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If all you are doing is creating a different architecture without making significant changes to the actual content (so giving each existing page a more SEO friendly category +/or file name) then you just need to make sure that every individual page is correctly redirected to its new URL using 301's. External links will remain in play and search engines will eventually recognize the redirects and update their indexes.

As long as you build the new structure in parallel so that you never take a page out of circulation you should be good.

If, on the other hand, you plan on altering content, removing pages completely, or doing something that will make existing pages unavailable for any period of time, you are likely to see some impact on rankings that might not be ideal.

If your concern stems from the fact that you are maybe not sure whether the new structure will actually help, then you will want to start slowly as Nicholas suggested.

My approach would be to do exactly as Nicholas described, but to start with pages that are ranking poorly.

Happy 301'ing

Hi Glenn,

Another way to supplement your intelligence on new links to your site is to add Linkstant, which was built by Tom Critchlow and Rob Ousbey from Distilled.

This works similarly to the way analytics does. You place the code and if a new link is clicked that has not been seen by the tool before it will be reported. It's not perfect, but given that most savvy webmasters would check a link by clicking after it is placed, it can be quite quick in surfacing new links for you.

Because of the way the tool works, initially you will see it report links you already know about, but after a time the links reported will be bringing you news of new acquisitions.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Tracy,

You can use the On-page tool to optimize for any keyword term as long as it is loaded into the keyword list in your campaign.

By default the On-page tool offers a report card for every keyword already loaded that it finds relevant to your home page. You can create Report cards for individual pages and keywords by digging a little deeper into the tool.

There is an explanation of how to use the tool for specific pages in this recent thread about SEOmoz On-page Tool issues.

If you have not specifically selected the URL of that page (as described in the other thread), then the B Report Card you are seeing would be the Grade for that keyword on the Home Page of the site, not for the specific page you have optimized.

If this is not the problem and the tool appears to be malfunctioning, then the best thing would be to contact the Help Team using help [at] seomoz.org.Let them know the details of the specific campaign and the issue so they can take a look for you.

Hope that helps,

Sha

...and neither did my first link removal client, but the penalty was revealed when I insisted that he needed to lodge a reconsideration request.

I have heard this story repeated over and over while talking to rmoov users over the past few months...I am quite sure there are way more people out there who are under a manual penalty than anyone realizes.

I have my own theory as to why this has happened, but that's probably for a blog post some time.

In a nutshell, I absolutely agree with Ryan's take on the subject except for one thing...hard earned experience does not in any way amount to bias.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Kris,

An alarm bell rang for me when you mentioned that your focus here is on the effect upon PageRank. You should be very careful in attributing the change in Pagerank to the implementation of the 301 as Toolbar PageRank is updated infrequently and in a very ad hoc fashion. This means that there may have been other things which occurred over the period between PageRank updates which were responsible for the change.

Rand gave a very good explanation of the vagaries of PageRank and the differences between the two types of PageRank in this Whiteboard Friday recently - What is Google's PageRank Good For?

Given the changes that have occurred recently in the world of search, I would be looking fairly carefully at the possibility that some of those changes may be responsible for any negative impacts on the site. Also, has there been a negative impact on traffic and/or rankings? These things are really much more important than PR.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Donnie,

Probably the best place to get good information on optimizing for any of the comparison shopping sites (including Google & Bing) is the CPC Strategy Blog.

While the company offers management services for those wanting to pay to have someone else run their comparison shopping feeds, they also share huge amounts of information about what they do through the blog and occasional webinars.

There is quite a lot being discussed there at present about Google's new "Trusted Stores" program, which is definitely worth a read too.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi,

Without seeing the site it is a little hard to say exactly what is happening and how things could be improved. Perhaps if you could tell us these few things:

1. Is that 2000 Uniques per month or per day?

2. What is the intent of the site? Are you trying to sell products, earn from advertising, be a leader in your space? etc

3. What is the URL for your site (if you are happy to share it)

4. Do you know how many backlinks you have?

With a little extra information we can better understand the problem and suggest some solutions.

Sha

Hi Steven,

This message refers to a meta tag which appears in the head statement for the page.

the code looks like this:

OR

This tag tells crawlers not to index the page (or to remove the page from the index if it already appears there) and to either follow or not follow links on the page.

In most cases I would use noindex, follow as this allows any link juice being passed to the page to flow on through the site. The meta noindex tag is the most reliable way to ensure that pages are not indexed since it occurs at the page level. Other methods such as disallowing pages in a robots.txt file can be unreliable as crawlers that come to a page via an external link do not see the disallow statement, so will index the page.

The noindex tags on your pages may have been placed in order to exclude pages that were producing errors or are duplicates of other pages.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi James,

My immediate response would be DO NOT place any reliance on the presence or absence of an unnatural links warning from Google!

I have clients who never received an unnatural links warning of any kind and were actually suffering impact from a manual penalty. The penalty was not revealed until I decided that we needed to lodge a reconsideration request because something more than Penguin was going on there. Sure enough, the message that came back from the webspam team was that the site had a manual spam action in place.

Since our company developed the rmoov tool, I have been responsible for customer support and spent many hours talking to site owners who are trying to clean up their backlink profiles. During that time I have heard from many, many other site owners that have big problems with no unnatural links warning message received. A number of these have also found on lodging a reconsideration request, that they have a manual penalty applied to their site.

