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Hi SEO Martin, I'm trying to figure out your exact question. Are you wondering whether you should noindex the "empty" pages? Are you trying to figure out how to identify all the pages that are producing errors? Or something else?

Yes I would definitely link back the images to the new site so you can make sure that if they have any link juice they still will have when they're redirected.

My main experience with A/B is via Google Experiments and it looks like they highlight option 4: To ensure that serving your variation pages does not have a negative impact on your site's SEO rankings, you can use therel="canonical" link attribute on your variation pages. rel="canonical" is a signal to search engines that the content of your variation pages is essentially the same as that of your original page, and that you would prefer that search engines index your original page rather than the variations you're using in your experiment. Source: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2613318 If you roll out rel=canonical correctly then this seems to be your safest bet in Google's eyes. My main experience is with split-testing single pages, but theoretically this should work out okay with the correct use of canonical. If you're really not sure you could roll out a mini-test with a couple of key pages first?

Let's put it this way, all of the major search engines in the Western hemisphere have endorsed microdata. It's basically the WordPress of semantic data now. Everyone agreed that it would make everyone's life easier if we all adopted a uniform semantic markup. There may be a plan for graceful degradation of RDFa, there may not. But it's somewhat rare to get such an emphatic endorsement from every search engine of consequence in the Western market. Schema has a pretty solid general taxonomy for many common instances. The types and properties keep growing. The only reason you should go with RDFa over microdata is if there's something you can't do otherwise. Though that is likely doubtful at this point. Scroll all the way to the accordions on this page. You will see something that will make your decision easier.

Hi, It's a tricky one, I've looked in to this also a while ago for a site I was working on. I don't have a definitive answer but we went for another solution. Creating sitemaps and using the last_modified date element in there so hopefully Google would get when we last updated the specific pages.

just perfect, thanks Moosa

It can be good, to redirect users to simular content, but not how they have done it, but I think there are much better things to spend you time on. What they have done is returned a Status code of 200, this will cause problems with soft 404s. Also when you create a 404 page, you really should not have any external files such a images css or js files, this can cause a eternal loop if any of these files goes missing. a missing image will create a 404, that will call the 404 page that will cause a it to happen al over again. Crawlers will not like this. Bing once stated that they see your site of low quality of this is the case.

Instead of using noindex or rel=canonical tags that would redirect link juice away from your page, how about summarising or highlighting important parts of these news articles and congregate them in one page instead? Individual links to the full articles can be placed after the summaries. This way, I believe you can still achieve the purpose of showcasing good reviews about the company and keep the page ranked and searchable on Google.

Try the DYNO Mapper sitemap generator. It has a plugin built for Wordpress that can authenticate and crawl all of your pages within your Wordpress site or any additional sub-domains that you have. This is great because most large website contain several websites on sub-domains and cms systems. It also includes Google Analytics and Content Audit features to check for bad links and errors. It can export your XML sitemaps for search engines and HTML for your website. 110649952

In this particular case is a female clothing company that provides new stuff each 3 months, they never repete the products!-) Thanks for all the answers and I think I wlll customize and improve the user experience by implementing a dynamically-generated message via cookies during a 301 redirect. This would result in users who have landed on expired products receiving a message letting them know that the original product they were seeking is no longer available. This enhances the user experience because it informs users on why they are being redirected. As I´m working with magento I will try to find a ready to go solution as a plugin but If I don´t, I will make my own and send to the forum !-) Many Thanks !-)

Yes. Your categories are very broad/general so have some good long tail keywords in your products to convert.

I have tried using them and didn´t do anything - furthermore, if you check this video out by Google themselves, you will find that using these parameters is a "hint/suggestion" as opposed to a solid directive. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DiEYcBZ36po Rel Canonical is also a hint. But Meta Noindex,follow is a solid directive which they have to pay attention to. Hope that helps - been there, done it got the t shirt through a lot of pain and frustration!

thanks Dan, really helpful !-)

I´ve just tought to delete the pages and redirect because It could "transfer" some PR to a new page, (a new machine to sell) and keep the server clean (with less pages and pictures).  Thanks for your toughts

would be good to get .com/category/name if possible obviously if you do that becareful about using canonical urls as things may appear in more than one cat