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Our IT department wants to make a change to our website and serve all the pages under SSL (https).

This will be happening at the same time as a move from classic ASP to ASP.Net so the file extensions for non re-written urls will change (this doesn't equate to many).

They will be ensuring everything is 301 redirected correctly.

Even with this I can't help being very nervous about the change.

We have tens of thousands of links to the website gained over many years, and I understand even with 301'ing them they will lose some of their value. We receive tens of thousands of natural visitors per day.

Has anyone done anything like this before, or have any advice on whether it is the right thing to do?

I have a micro niche site that performs reasonably well (page 1 at least) for it's main keywords. It is an exact match domain.

To save the ongoing maintenance of a site that gets less than 10 visitors a day, I was thinking of redirecting this micro niche site to a bigger site (a niche site that the micro niche fits into, if that makes sense!)

Would I lose rankings because of the power that the EMD provided?

Would it be better keeping it there for the backlink it provides to the bigger site (although on the same C Class IP)

Is there anyway of clearing the 'Tool Reports You've Run' list on the Pro Dashboard, or setting certain reports not to be saved here?

That's a good idea and could be worth trying out.

My only slight worry with this is as newer products are introduced, there is invariably a period of time when both are popular searches so I wouldn't really want to append 'blue widget 2010' content to 'blue widget 2011' during this period and possibly lose rankings.

I could add 'blue widget 2008' and 'blue widget 2009' of course to the 'blue widget 2011' page, but this might look odd that 'blue widget 2010' wasn't there.

I guess I was also asking if losing pages looks bad to Google - do they like to see a continually growing site?

I know there is value having lots of unique content on our websites, but I'm wondering how long it should be kept for, and if there is any value in 301 redirecting it?

So, for example we have a number of pages on our website that are dedicated to single products (blue widget x, blue widget y, red widget x, red widget y). Nice unique content, with some (but not many) links. These products are no longer available though and have been replaced.

So I'm faced with three choices:

1. Leave it as it is, and hope it adds to the overall site authority (by value of being another page), and also perhaps mop up a few longer tail keywords. Add a link to the replacement product on these pages;

2. 301 redirect these pages to the replacement products to give these a bit of a boost, and lose the content;

3. 301 redirect these pages to the replacement products and move all the old content to a new 'blue widgets archive' and 'red widgets archive' page?

Would appreciate everyones thoughts!