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Hey Trenton Do the pages in fact return a 404 code now? You can check with http://urivalet.com/ set to Googlebot. Are they indexed in Google? search for the URL and put 'site:' before it. If they 404 and are indexed, it will just take time for them to drop out. Google continues to crawl pages they had once discovered, but are not linked to anymore, and these will definitely show up in your crawl errors. Pages with crawl errors are actually a good thing if that's what you expect and intended which in this case, it was I know it stinks to have errors showing up in the report, when in fact they are not really errors you have to "fix", but just think of it more like a report, and some pages it's perfectly OK to have 404'ing.

Here is Mashable's article on what's next: http://mashable.com/2015/02/27/net-neutrality-whats-next/?utm_cid=hp-hh-pri

By the way, I buy my certificates here: https://www.namecheap.com/ In my opinion from a visitor perspective, to move in and out of ssl during a visit is bad; they would notice something is changing and average visitor wouldn't understand. So I would go for a 100% https. If you google about it you will find a lot of testimonial saying moving everything from http to https didn't have much impact in terms of performance. In my opinion the bad name of https is all coming from ages ago when protocols and hardware were not very good at managing it.

There has been a lot of discussion about the different extensions lately, here are two that I have been in on http://moz.com/community/q/i-have-to-change-my-site-s-name-and-domain-is-using-ninja-going-to-be-a-huge-pitfall http://moz.com/community/q/london-and-long-terms-value-of-tlds Personally I would not launch a site with them, it is unclear how search engines are going to handle them. There is too much user training to get them to use them currently as well. Buying them, for the cheap cost and the insurance of having them, sure, why not. But I would not do much with them. Maybe a static site with a contact form for the time being.

I guess you're right, but does that mean that Google wouldn't consider this a black-hat technique just because the link juice is divided by so many links? I thought it would actually be the opposite, that having only 5 or 10 links passing juice on a page would be okay, but something like 600 would be considered spam. I don't know, but perhaps Matt Cutts has said something about this specifically. Regardless, have you, or has anyone here heard the phrase, "If your intention is to gain rankings in Google, then it's black-hat" Basically anything you do, such as listing a bunch of links like this without a nofollow link and asking to trade links, based on what I've gathered from Matt Cutts, is considered black-hat. If I'm wrong, please let me know. But let's assume that everything you're saying is correct. How can we make the most of this situation? For me, for example, I actually went to Open Site Explorer and checked into followed external links and sorted them based on Page Authority. This was actually the most powerful link going to the site (I believe I was researching Quirky.com) based on what Moz was telling me. If what you're saying is true, then shouldn't Moz's algorithm be updated to take into consideration the amount of links on that page, then perhaps also they can take that and divide it with the Page Authority for the page and give us a new number based on that? That would probably be a much more accurate way of ranking pages based on how powerful they are, or how much link juice is going to them. Maybe there's a way to do that now and I'm just not aware. Do you have any strategies you use for this sort of thing, dividing link juice between the number of pages on the site?

Thanks Cyrus. I hear what you're saying, I'm just confused as to why Google would allow us on the first page for so many keywords every other week if we had so many bad links? My understanding was more that you have rankings, and you hold those rankings unless a competitor comes and overtakes you, or if you get penalized by Google. I guess this is technically the latter, but if I was getting penalized I wasn't expecting to be anywhere close to the first page for my targeted keywords. I suppose I will look into cleaning up the link profile. I am also planning on switching hosts to WP Engine from our HostGator VPS as it's just too slow. Perhaps changing hosts and speeding up the load time will help a bit as well. I'll continue to tell the client to write more content. I personally don't do any black-hat stuff, especially link-building, so I'll have to go in and see what his old SEO people did.