vijay

Hey Sebastian - We already do something similar to know if it is expired (instead of the if condition in MySQL, we query for records where job_closing_date >= CURDATE()). Thankfully they programmed that in to pull the old job off the list and out of the job search results. (Though up until yesterday the old jobs were on the XML sitemap...woops. Guess what I fixed yesterday!) I like your idea though of keeping the content active and keeping the page alive, but with some kind of message above there. That would definitely keep the page unique. I'm not positive that will fly on the business side but I'll definitely propose that. Thanks for the reply!

We did a non E commerce site in late July/early August. Client had home page PA of 42 and DA of 38. This was to an entirely new domain. It took about 3 - 4 weeks and he is at same as before. (Not always the case, but this was 99.9%) I would make sure that in the changeover, if someone new is handling new domain they have correctly handled the canonical redirect. Especially if there is any issue around web site and compensation, etc.

Do all of the pages receive back links? It would be a laborious job and perhaps not worthwhile but you could look at which of the pages receive a substantial amount of links or links from high quality websites. Then just include the "Good" pages in your new site. Like you say, I think you would benefit from losing some low value content that doesn't rank well and doesn't have many quality links pointing to it. Whatever you decide it would be interesting to know how that effects your site. Perhaps even worthy of a YOUmoz post?!