Basing your assessment of what is happening on whether or not you have received a message from Google is a big mistake, and unfortunately one that is being made by way too many people

Hope that helps,

Sha

OK, so what you are actually trying to do is redirect from one page on the new server to another page on the new server, regardless of anything that is happening on the old server?

Sha

Hi Kyle,

Have you manually checked the URL's reported in Webmaster Tools to check whether they are actually returning a 403 for users? I have often seen errors that were temporary or have already been fixed still being reported in WMT for sometime afterwards.

If you have checked and the pages are working fine then the problem is most likely due to a lag in updates in WMT so you can ignore it and wait for it to go away.

If you have checked manually and find that there is in fact a 403 problem on the site, then you will need to investigate further. Since you are relating the sudden flood of 403's to the addition of the 301 redirect, the first thing I would do is check that the code for your 301 is correct.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Sonja,

Adding the meta noindex tag will instruct the search engine to remove the URL from the index.

In almost every case I would recommend using noindex, follow as this will allow link juice to continue to flow to other pages within your site.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi James,

Google's Disavow Tool is not a first line of defence, but the last.

Matt Cutts made it quite clear when releasing the tool that Google still expects webmasters to make a "good faith effort" to remove as many links as possible before using the Disavow Tool.

If you read Dr Pete's post using the link that Smart Lock Solutions provided in their post you can see this. If you have not seen the video from Matt Cutts about the Disavow Tool, you can watch it and read some views on the release of the tool here.

The only way to confirm whether a manual penalty has been applied is to lodge a reconsideration request. The webspam team will respond to a request, either advising that there is no manual action in place, or that a penalty exists because the site violates their search quality guidelines.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Wardy,

The .htaccess file is read from top to bottom and the first Rule which matches is the Rule that will be used. This means that currently, your Wordpress Rule is a "catch-all" and the 301 will never be executed.

So, the 301 needs to be placed above the Wordpress Rule in the .htaccess

Hope this helps,

Sha

Hi Aaron,

Your 301 redirect is working fine and sending all non www traffic to your www subdomain, so there is no harm to your SEO. The potential for that was explained by Ed in his reponse.

Google has simply indexed your non www root domain before you put the 301 redirect in place and has not picked up the redirect and adjusted the index as yet.

If you have not already done as Nico suggested and advised Google in your Webmaster Tools account which is your preferred domain, then you can do this. It is likely to enable Google to pick up the 301 more quickly, although I have heard Googlers refer to it as a "hint" which means that you should not hold your breath, or be overly concerned if you do not see a change in the results page straight away.

Bing also has the same function in Webmaster Central.

Sha

Hi Gary,

If the two pages are identical (or close to identical), you could add a canonical link element to one of them as an alternative. Just choose the one that you wish to be seen as the preferred page and add the code in the HEAD of the other to identify it. Here is an example of the code you might use to identify your new page as the preferred page:

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi AutoGlassRescue,

The report you have made available here does not provide sufficient information to make an informed decision on your backlink situation...this report provides only the domains that link to your site.

Within this list I see root domains that may well be hiding large numbers of hosted sites that might have been created for manipulative purposes.

For example:

1. wordpress.com could host just a few subdomain.wordpress.com blogs, or perhaps hundreds or even thousands. Without the actual URL list, (as you would get from the most recent links report in Webmaster tools), it is impossible to know.
2. yahoo.com could be playing host to some harmless posts from answers.yahoo.com, or it could be concealing an orchestrated effort to manipulate search results via bogus posts on the groups.yahoo.com subdomain. Again, there might be just a few, or hundreds, or even thousands.

There are a number of sites that offer individuals the option of claiming a subdomain which is essentially independent of the domain owner. These also include blogspot.com (and a range of country specific duplicates), tumblr.com and more.

This Link Removal flowchart from the Bruce Clay blog will give you an idea of what to look for when analyzing your backlink profile, but you will need to be looking at individual URLs to get a clear picture of your situation.

You could also take a look at our October Webinar recording and slide deck which focused on link analysis for some more information.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Wardy,

Check your Private Messages please.

Also, a couple of questions.

1. Is the file called .htaccess?
2. I the page magazine-freebies a static URL or a Wordpress Blog Category Page?

Please make your .htaccess file look like this

RewriteEngine On

RewriteRule  ^/magazines.htm$ /magazine-freebies

Just these two lines, and test to see if it works.

Sha

Hi,

The major concern with you adding so many new URL's to the 301 list every day is the potential for processing bottlenecks which might adversely affect site performance.

If you have a database behind all this (and it is hard to imagine with this many products that you would not) AND if you can match an old-id to the new product then you could try:

RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d [NC]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/(.)/(.)$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^/(.)/(.)$ /redirect.aspx?oldid=$1 [R=301,L]

Where redirect.aspx would

1. pull the new data from the database using the old-id
2. build a new page string to go to
3. finally do a 301 to the correct page.

Hope that helps,

Sha

Hi Derek,

I think kjay, Harald & Will have all pretty much covered removal (or correction) of links that are being called from within the pages on your site and using 301 redirects to capture traffic from external links.

I would also make sure that you have a well designed custom 404 page set up for your site so that any link that isn't covered by the work you have done on the above will still provide an opportunity for the visitor to get to the content they are looking for.

You should make sure that your custom 404 page contains some well written text that invites the visitor to explore the site to find other content that will help them and a menu that will allow them to click through to other parts of your site.

Hope that helps,

Sha