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Gotcha, well depending on the crawl rate (PR/Update Frequency, etc.) and number of pages, Googlebot should be back to check it out, more than a month and I would start to wonder about other issues. But, hey, as Matt said above, if you can gain something from keeping those pages, 301 them to an equivilant page on the new site. If you know that thosee pages were low value or had no links (except internal ones), you could go the Remove URL route. Brian

Hi Shawn, It is inadvisable to use more than one method of blocking bots from specific pages on your site. There is a very good explanation of this in this blog post from Lindsay - Robot Access and Indexation Restriction Techniques: Avoiding Conflicts. Definitely worth reading! Hope that helps, Sha

Bribes or maybe just dinner and a few drinks Alas, you can't force Roger to crawl your site "**Q.  I just fixed a ton of issues. Can I get a new crawl?**SEOmoz crawls your site once per week. The start date is based on the date you first set up your campaign. Unfortunately, there is no way to change this date or force an earlier crawl. However, you can use the SEOmoz Custom Crawl tool to crawl up to 3000 pages of your website. We’ll email you the resulting CSV file within 24 hours."

Thanks for the explanation!

I don't see any benefit to blocking search engines with robots.txt with the exception of Bing or Google as necessary. Robots.txt is strictly a suggestion to those crawlers who care enough to respect your wishes. The only benefit it can offer is IF a crawler chooses to respect your wishes, then your site will have a bit less traffic volume during the crawl. The reality is any specific crawler from one of the many random companies is going to visit so infrequently it wont make any noticeable difference.

Thank you for the insight Chris. Yes I see that it works on mobile devices and iPads. When you do an SEO Audit for the navigation, is it best to just look at the code as opposed to the way prescribed in SEO Secrets (disable java and view the website)? Thanks, Shawn

I use a mix of both relative and absoloute, for navigation I tend to use relative links in case i ever move things around. However for content in particular articles or news pieces on a site i use exact links. I have found before that some of these have been used on other sites so including the exact link ensures that there is a link back to the website.

The minimize url length is always better. Keep it minimized, IE allowed maximum of 2000 characters which is too long. Less then 100 is good and less is even better. B option is good, going into sub-categories make it lengthy.

The question is a great one, and the responses to it are also great, but they directly contradict each other! Could the SEOMoz staff weigh in on this one?