Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hi Sheryl,

If those URLs are returning a 404 Error, then you don't need to delete them -- they're already gone :).

The 404 error is simply a response code which says the page could not be found. The likely reason for this is exactly what you said in your question: since you renamed your URLs, you basically deleted the old URL and replaced it with a new one.

In general, there's nothing that you NEED to do, but here are a few suggestions:

• If you link to any of those 404 URLs on your site anywhere, then be sure to change those links to point to the correct, new URLs.

• Were any of these old URLs very popular? Did they get a lot of links and a lot of traffic? Are people still trying to go to them? If so, then you can 301 redirect those URLs to point to the new, correct URLs.

I hope that this helps. If you have any other questions then just let me know.

Phil

The problem is with this line:

meta-refresh: 0;url=http://akaalpet.com/default.aspx

You're basically telling the search engines "I know you came here to check out www.akaalpet.com but I'd rather you head over to http://akaalpet.com/default.aspx"

Because of that, when someone visits www.akaalpet.com you're redirecting them to that other URL right away.

Make sense?

Personally, I would 404 these pages.

But first, I would spend a good amount of time looking for incoming links. Perhaps take a random 100 of your 1,000 pages and do a backlink check on all of them. Is nobody linking to them....and they're not generating traffic....and you don't have a new page to replace it....then just 404 them.

However, if you find out that magically these pages have lots of links, then you'll want to put on your thinking cap. Might it be worth creating a new page to point those links to? Or, are you better off just reaching out to these folks and asking them to link to a different page on your site?

Also, on a semi related note, I wouldn't 404 all 1,000 pages at the same time. Do a few hundred at a time and see if anything happens. If there's no huge rush, it's better to space it out.

I've used this same exact method and it worked great for us.

I'm seeing your images show up in my Google Image search:

http://bit.ly/PKAaaq

Looks like your images are getting indexed.

In fact, even when doing a search for "yard cleaned of wood" I see one of your images:

http://bit.ly/NsNeS0

Perhaps there's no issue after all :).

Hi Nathan,

Despite using a different plugin, I think Dan's advice still applies.

In general I suggest INDEXing the categories. Make these your keyword rich overarching categories.

For archives, I'll general NOINDEX those. They're likely not providing a lot of value to searchers, and could possibly create duplicate content.

For tag archives, I also suggest NOINDEX.

As long as you INDEX your categories, then you can kind of just follow your heart with the rest of them. Luckily, there really isn't a worst case scenario. If you're nervous, then just don't NOINDEX anything and see what happens. If you're happy with the SERPs then keep it as is.

I know it's awfully stressful to make sure you get this all correct at the start, but I promise this won't make or break your SEO. Feel free to experiment to see what works best for you.

This is definitely one of those things where you can talk to 10 different people and get 5 different opinions.

The best detailed resource that I've seen on this was written by Dan Shure. I highly recommend you check out his entire post on the subject: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/setup-wordpress-for-seo-success

He details step-by-step how he handles each, and gives the reasoning behind his choice.

Hey Rich,

Unfortunately, I only have one suggestion for you.

Throw your supposed 404 URLs into this tool http://www.tomanthony.co.uk/tools/bulk-http-header-compare/

This will allow you to check their response codes in real time to erase all doubt of whether they're 404ing or not.

Hi Rich,

Are you willing to post some of the URLs here so that we can take a look?

Phil

Using bitly to shorten your links works perfectly fine. In fact, that's exactly what I do :). Basically, using bitly just sets up a 301 redirect which passes most of the link juice over to your site.

For a comprehensive (and awesome) look into link shorteners, be sure to read this post from Dan Shure: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/url-shortener-owl-li-indexed-in-google

Open Site Explorer can definitely take some time to register links, so that might be your issue. I'd recommend downloading your latest links from Google Webmaster Tools to see what sort of Twitter links you have.

My hunch is that your your version of Excel has a semicolon set as the "list separator" rather than the comma. With that being the case, when you try to open the file, Excel doesn't quite know where to separate things.

To help out, I found this great guide for you that provides a few different ways for you to solve your issue.

http://www.paessler.com/knowledgebase/en/topic/2293-i-have-trouble-opening-csv-files-with-microsoft-excel-is-there-a-quick-way-to-fix-this

Rearranging your keywords in the title could definitely make a difference. Here's what SEOmoz has to say about it:

SEOmoz's correlation research has shown that pages which employ the targeted keyword(s) at the front of the title tag benefit greatly in the rankings. There is a direct relationship between proximity to the front of the title element and prominence/rankings as seen by the engines, and the further back in the page title the keyword appears, the worse the correlation with high rankings.

Because of this, if you can do so naturally (aka, without it sounding funny) then it's likely worth testing putting your keywords at the front of your title tag.

You can get that information from Screaming Frog (hooray for a free tool!) or from SEOmoz (if you happen to be a paid member).

Whoa, that's so cool! Does that mean I can have my automated monthly reports come as csvs?

We wrote freakishly similar responses at the exact same time. High five!

It completely depends on your site and the competition.

For example, if you're trying to complete for "super duper elephant lamp" then you can be on page 1 within a week. Frankly, you could probably have the #1 result in a week.

However, for a keyword like "lamp" you'd have a lot more trouble getting on that first page.

Basically, without looking into your specific niche, there's no way to give an educated answer.

-Phil

PS If anyone reading this happens to go into the "super duper elephant lamp" business then I expect to be paid royalties :).

As far as I know, reports are offered as PDFs and can't be exported as CSV.

However, you can export things such as "Rankings" and link metrics as CSVs.

I don't think hiding the text the way you have harms their SEO value since the content is still readily available in the HTML of the page.

However, with that being said, from the perspective of a new visitor to your site, it seems a bit strange to have to click a "read more" link to read more of the welcome section. Doesn't seem very welcoming :).

1. If it were my site, then I would remove the bottom content. It's formatted in such a way that as a visitor of your site, I would never read it. It looks like legal text, or text that is just there for SEO. If it is there just for SEO, then I think you're better off targeting those keywords on different pages. For example, target "fairy costumes" on a fairy costumes page...rather than your homepage.

2. From my experience, internal anchor links don't correlate well with search rankings. For that reason, I think you should use the anchor text that is best for your user. If that also happens to help your SEO then great. If not, then I wouldn't worry about it.

3. The footer links serve no SEO value if you already link to those pages. If you link to the same page multiple times, then Google will generally just use your first anchor text.

Hi Boo,

First of all, congrats on getting that number one ranking!

Now, onto your question...

I would suggest creating another page targeted specifically to large and giant horse buggies. I'm sure that you could create a targeted and awesome page for these keywords that would really benefit folks looking for larger buggies.

My guess is that if you try to target these phrases on your homepage that you'll just be doing too much. It won't look great to users, it will be hard to send enough signals to the search engines (that's a lot of keywords to use), and that's a lot of different anchor text to get for one page.

To use a more modern example, if I had a site selling cars, then I would target the keyword "cars" with one page (I haven't actually done the research) and would target the keyword "suv" with another since folks doing those searches are looking for two very different things.

Hope this helps!

Phil