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In the last 45 days, I am receiving an increasing number of 404 alerts in Google Webmaster Tools. When I audit the notifications, they are not "new" broken links, these are all links that have been pointing to non-existent pages for years that for some reason Google is just notifying me about them. This has also coincided with about a 30% drop in organic traffic from late April to early May. The site is www.petersons.com and its been around for a while and the site attracts a fair amount of natural links so in the 2 years I've managed the campaign I've done very little link-building. I'm in the process of setting up redirects for these urls but why is Google now notifying me of years old broken links and could that be one of the reasons for my drop in traffic. My second issue is my I am being notified that I am blocking over 8,000 urls in my Robots file when I am not. I attached a screenshot. Here is a link to a screenshot. http://i.imgur.com/ncoERgV.jpg

Helllo I need help understanding the following scenario. We do campaign tracking for number of our sites using urt parameters. These are normally PR links with utm parameters. I am not sure if we should remove the utm parameter and forget about tracking the links completely if it offers an added SEO value with direct links OR we just keep using utm parameters for PR tracking and use canonical tag instead on respective pages. For me SEO value is most important. But i am trying to understand what i am losing or gaining. Kindly sugggest Thanks