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I'll reserve my answer until you hear from your dev team. A massive site for sure. One other question/comment:  just because there are 13 million URLs in your sitemap doesn't necessarily mean there are that many pages on the site. We could be talking about URI versus URL. I'm pretty sure you know what I mean by that, but for others reading this who may not know, URI is the unique Web address of any given resource, while a URL is generally used to reference a complete Web page. An example of this would be an image. While it certainly has its own unique address on the Web, it most often does not have it's very own "page" on a Website (although there are certainly exceptions to that). So, I could see a site having millions of URIs, but very few sites have 17 million+ pages. To put it into perspective, Alibaba and IBM roughly show 6-7 million pages indexed in Google. Walmart has between 8-9 million. So where I'm headed in my thinking is major duplicate content issues...but, as I said, I'm going to reserve further comment until you hear back from your developers. This is a very interesting thread so I want to know more. Cheers!

Hello! I just came across your question. Here is a recent Moz post of mine on how to use log files for technical SEO -- the example screenshots are from the SEO dashboard in Logz.io. Feel free to sign-up at our site and test our public beta to see if it works for you. Disclosure: Yes, I work for the company.

I was actually thinking about some type of wildcard rule in htaccess.  This might actually do the trick!  Thanks for the response!

It actually wasn't a manual edit.  For rel=publisher, I went to a Titles & Metas under the Yoast SEO plugin, went to the Home tab, and entered the company's Google+ page there.  For authorship, I went to the author's profile page in WordPress and added their Google+ page in the appropriate field. It sounds like this is going to take some template editing.  I'll give it a try when I can. Thanks!

Hi Masterworksintl, Bede is offering you good advice. You need to report the closed business as closed, and also engage in work to remove/edit any references across web that feature the old address. This can be a big job, so be prepared to spend some time on in, or hire a professional citation editor to do the work for you. It's amazing how many citations of a business can appear around the web in even 6 months' time.

TTL is Time To Live (set in seconds), and is the interval that your computer will refresh its DNS information. Usually it's set for 12 or 24 hours. So the day before an IP change, set your TTL to 5 minutes. That way, when you do change your IP, it should only take 5 minutes for the DNS change to propagate. Once it propagates, change it back to its original value.

You're welcome

Have you gone in and changed the admin panel information about your site?

I've got a similar issue with my CMS solution where the .htaccess file creates the pages in the system but the 301 redirect page will actually show the query string. such as: site.com/oldpage should go to site.com/new-page-format.php however if i type in site.com/oldpage i'm actually seeing site.com/new-page-format.php?htaccess_query_string I'm going to implement a rel=canonical string for the site and see what that does. So depending on how your cms solution is built the 301 redirect could cause additional problems. As for the duplicate content issue I think it would be best to get that cleaned up.

@Frank: As to paid links, I highly doubt it.  My supervisors and I are pretty militant against black hat, and I know I haven't bought any links.  I can run another backlink report tonight, but it's not likely we'll find any.  I have found a handful (i.e. not even half a dozen) random links that appear highly spammy, but they aren't on interrelated sites/link neighborhoods, so I don't think that's the issue.

We run one site with all https and there is no problem at all - we link build as usual and see no bad impacts, in fact we are doing very well. It's not usual practice but for SEO as long as you are playing by the rules it will have no impact whatsoever.