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Multiple 301s to a single page aren't really a problem, often if content consolidation is going on you'll be redirecting several pages to one.

Redirecting them to something has got to be better than just having them as 404s. Ideally though you'd send it to your new about page (or whatever the most closely related content page you still have is).

Building links to your links is a fairly legitimate tactic, however only once you've almost exhausted the links you can get. It really is almost end game stuff.

As you'll be building links for people in related fields, you'll almost certainly be better off putting those links into your own site from other sources, as a rich linking domain profile is a big authority metric.

If you have a lot of low quality links, it could be that you'll not see any movement in the SERPs, you should focus on building quality links or creating quality content rather than start doing SEO for other people's sites

If I can just add a thought for you as well, assuming your homepage is the one ranking for the keyword that your competitor is beating you on, the PR isn't being distributed until AFTER the link juice is being accounted for, i.e. The homepage still has 50 linkjuice points (I just made that up) which are split between 200 links vs your competitors 50 LJP (but I'm going to keep using it) being split among 100 links; basically the ranking factor of the links should only occur further down your site structure.

What may be a factor with those links is whether you're linking off the page with your main keyword to a subpage. So if you want your homepage to rank for 'keyword' having an exact match anchor link with the text 'keyword' may have some effect.

WARNING: You're going to be taking this on the chin, as I didn't like it. I'll try to be as constructive as possible.

I'm not a video expert, but what the hey

I will semi-live post my experience:

Hmm, what's going on here, why's there no sound?
6 minutes?! I'm never going to get this time back
Oh sound. Hmm, Symphony no.5. We'll see.
Ugh, is all the font Arial?
So you guys renovate houses or provide storage for redoing houses. Pretty cool examples.
Wait a minute, I don't believe these are actual examples ಠ_ಠ
Bored now.
Super bored now.
Skip, skip.
You really don't know what I'm thinking.
I still have no idea what you're trying to sell me.
Okay. Products. Let's see.
Flashing by too quickly.
EPILIPTIC FIT
Topical Charlie Sheen reference. I'll give you that.
1 minute of credits?!

I'm not a big fan.

Firstly, I'm not going to watch a 6 minute advert. Realistically you've got 20 seconds to pitch me your product or hook to get me to continue watching. If you hook me I'll watch for up to 2 minutes if it's consistantly entertaining. Not having sound at the very start has immediately got me looking elsewhere or thinking about clicking back.

As for having to convince people it's safe to buy online, if you're pitching to that market they're not going to be persuaded by a video with a talking dog. Identify who you're targeting and maybe split the video up into different parts tailored to each.

Apart from the Charlie Sheen reference I didn't find it entertaining enough to carry me through the first 90 seconds, let alone the remaining four and a half minutes. You'll need something a little more wild to tap into the psyche of a frequent web user like myself and your secure message and charity message lost my attention even more.

Change the font, it's boring.

Make sure your logo's are proportioned correctly and not squashed.

Less of the dog, MUCH less text, less assuming you know what I'm thinking.

The save the Earth thing didn't work for me as you never went into any green credentials or how you're 'doing your bit'. I'm left with the impression that was just some nonsense you threw in there.

You need to focus a lot more on what you sell as it's unclear.

Ultimately I'd go back to the drawing board and come up with a (or several) shorter video(s).

Show the problems your products fix or why they're cool, couple it with something 'zany' and then get it in front of people who need to know about it and hope they share.

Possibly months, but more likely (if they're good quality links on high-ish profile sites and not buried in a directory somewhere) it'll be at least a month.

The last index update was August 23rd (check on the OSE homepage to see), so I would expect another update around the end of September or thereabouts.

I'm in agreement with Stefano that I've been using it for years and never had any problems that weren't my fault/settings.

Is the problem that it simply can't write to your server? I've had that before. Create the sitemap.xml and sitemap.xml.gz files manually via ftp, then play around with the permissions until the plugin can write to the files.

If you can tell us exactly what the issue is we might be able to get it working

I can provide you with a little anecdote but I think internal linking is a reasonably large factor, especially from the home page.

So I have a page, 3 levels deep, absolute tail end of my site and exists exclusively to catch the keyword it's targeting; doesn't provide any information you can't get elsewhere on the site, doesn't have any exclusive offers, just another page on the site.

So I build a few links into this page, nothing exciting; articles, links from my blog posts, manage to find a couple of websites about the topic, but after 3 months, nothing, top 50 ranking (from 120 or so) but not that great. However one day I get a conversion from it, so I decide I'm going to give it a little push and link to it with the main keyword from the homepage.

Boom! Next day, 7th.

The homepage itself isn't that powerful, very low page rank, very few links coming in and there's already about 100 links on it between the nav and the other editorial style links. It's not that the page I linked to wasn't being crawled or indexed but putting a link in from the homepage instantly boosted it.

2 months later the page still fluctuates within the top 10, but I have been building more links into it.

