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Hi Rachel, I guess this might be worth a blog post since you didn't find resources I'm going to try and tackle your question in steps,.. 1) What do people recommend to do with old, outdated videos on sites like YouTube and Vimeo My personal opinion, but if these videos are getting views, try to direct them to the new videos using annotations and such. Unless that product video is harmful (example: it was flagged as toxic waste ;)), then why take it down if it's still getting traffic? Okay, a better example would be that they're so outdated and look embarrassing to your brand, but even then, you can cover up the entire video with an annotation to visit the new product video... 2) They show up in search, but some mention outdated products Which search? Google regular search / video / youtube / vimeo? If it's regular Google search, you can change that by de-optimizing the listing on Youtube and get a new video ranking.. 3) However, is it best practice to remove everything older and outdated from Youtube, etc. or is it better to have these in your library (quantity over quality) There are no rules here, every case is different. 4) We also started Google Plus after Youtube, so we now have two YouTubes (one empty one attached to our new G+ and one that's been established with a lot of videos - new and old) For simplicity, it might be better to have one account. ** Good suggestion / idea from Microdesign, but I don't think updating videos is possible on Youtube (https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/58101?hl=en)

A couple more thoughts here, based on your revised question. You'll want to figure out how those links to the rogue subdomain have been generated, so you don't just move them over to the new CMS (such as if it's in body text that gets wholesale copied without being examined). If those old subdomains are not needed at all anymore, I'd get them removed entirely if you can, or at the very least blocked in robots.txt. You can verify each subdomain as its own site in Google Webmaster Tools, then request removal of those subdomains if the content is gone or if it's excluded in robots.txt. You might suggest to the dev team that they password-protect things like this so they don't get accidentally crawled in the future, use robots.txt to block, etc. If you have known dev subdomains that are needed, and you know about them as the SEO and make sure they have robots.txt on them, you might want to use a code monitoring service like https://www.polepositionweb.com/roi/codemonitor/ to monitor the contents of the robots.txt file. It will let you know if the file has been changed or removed (good idea for the main site too). I've seen dev sites copied over to live sites, and the robots.txt copied over too, so everything is now blocked on the new live site. I've also seen dev sites with a data refresh from the live site, and the robots.txt from the live site is now on the dev site, and the dev site gets indexed.

Hi there, As far as your platform goes, product name changes simply shouldn't be causing 404s and this can be (relatively) easily bypassed by introducing the product id to the end of the URL. The name can then change but the product id remains the identifier for the product to load on the page. With regards to your 40K pages without meta titles or descriptions, it's going to be almost impossible to fix that manually. It sounds as though you need to establish a business case, which could be done by fixing a few hundred of them (based on the ones that get the most traffic) and seeing if it has any improvement. This might not have an impact though as it sounds as though they aren't doing well in SEO as it is, although I agree there's a chance that these poorly optimised pages might be hurting your overall rankings. The challenge you face sounds like more political/strategic than technical though. Either SEO has actual/potential value to your business or it doesn't. If content producers aren't versed in SEO or focused on maintaining it or producing optimised pages and content then you probably have an uphill battle ahead of you to get them to focus on it. Good luck, George