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Webmaster's Tools has been pretty good to me regarding telling me about 404s I may have missed after a migration, but using the tactic I described really limits missed URLs, assuming you have a good grasp on the subdirectories of your site.

Phasing is an option, but say, in the case of a redesign or domain migration, I like to do it all at once. That way Google isn't trying to index the website on two different URL structures or domains. Doing it in one shot makes it clear to Google what has happened, since everything is now moved, instead of just a fraction at a time. I'm sure this is a point of debate, and not necessarily the definitive way to do it.

It sounds like your client needs to be educated on how proper link building works. You can't just say, "I need good backlinks, and I need them NOW!"

In order to build good, relevant, safe backlinks, you need to create assets or other ways to attract people to share your content and build links naturally. This takes time and planning. There are quicker grey/black hat ways to build links, but this puts your client's site at risk, and your client needs to know that.

Moz recently came out with a good beginner's guide to link building. Perhaps you can pull some tidbits from that to help your client understand why his/her request is unreasonable. http://moz.com/blog/beginners-guide-to-link-building

The amount of time you need to wait varies widely depending on a lot of things. Google's John Muller said in a recent hangout that the disavowed links aren't all removed from the site at once. It's staggered based on when the links are recrawled and reindexed by the bots. This means you may not see a big jump after a few weeks or months, but instead gradually see improvement over time. Here is the hangout: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxqkqGyCaI4

As to the new bad links you've found, you can continue to update your disavow file with new bad links you find, there's no need to constantly submit reconsideration requests.

Assuming not all of your pages hold incredible value and don't get visited a lot, I don't think you'd need to do it in phases. You can save yourself some time by throwing in some regex to grab large chunks of URLs at a time and redirect them that way.

Your more valuable pages should be one-to-one redirected as to not confuse users and to retain the most juice to the right place, but for less important pages, grab a bunch at a time.

One way to do this is:

redirectmatch 301 ^/sub/directory/(.*)$    http://site.com/newdirectory

This would grab all pages under site.com/new/directory/ANYTHING to site.com/newdirectory/.

Hope that helps.

In Webmaster Tools you can see if there are any manual action penalties. Just because there are none there doesn't mean the site isn't penalized, but if there is something there, then it's time to take action right away.

This little tool can help indicate as well if you don't see a manual action, but without historical data like analytics and ranking reports, it becomes more difficult: http://feinternational.com/website-penalty-indicator/

Some SEOs say not to disavow until you know you're hit with a penalty, but I like being proactive.

These links are definitely spammy. These are the kinds of links that take down websites, and when I get a new client with a lot of this kind of stuff, I'll submit a proactive disavow report.

Recovering from a link spam penalty isn't exactly the easiest or fastest thing in the world, so making sure it never gets to that point is important.

Mind PMing me your. Htaccess?

don't put your URL in for line 4, keep it as "localhost" like in the example.

Thanks! Although, yeah, not very easy to play with.

The code above will do the opposite.

domain.com/page.html will become domains.com/page

Did you test for that? Usually this is how people prefer their URLs to be, and if they type in the .html, they'll still get to the page.

I wouldn't recommend using the disavow tool for this. The disavow tool is used to clean up spammy links that were not gained naturally.

A better solution is to use 301 redirects and redirect the 404'd pages to the new pages that work on your website. That way users will land where they should if they click the links, and Google will still give you juice from those links.

Here's a place to get started on how t do that: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/93633?hl=en

The Schema markup is all you need. I've never had to do anything else besides that, and Google usually indexes the rich snippet within a couple weeks.

I've never done this specific rule, but it would definitely be a rewrite rule in your .htaccess file in your root. You can give this piece a shot:

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /html/(.*).html\ HTTP/

RewriteRule .* http://localhost/html/%1 [R=301,L]

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /html/(.*)\ HTTP/

RewriteRule .* %1.html [L]

Jeez.... how do I get rid of all the extra spacing?!

Anyway, if that doesn't work, there are some other options here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5730092/how-to-remove-html-from-url

And if you need to customize the regex a bit, this can help: http://www.regexr.com/

We've never had an issue. We test tag manager in our dev sites, they don't get indexed, but the tags will still fire.

We discussed this internally yesterday, and came to the same conclusion EGOL did. SEOs are so quick to panic and change everything on the slightest bit of real news. What's the harm in waiting and seeing how things are after the dust settles?

In general, I find it's always better to consolidate and build a nice big authority under one domain. In your case, it'll take some analysis of how those 10 sites are already performing. If they are well-built and already established, it may be better to keep them. If not, create pages on your one domain for them, redirect the old sites, and create listings for each one, pointing to the landing page for the property. This is, in general, the better route I've found 9 times out of 10... and now-a-days maybe more like 99 times out of 100. Especially in real estate, which is a very competitive market.

This is one of the things Panda was trying to discourage (creating pages strictly for SEO value as opposed to user value that have thin content).

Consolidating and building out a single page is the way to go. Google will still crawl the product numbers, and they will be on a much stronger page. Even if they're not in the URL and title, a more valuable page nearly always wins out.

Not only that, you're playing with fire right now. If you haven't been hit by Panda yet, your odds are much higher with the numerous little pages.

I think you're already in Panda territory. The content can't get much thinner. It seems like all those sub-pages that are linked to on the page you just shared are unnecessary, no? Couldn't you just have the one page, build it out with the cars it works in, maybe a diagram or instruction on how to put it in, and make a really valuable page?

What's the thought process of creating a bunch of new pages, even though it's the same product, just referred to differently by different companies? Just for the unique URLs and titles?

Consolidating all of that would eliminate thin content and likely strengthen your landing page exponentially.

This issue isn't duplicate content, Moz is just flagging it as that because of the severe lack of content, making the footer, sidebar, etc. the majority of the content on the page. This is not good, and the best way to remedy it would be to build out more content.

I realize with roughly 14k pages, this isn't realistic to do for every single page, but you could prioritize. What are your most popular products? Start with those and build out content to make sure they rank and perform as well as possible, and then continue to go down the list as you have time to do so, manually optimizing and building out the most profitable/popular pages first.

When it comes to unique content, there is no automated solution. Either you write stuff, hire someone else to write stuff, or do what a lot of places do: implements a review system for customers to use and crowd-source the unique content that way.

Yep. Of course, as with any change, back the old rules up into a text file before making the move... just in case it explodes everything (but it won't). Just a precaution.