So, flush with this new success I decide to test it on another, very similar, site. Same sort of page, same sort of keyword, same sort of site structure. Difference this time is that I'm not building links to the page in question.

Keyword isn't top hundred so I put the link in from the home page.

Boom! Top 80.

Alright, not as good but a definite twitch. I figure that it's not quite the magic bullet I thought it was (and realistically I can't link to every page from my home page anyway) and haven't really revisited what would happen if I did build links to that page (and a few more to the homepage).

So, anecdotally, internal linking from recent pages and small time link building doesn't do much. Linking from the homepage is a big signal that a page is important. Without external links your internal linking (on a small / low DA website) isn't going to rank you.

I'm going to say it's closer to 20/80 though.

Then you're effectively dividing your link juice much more than they are. This is mostly still relevant - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-the-juice-is-loose

Edit - Wait I take that back, using nofollow to sculpt page rank isn't a recommendation I would give. It still works a bit but I simply want you to watch that video and understand how link juice flows around a site.

Some things you may want to try are to reduce the number of links and only have converting or money making pages linked to from the home page and building links from other sites directly into the subpages.

Building links directly into subpages should have the greatest effect.

Edit - But please don't just chop off links without thinking about it, take some time to work out how you want Googlebot and visitors to move around your site and make sure that you still have links into ALL the pages on your site (but not necessarily from the homepage).

Also, check if all the subpages are being cached regularly, if not then it's probably a fair assumption Google's not working it's way through all your links.

You've made it upside down

Roger sees the first * and then goes "okay :(" and goes away.

Simply change it to:

User-agent: rogerbot
Disallow:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

It depends. What's written into the agreement?

If they've built links on other people's sites then it will probably be too much of a hassle to contact all of them and ask them to remove it, so it will either naturally run out (if it's paid and you're not given the contact details) or remain there for the rest of it's natural life.

Alternatively if they run the sites they've been building links on (and it is the easiest way to guarantee clients will get links on sites) then they may remove them to make way for new clients links. I've certainly seen this happen.

It's important to note that Google doesn't overly care how quickly you get links, but it will certainly notice if you lose a lot quickly! Aa it means you've either bought them and they've expired or something has happened to make people lose trust in your site, either way it's going to raise some flags and possibly have someone look a little bit closer into your link profile.

Double check what's been agreed, find out who owns the sites the links have been built on and speak with the agency before you do it. If they're reputable I doubt they'll try and screw you over.

Definitely host it on the company website, unless you're doing something risqué with the blog.

Your blog is going to be collecting links, you will probably want to be using it as a hub for other social activity and it's much easier to convert people by directing them around the site than it is to get them to go there in the first place.

Using Blogger or WordPress.com limits a lot of what you can do, plus you're then accumulating links into a domain you don't control.

As for using the blog to point links to your main site, well that's not usually the best strategy either - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-the-microsite-mistake

If your set up absolutely prevents you from doing it on the site then go for a self-hosted blog.

PM me your email and I'll invite you

The last part redirects index.html to /

There would only be a loop if you redirected / to index.html

99.9% sure this'll work for you I'm using the exact code on a small site right now and it's working fine

Well, to see if I can clarify your position:

You have multiple subdomains each using a different CMS/system to run and you want to bring them all under one CMS/system during a site restructure.

You could, most likely, run each of the systems in their own folder (e.g. /blog/ is powered by Wordpress, /shop/ is powered by Joomla) but I think this is a case of better to do something well if you're going to do it at all and bring it under one main CMS.

I recently had to do this from a bespoke CMS to an open source one and, as there was no real way for them to talk to one another, it was unfortunately a copy and paste job. I only had about 2000 pages though, so would seem less likely you can manually do it with 100,000

If you can export your content in say XML or a database and then parse it into a format that your main CMS would recognise that may be one way of doing it.

Now looking at your response below you've no coder/programmers as such working for you, so what I've suggested may be a bit beyond what you can achieve without hiring one.

Just to be clear though, you cannot have different parts of a site hosted on different servers, so parentcharity.com/sales and parentcharity.com/community MUST be hosted on the same server.

The language that powers each of these sections CAN be different, but you'll most likely have to speak to your current providers and ask if they can move it to the same server. If it's a bespoke solution they may not be able or willing to move it to a server they don't control.

Let me know what I'm missing

It's quite time consuming to find good quality writers, also a bit more expensive.

If you can be bothered to weed through tonnes of useless writers you'll be able to exploit people starting out on Digital Point

Along the lines of the oDesk of this world I'd suggest - http://www.studentgems.com/ - pretty good for pretty cheap.

If you're looking for proper quality writers you could start scanning Linked In for journalists of industry magazines and such like.

But the real quality writers I've either poached (found articles in the same niche I've liked and approached them) or made through contacts in the industry. Never a substitute for networking

Fairly complex to get decent value out of affiliate links and technically I believe Google wants you to nofollow affiliate links, so gaming them for more positive SEO value could wind up with you getting in a little trouble.

