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The most important is to redirect all your backlinks via 301 to the new URLs. As you've been told, why not develop the entire site in the subdomain and then move it to the new one, so you don't play with redirects and traffic from one subdomain to another.

Excellent, thank you Chris. I would prefer to keep the URL path the same, but to be honest the original URL path is a bit of a mess, so I'm taking this opportunity to clean it up. Really appreciate your help on this!

Hi there, You should look into this in Bing Webmaster Tools. Ross

From an SEO stand point? -- Google might consider the links in this article to be paid links.  If they are marked as nofollow or as sponsored then they should not have a bad SEO impact.  But if they are not marked nofollow of sponsored then they might be a problem. -- You got an article because you want to increase brand visibility.  So, what is the DailyMail doing to deliver traffic into your article?  Are they shouting it on on their home page and on every relevant page across the site?  An article on an orphan page is worth nothing.  An article on a heavily promoted page is worth a lot more. -- How long is the article going to be there, and how long will strong promotion of it persist? -- It's a thin content article.   It would be best to give them a very high quality article if lots of people are going to see it.   That will produce a positive impression for your brand.  The high quality article will also rank better in the SERPs, if the Daily Mail is allowing it to be indexed.   If it is going to be used on the DM for a limited amount of time, it could then be used on another website or your own., -- How would I spend my next block of money and time?   I would make a kickass 10x article and post it on my own website.

I don't think I would do it this way, RWesley. Why do you need both versions to be live and indexable at the same time? Most of the time people use a development environment for this type of thing. I guess I'm a little confused about the strategy here. Could you explain more about the reason you don't just do all of the work on a non-indexable, private development site and then push it out live to replace the existing site on www. whenever it is complete, along with the redirects from old content URLs to the new ones (if that's even necessary; which it is not if you're replacing old content on the same URL).

I had to do a similar migration, and my solution was similar - 302 redirect all the missing content. In our case, all of the missing content was contained in blog posts, so I 302'd them all to the blog. I would recommend something similar if possible - if you can group the missing content and land people somewhere similar to provide the best possible user experience, that's your best bet. If people are looking for a missing blog article, maybe they can still find something interesting to read in the 30% of blog articles that are posted. If they are looking for a missing product category, maybe they can still find something interesting in your main store page. Alternatively, if you have the ability to keep the 70% of content within the old structure while launching the 30% of updated hierarchy, it would be a better solution. Sometimes moving from one CMS to another, you can leave old content on the old CMS and only redirect and push out new content on the new CMS. Just depends on your situation.