Welcome to the Q&A Forum

If you don't have anyone yet, definitely check out our recommended list for great companies to work with.

Shawn, you say that you are not entirely convinced that these sites offer any additional value. So, if you don't see that they're offering value then do you really think that the general public will see them as valuable? These pages may be ranking for different reasons, and not because of the "lack" of pogo sticking. In fact, they just might have an issue like that but might have enough links and trust on the domain itself to rank well. Pogo sticking is only one search engine ranking factor of many. From what I understand, Google doesn't take into account the DMCA take down requests when it comes to rankings. They determine the rankings and then at the "search query time" is when they DMCA info is used. So, the page still ranks-- it just doesn't show up when someone searches for it.

Arbitrageurs killed the penny Adwords clicks about ten years ago.  Today, I think that you will be lucky to find any clicks that go for less than ten cents each. Today you can find a SERP with huge traffic and no ads.  You will think "I can get cheap clicks there".  They do not exist.  Google will run your ads for a few thousand impressions and then force you to bid an amazing price.

Shawn is correct. Domian tools will give you a great history plus info on the current owners other domains.

I'm going to disagree a little bit with the other commenters. I've done quite a few large scale redirect projects and I'm not 100% opposed to using a "dirty sitemap" for a short duration. The better option is to leave some internal links pointed at the old URLs. I know what the search engines say, but I also know what I've experienced when it comes to getting 301'd links crawled again. Read this post by Everett Sizemore for more info at what I'm describing: http://moz.com/blog/uncrawled-301s-a-quick-fix-for-when-relaunches-go-too-well

I didn't mean to sound harsh or critical... so please don't take it that way. I've been in the situation of destroying my own stuff thanks to bad advice and bad links before... so I know how hard it can be. In your case, I don't think the 301 is necessary. Like Dana said, it could just be fluctuations and over the coming weeks, months, etc. that article could wind up getting more link love and ranking better again. Great, original content will garner new links to your site & articles. Work on creating new content and keeping things fresh so you're a resource to your customers, fans, industry, etc. and the good vibes will flow (hopefully). Anything vaguely unnatural with link building nowadays has the potential to turn around and bite you. So when you have a great article that is doing well and drawing in the readers and the rankings start to slip... give it some time, see if its just natural fluctuations, do some testing, etc. so you can do even better with the next one.

Let's hope not...

Based on the information you provided, yes, I would recommend a 301 redirect to do what you are trying to accomplish versus a 302 or no redirect.

Crimson offers a great reply and gets a thumbs up from me. I'll just add a bit. Whether or not you submit a sitemap, Google will visit your site as long as it knows the site exists. If your site offers solid navigation, there is absolutely no need to submit a sitemap. Google will find and crawl all of your pages. If you have coding issues on your site, navigation issues, island pages, etc. then a sitemap is helpful so Google can be aware of these pages it would otherwise not be able to find. With the above noted, a sitemap is easy to set up and automate. You can pretty much "set it and forget it" so it's still a good practice. About your questions, 1. It's your call. If a page is linked to in your main navigation such as About or FAQ then Google should find it 100% of the time. There is no need to include it in your sitemap but there is no harm either. Either way works. 2. Yes, as per the above as long as Google can find the page it will index them. You can even have horrible coding and navigation and Google may locate your pages if you have earned external links to them from credible sources. 3. Last I checked a sitemap can hold 50k URLs. If your site has more then 50k URLs, then you can break up the sitemaps into smaller files. The advice Crimson shared is correct. In summary, if you implement all best practices in your site design and do not have any island pages then a sitemap is not needed but it is a nice backup.

Just got off the phone with Adwords Support and they confirmed it is definitely still in beta. If you have an account manager you can request it, but I don't spend enough money with them yet to have one

There's no way to do that to my knowledge, they just get moved further down the page as you run new Difficulty reports.

If the partner site would allow you to add code to their thank you page, you could have them just add your existing Google Analytics tracking code to that page and then page views of thankyou.html would start showing up in your Google Analytics. The problem with that though is that it will show ALL page views of thankyou.html, not just the page views that originate from referrals from your domain.  So this would only work if you are sending traffic to a page on the partner's site that is exclusive to your domain. You could actually set up a custom report in GA to show only page views of thankyou.html where the referrer is your domain, but you'd have a bunch of additional page views mixed in with your data that have nothing to do with your site.

On the homepage it does not matter, as no redirect is made to the slash, both return a 200 code but on deeper pages it is a problem as it leads to canonical issues. I prefer no slash because when people link to you by hand, they rarely add the slash on the end. Wordpress makes a mess of this, i have to say, i dont use wordpress so i dont know if its wordp[ress of a plugin, but almost all wordpress sites have un-neecessary redirects. That is internal links that go thought a 301 to get to the internal link, each 301 is a link juice leak, so why would you do this when the link is internal. Wordpress sites often use a 301 redirect to send you to a url with a slash, when the link should point to the slash or none slash, and there for not leak ling juice. The first think i do when i build a site, is setup my redirects, to ensure a canonical domain, none slash( or slash one of the other), and make sure all urls are lowercase. These things are a nightmare to fix later.

Ahh, i misread that date.

Doug's comment above is correct. In general, if a page doesn't have any links to it then OSE won't know that it even exists. This was the case for my Twitter profile until I pointed a couple of links to it, not that having it indexed is of much use anyway.

Thanks guys! This a huge help. I'll get it taken care of.