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As tom says 404 errors are not the end of the world.

if you are concerned then as long as the relative urls have remained the same and the root directory is all that has changes a 301 in bulk should work, though if you've changed categories or something it may not work so well as a single entity and 100 would be the way to go.

Something that you should do, if you've not already, is within webmaster tools make sure you tell Google you've changed your url (configuration > change address) - it also has a mini guide on the steps you should be taking, including to register your new domain on webmaster tools.

But again, as tom says, if it's not destroying the user experience and isn't a huge annoyance for visitors don't worry too much about it.

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Just for your reference a full url redirect (aka changing say abc.com to abc.net - moving all directories and urls in one go) would look like

RedirectMatch 301 ^(.*)$ http://www.abc.net

I think what we are all trying to say is... as always with SEO ...

Quality Trumps Quantity

if you are building your own list use MailChimp it's free for first 2000 subscribers... if you are buying a list (be careful, be careful, be careful) and use something like what Takeshi suggests.

In addition to what Moosa has said I would advice you look at historical rankings and see when you were hit and compare this with recent Google updates to see if you have been hit by an update - that sounds whats most likely happened here.

I'd also advise doing a "url" search on google and checking your site appears, if so it's indexed and your issue is not indexation.

Hi There

I agree with Matt but would go one further and say also take a look at your title tag AND look at implementing things like opengraph on your site - you haven't mentioned social media but it could be a great thing to dip into.

Something we found when optimising a similar site for one of our clients is that Rich Snippets do work quite well - they seem to drive forward terms such as the car model name and brand names more than anything - it's also probably a safe bet that relatively few of your competitors use it and so worth getting ahead with.

cheers

I am of the belief it is bad to be "too" Google-centric. Many people have found that out with Panda, Penguin and Venice in recent years - all eggs in one basket and after one update you are out for the count (if you we're naughty of course).

Anyway, That aside I enjoy looking at are reminding myself about Google Algo Updates using the SEOMoz Google Change Log (a bit like Gina Tripani's change log on This Week in Google, but only more Algo focused) - http://www.seomoz.org/google-algorithm-change

So, my question - is there a version of Bing somewhere out there?

yeh! - sleep whats that?

in that case try to optimise things like the page titles to the country and the description if you can amend that somehow ... maybe slightly change the way urls are output (one with brand name one without) that other thing you could do is have microformats on the site you are preferring over the other.

Something I did find once a while back is that if you have 2 very similiar sites and you optimise in different ways (eg with microformats above) then you can in some ways get an advantage over competitors by blocking listings.

Hope that helps - feel free to message me more detail such as urls and i can take a look and see what else i can advise.

I would vote for their own urls if you are selling goods. That said it sounds like they would want to be related anyway and so having .com/blog1 .com/blog2 maybe of use (it can be changed later with jiggery pokery of multisite - though don't ask me how, I just know it can be done and is done by the likes of wpengine - start as subdomain and paymore to have a custom url in use)

this said if you want them to repeat the process having them set up their own site would mean they know how to in the future

it's hard to really decide, it depends on what you are wanting to do with the blogs at the end of it.

If its for businesses they should be alone

If its just as hobbies or something like that then together would work.

it's a little tricky to answer the question for a few reasons - but first there is a the question of could you not buy the .com and target both from the one site - and avoid this issue?

Other than that it maybe worth considering some mixing and twisting of content in someways as well as using rel=can - Google doesn't always see dupe product descriptions across sites as dupe content, if they did no page with a manufacturers description would rank - this translates to "if you can write your own great! if you can rewrite a bit or twist it - ok ... if you can't don't loose sleep and optimise elsewhere like hell!"

Hope that helps - though could just through up more questions

mmm odd

can you message me the urls and i will take a look and see if i can see an issue

author = person

publisher = person or place

• to your other question using the authoring "script" is an addon / seo and so would likely improve things in general but not doing it wont mean you get marked down (you just wont be marked up). The other thing to think about is linking to a persons profile ensure they list themselves within G+ as a contributor to your site (this helps activate the profile pics in search and lets google know you site is trustworthy, assuming that person is).

in GWT ensure you have removed the directory / subdomain from listings / index. (under optimisation > remove urls).

May take a week to kick in but if your 301s are working and robots is in place it will work.

In addition to these ensure you are using canonical tags pointing the the live location not dev.

ah so you want regular expressions ?

im confused - if regular expressions its not really mass writing - that would be as i described

as i say only the two options / well three including robots.txt to not index the page

both in csv?

first col = redirect 301

second col = old url (find and replace domain url with a space - remove the url)

third col = new url

save as Text (ms-dos) - jobs a good en

correction the meta tag required index instructions too

NOINDEX would prevent search from seeing that page and nofollow the links - 

page wide with the meta tag

not a perfect solution i know but its that or individually - i believe

that has nothing to do with your inventory though. :S that is a stock management / system management issue with dealing out of stock items. Just because you have a similar item in your inventory doesn't mean it will rank well nor be the next thing to appear on google.

The sentiment of the question is basically if i've a million items (say mens shirts) will they rank well because I have so many - the answer is no they won't rank well unless you perform seo on them just as any other shop.

did you tell GWT you were changing url?