Welcome to the Q&A Forum

The answer is "it depends" because I don't have enough information to give a good answer.

For Site A - You are getting rid of some number N of content pages and replacing that with a smaller number of content pages and redesigning the home page. I have a number of questions about that:

1. Are you totally deleting the content, or are you consolidating the content onto larger, more comprehensive content pages?

- Example: Today you have pages for [Great things about Red Shoes] [Tips on tying your Yellow Shoes] [The buying guide to Blue Shoes]. Are you replacing that with [The Comprehensive Guide to everything you need to know about wearing, tying and buying any color shoe]?

2. You mention Site B. Is Site B going to contain all of the content that was on Site A, or is it getting totally new content, but in the same subject area?

When I go to your page and look at the source code I see this line:

name='robots' content='noindex,nofollow' />

You are telling the bots not to index the page or follow any links on the page. This is in the source code for your home page.

I'd go back into the wordpress settings (you are using Yoast) and make sure to enable the site for search engine visibility!

Once you do that, and verify that the code is changed to "='index,follow'" then resubmit your sitemaps via webmaster tools.

Most ecommerce sites use user reviews to do this.

Encourage your customers to write reviews of the product, or to submit pictures of the product in use with a description of the photo or setting.

That way you'll gain real content from people talking about your product.

You can also engage in some contests to encourage user reviews and that will both help to sell your products and provide additional non-boilerplate content for your ecommerce pages.

I would say a lot of this depends on the goals for each page.

Think of your page title and meta description as an adwords ad for that particular page. If you were to put up an ad to get people to come to that page, what would the headline and ad copy be?

Would that headline and ad copy properly sell the click? Does the page deliver on the promise sold in the ad? (In other words, will they see one headline and come to a page whose copy is totally different, or does the headline and copy lead right into the page?)

Depending on how strong your brand is, you may want to include the brand name within the body copy. People like what they know and if you've already invested in brand equity, then get that to pay off for you in terms of more clicks.

Titles and Metas are more of an art form as you're balancing how well the title helps direct ranking (focused keywords) with how well the title sells the click (persuasive headlines and branding copy).

As with most things - you'll want to do some testing and see which works best both for your site and your search queries.

OG and Schema can live in the wild together. They are both ways to show information around the entities which they describe.

IMDB is using both OG and Schema to mark up their data:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1392170/

How new is this page? In terms of page metrics, Open Site Explorer (OSE) is not showing any data for that page.

That said, what are you targeting for the search term? "Lost and Found" is too broad given the other topics that come up in google searches. When I search "lost and found fashion" your site's home page comes up at #8, so your domain is at least on page 1.

The top ecommerce site on that search is the category page for Far Fetch. I'd take a look at their link profile to get some ideas of media mentions that you could work for your site.

When I go back to the domain index page, I'm not sure what I'm looking at. The title and "welcome" are really small and I feel like I've been dumped into a google image search

I would have a few people not familiar with the site use it with you looking on to get a feel for their user experience. From there I bet you'll find a number of things to implement that will improve the user experience and make the site pages more sharable (which will enhance their SEO value.)

Given that other people may share those pages, I would incorporate both OG and Schema on the site.

If those pages don't exist anymore then they're not going to impact you one way or another.

Unless you've received some sort of unnatural link warning then I would concentrate more on building more good links and interactions than on spending time and resources getting rid of a number of links that you're not sure are hurting you. As long as you are continually building up your content and working to get good links and citations then the site should be moving in the right direction.

Lots of web sites have some "dirty links" and some sites do well in the serps despite outright spamming. A lot of the negative impacts I've seen has to do with tripping some boundary, so if you're working on the good links then you'll be walking back from that line instead of towards it.

Are you having the issue of your .de pages ranking in .co.uk instead of your .co.uk pages?

If that's the case then I'd look towards usage of HREFLANG both on-page and in the xml sitemaps. That is going to provided Googlebot with a better view of the country-language targeting for the site.

A couple of things that I see on the home page:

The title tag is a bit long. Google will end up rewriting the title for the search query to make it match up with the searcher's question/intent but you're putting a lot on Google. Instead I would redo the title and meta description to read more like the best converting adwords ads that you've been running - or at least to be more brand-heavy.

The home page should be more brand-centric and push the link equity to the inner pages. The header tags should also be structured so that the most important tags for site structure are H1, then H2, etc.

I noticed that your H2 tags are "Contact Us" and "Latest News" - not really anything unique to this page and not the search topics you want to be ranked for. The main topics (Family Law, etc) are all "H3" tags. I'd redo the styling to bump those up to H2's and demote "contact us" and "latest news" to something else.

Lastly, all of the blog posts in "latest news" are only linked with "Read More" as the anchor text. I would change that to be linked by the title to have more relevancy passed on to the sub-pages.

