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In addition to Ray's response, are you also asking about increasing walk-in visits to your brick and mortar store via an increased presence on local search? You're best planning gains will likely come from quantifying the average values of visits to your brick and mortar and ecommerce stores then planning for X hours of work to increase that number Y%.  This is all going to be data that's unique to you. Still, here are some guides to help you with your planning. http://searchengineland.com/google-uses-neural-networks-reverse-turing-tests-validate-street-address-numbers-signs-209801  (A review of the growing interlaced relationship between real location presence and virtual presence.) http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/tracking-offline-conversions-hope-seven-best-practices-bonus-tips/  (Analytics guidance on tracking offline conversions) http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/study/2343577/google-local-searches-lead-50-of-mobile-users-to-visit-stores-study (Stats from Search Engine Watch saying 50% of mobile users doing local searches visit business locations.)

It depends a bit on your setup and how easy/difficult it is to implement the tags but a couple of things to have in mind: NOINDEX, FOLLOW should still mean the hreflang tags on the page are seen and followed even though the page in question is not indexed, the page needs to be parsed for the crawler to read the meta tag. If you are not facing some serious issue with crawling and your system automatically adds the canonical and hreflang tags then I would leave them as is even on the no indexed pages (you might for example want to start indexing the french pages but not the english pages of certain cat/brand etc combinations and the hreflang tags might help speed recognition of this kind of change to the crawlers). For the x-default my understanding is it is mainly for use in a multinational setup with default landing pages and or auto lang/region redirections and your url suggests your are aiming at Canada (and maybe USA) and only for en/fr so my understanding is it might not be really crucial in this case. Check out this page for some more details.

Hello WMCA, Does BV want you to add that rel ="canonical" tag to the main product page, or just the paginated review pages. If the former, I say no way. If the latter, we should discuss further. It could be advantageous, but I'd rather send the authority to the main product page instead.

Thanks for the insights and I'll investiage both options. Cheers!

I read a post by bings Duane Forrester where he explained that they will lose trust in your site map if it has errors more then 2%. all entries should return status code 200, no 404's or redirects. He also said that you should not include all pages, just places where you want bing to start crawling from, or where you want to discover links.

Ideally, that's what I would have done. Have new site on a subdomain disallow, noindex everything and allow user transition and testing to go forward without impacting SERPS. Unfortunately, someone's bright idea (before I was hired) was to transition site entirely within two weeks and take down the old one right away, hence the pickle. We understand the ramifications of large 301'ing but our current site is terrible for many reasons (grandfather/legacy issues) and our SERP visibility is good but not where we should be. That's why loss in traffic is a gamble worth taking because our new site will be 1000% improved from a SE & user perspective. Don't get me wrong, we don't take the loss likely b/c we are the 2nd largest online retailer in our market. About 2500 top level URLs are changing.