The blog post Atul linked to is a good place to start, however I think if you were really serious about it there's a lot more depth you can go into.

In your example you can start by ignoring the aff parameter in webmaster tools and I assume you'll canonicalise the page.

It's possible to get affiliates to give you a clean link, then drop a cookie on users based on the referral header. This has the advantage of requiring no work on the affiliates side (they simply link to anywhere on your site as normal) but it's very easy to game for other affiliates. If there's money to be made a lot of people are going to take advantage of it. A variation on this is you can use # links and then interpret them server side (so affiliate links to example.com#aff=123456 convert to example.com/?aff=123456). Again that's game-able.

A possibility would be to set up affiliate landing pages that override cookies (a force vs a default), so that affiliates can link into this page cleanly and visitors get cookied at that stage. You would then have a stripped down navigation to sections of your site you most wanted to promote. You'd have to make this page accessible to search engines though, which means there's a possibility of that page showing in SERPS. On the other hand it could also give you a chance to be in the SERPS for their brand if you do it right

Another, somewhat dodgy (all right, actually dodgy), thing you can do is look at a list of your affiliates and see who's not bringing in many sales, especially those with high traffic. You can then offer to match or beat their affiliate payments for their continued endorsement with a clean link.

Assuming you manage to impliment a decent solution something you'll need to overcome is that affiliates are increasingly masking their affiliate links to keep the link juice. See this post for an example - http://yoast.com/affiliate-links-and-seo/ - though it's possible to do the same thing without the plugin. No real solution to this beyond interacting with the affiliate and discussing it with them.

Also affiliates may not be too happy about providing SEO friendly links as it makes it harder for them to rank/earn. One solution could be to offer additional rewards for SEO friendly links over traditional links.

A small negative to solving this if you have a widespread affiliate program is that you could suddenly have a lot of low value links pointing into you, diluting to a degree some of your stronger links. I'm not saying that getting a whole bunch of links could ever be bad, per se, but, depending on your niche, I still think some affiliates operate in 'bad neighbourhoods'. I wouldn't worry about it too much, but if possible roll these links out instead of flipping a switch.

The only real concern is if you then revert or change your affiliate program. I'm 95% sure Google doesn't care if you pick up a whole bunch of links quickly, but if you LOSE a whole bunch of links quickly you're going to set off some alarm bells. Although I could be significantly overthinking your question, just the sort of things that go through my mind

If I think of anything else I'll update.

Well, I would recommend you alter the internal links to just point to the new '/' default, but in the meantime...

I would have thought your code would have worked, but every time I try it my site falls over. It might work for you though. Give it a try but test it straight away

I'll see if I can get a different version working on my test site for you if not

Well, it depends how much forcing users to add a description would negatively effect you I suppose. Hard to get something out when there's no data being put in

They must already choose a category (car), can you get them to name the image (ask them to be descriptive 'Red Ferrari on an Italian mountainside') and tag it with items in the wallpaper (red, Ferrarri)?

If so then you can improve your URLs a title tags

URL: site.com/car-wallpapers/red-ferarri-italian-mountainside-3/
Title: Red Ferarri on an Italian Mountainside Car Wallpaper | Computer Desktop Wallpapers

Add the tags on the page with links to tag pages (which I don't always like but would be useful for your users and internal linking).

URL: site.com/car-wallpapers/tag/red
Title: Red Car Wallpapers | Computer Desktop Wallpapers

or

URL: site.com/tag/ferarri
Title: Ferrari Car Wallpapers | Ferarri Computer Desktop Wallpapers

Unfortunately unless you want to do all this yourself you will have to get users to give you more info at time of upload. As I say, no real way to get something out without putting something in

Yes.

In your permalink settings just add .html (or whatever) to the end of your permalink settings so %postname%.html and that will work... for posts.

To add it to pages you can either use this plugin - http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/html-on-pages/ - bearing in mind it's rarely updated, hack wp_rewrite in wp-includes/rewrite.php

add_action('init', 'change_page_permalink', -1); function change_page_permalink() { global $wp_rewrite; if ( strstr($wp_rewrite->get_page_permastruct(), '.html') != '.html' ) $wp_rewrite->page_structure = $wp_rewrite->page_structure . '.html'; }

bearing in mind you'll have to do this every time you update

or add it in your .htaccess

RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !.[a-zA-Z0-9]{2,3,4} RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !/$ RewriteRule ^(.*)$ $1.html

I'm not taking any responsibility for messing up that last one

You've made the changes already, without making a note of what you've changed from > to?

Well, a) Doh! b) Alan's suggestion of looking for 404 errors in webmaster tools is a decent place to start. Add redirects for anything that's throwing up an error.

I would imagine it'll be a heavily manual process if you've already changed them, though I'm not sure what your CMS is capable of or if your new URLs were sufficiently thought through to allow you to create a rewrite rule

e.g. if the changes were something like
from http://example.com/?id=123&name=product&cat=stuff
to http://example.com/stuff/name/123
then you could add just one rule for the redirects