Agree with Dave. Since you are doing one-for-one 301 redirects then you are delivering the user to the page that best matches their intent.

If you were redirecting all of these to the home page, then that could be a problem.

The first place I would look would be the "Top Pages" in webmaster tools and take a look at the topics covered by those pages. Also look at the "Top Queries" report to see the queries and click through rates reported to get a feel for the top performing content.

Another avenue to use is the site's internal search engine. If the site has a "site search", then you can look at the common terms being searched for. If people are searching for something on-site, then it makes a good external search target.

Lastly, look at their adwords account (if they have one). See what adwords terms are bringing in the most traffic and conversions and use that as another starting point for the content strategy.

If the pages are throwing a 404 or the links themselves are nofollowed, then you don't need to worry about them.

If you are putting together a manual link audit report for Google for a reconsideration request, I would include those links along with a column for link status and either set that as "nofollow" or "page generates 404 error" for those pages depending on the error.

If you're not going through a reinclusion request, then you can ignore those as Google will figure out those pages don't exist.

This is more of a business decision, but you want to dive into that manual notification to get to why you received it. Assuming you were running the link building for olddomain.com, you should know which links are problem ones. If not, then you need to go through an audit of the links so you know which ones are problem ones (and can have that for future reference.)

You also want to factor in how much brand building you have done with the current domain. Do you have print collateral, print ads, business cards and a current customer base that knows that domain? Do you get direct type-in traffic for the domain? How are those customers going to react when they see the newdomain URL when typing in the old domain?

My personal site got a manual penalty b/c I built a bunch of low quality links trying to beat wikipedia for a term. That killed the main domain for that site for a little while until I cleaned up the link profile. Now my personal site has the penalty removed and is back in the SERPs. It's not quite to where it was pre-penalty, but I've also done zero link building outreach for that domain since the penalty was lifted. I'm confident that if I were to implement a solid content strategy for that domain this year that I would get back to where I was pre-penalty. It's just a matter of content and effort.

If you have a notification, now's the time to clean up some bad links and disavow the ones you can't remove. That shows Google that you're taking action and can stave off a penalty being applied.

While you can use a cross-domain canonical from your main site to the engine's site, are you sure that you should?

When you canonical the page, you're telling Google "Hey, the page you're on is functionally the same as this other page here. That other page should be the one that gets the credit for this content."

If your primary goal is to have your main page ranking, then you don't want to be telling Google to take away it's credit for your more narrowly focused engine site.

What I would rather do is work to make each of those pages unique - perhaps the main boating site would contain the broader information on the engines as well as reviews/ratings from current customers but then link to the engine-specific site within that page to get to thinks like additional manufacturer specs, repair guides, etc.

That way you are focusing each page better for the target customer and sharing some link equity between the two pages, rather than directing it all at the more narrow domain.

In that case have the contact and disavow plan on tap and ready to execute if needed.

Google doesn't want you to just disavow links that they think are bad; they want you to go through the process of attempting to get them removed. Even if you know there is a 0% chance, you'll have to do it and document your process.

There are a couple of good YouMoz posts detailing this.

Based on what you are describing they may have tripped an algorithmic penalty based on anchor text density.

Since the site has not (yet) received an unnatural links warning, you don't have to start removing those links - but I'd recommend you have a plan just in case.

Rather than disavowing these links, have you thought about these tactics:

1. Contacting the sites to get the anchor text changed.

2. Coming up with a new content campaign to generate more (and more diverse) links to reduce the anchor text density and add more quality links to the site

It's an ongoing process and depends partially on the authority of the sites you are getting links from.

Google has to recrawl the page that the link was placed on, then bake that into their algo for ranking, so if the links are on pages that Google crawls often, it will get counted sooner.

I'm going through the link removal process for unnatural links to a site.

While I'm able to identify the obvious link profile and seo-article links that Google wants removed, what should we do about the links that are generated by the various seo link investigation and ranking services?

Example: http://www.seoprofiler.com/analyze/allamericanfencing.com

This site (seoprofiler) automatically creates these links to web sites when it generates its reports. Are those links that need to be removed or disavowed, or will Google not care?

I want to err on the side of caution, but don't know how to treat these types of pages. The site didn't ask for or lobby for those links, so it's "natural" in that sense, but they're not editorially earned either (except for happen to be ranking for a similar term).

Does anyone have experience on this aspect of the unnatural link grooming process?

We have an existing site that is a subdomain but we recently acquired an exact match domain.  Will building links to the exact match domain and having the domain point at our existing subdomain work or should we convert the entire site and redirect our existing subdomain to the new domain?

What I'm trying to figure out is how to maximize the benefit here and how the existing mass of links pointing to our existing subdomain (shop.domain.com) can be used.

New domain:

keywordshop.com

Existing URL:

shop.domain.com