To add to what George says....

Google often tries to crawl pages that don't exist - simply to make sure they aren't missing anything on your site. When a page is clearly broken, you want to communicate this to Google by serving a 404 (but you can make it a friendly 404)

Here's what Googler John Mueller has to say:

What about the funky URLs that are “clearly broken?” When our algorithms like your site, they may try to find more great content on it, for example by trying to discover new URLs in JavaScript. If we try those “URLs” and find a 404, that’s great and expected. We just don’t want to miss anything important (insert overly-attached Googlebot meme here)."

Google expects to find 404s on your site. When they don't find 404s for links that should be broken, this sends confusing signals and could cause crawl problems.

I recommend reading this entire article - it's one of the most helpful I've ever read on the subject: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.ch/2011/05/do-404s-hurt-my-site.html

As for expired products  - as George said it's best to 301 them, usually to a category level page.

Lots of good answers here.

Generally, there's not much benefit to doing this, especially if the domains are new as Streamline Metrics pointed out.

The risk however, is if the domains have a negative history associated with them. If bad links were pointed at the old domain, then those links will now point at your main site when you redirect them. If an algorithmic action like Penguin or an over-optimization filter was applied to the old site, your risk carrying that baggage to the new site.

Sometimes it makes sense to redirect domains.

• SEOmoz.com redirects to seomoz.org. Lots of folks type seomoz.com, so this makes sense.
• You migrate an old domain.

In general, however, there's virtually no SEO benefit to buying a previously unestablished keyword rich domain and redirecting it for traffic, rankings boost (unless on those rare occasions it's a very popular domain name to begin with)

Hi Anton,

Great question! Folks get really caught up in the proper way to use H1 tags and there's a lot of misinformation and rumors out there.

In the old days SEOs discovered that there was a correlation between words in the H1 tag and rankings, and so it became best practice to load all of your keywords there.

As time drew on and Google became more sophisticated, new research by SEOmoz and others discovered that there really wasn't a statistical significance to adding keywords specifically to the H1 tag - in fact the simple use of keywords in a large font towards the beginning of the document worked just as well.

So the best thing you can do for an H1 is the way it was intended - use it as the unique title of the document.

I don't see a problem if this means it's placed after the h2, but I would be wary of placing your most important content further down the page. Google seems to discourage important content pushed too far down the page, but sometimes there's legitimate reasons to place your CTA in a prominent place.

Just make sure your readers can easily find your important content - especially true if you're placing a CTA on every page!

Hello Prime85,

Both these answers are correct in their own way, but let me clarify and add my 2 cents.

1. 404s don't hurt your rankings directly, but they can provide a poor user experience.

2. If you keep URLs "live" - then Google can keep these URLs in their index indefinitely. This means search engines may waste time and crawling resources visiting pages you don't want in the index, while ignoring your other pages. This CAN hurt your SEO.

Long story short, (like Brian says) if the page is no longer relevant, you should remove it from the index or redirect it to another URL.

3. Returning a 404 kills all link juice that may have gone to the page, and it can also send confusing signals to search engines about the structure of your site if you have a bunch of pages returning 404s at the same time you have a bunch of new, but similar, pages popping into existence.

The best policy is to set up a 301 redirect from your outdated pages to the most relevant new pages. Don't redirect everything to a single page like the homepage, but instead the redirect to the page that would be most relevant and useful for the user.

On the other hand, if it's a low-value page and there's really no need to redirect it, you should remove it from the index. There's a couple ways to do this:

1. Put a meta robots "NOINDEX" tag in the head and wait for Google to crawl the page and process the noindex. It helps if the URL is listed in your sitemap so that they can more easily "find" the url.
2. Block the URL through robots.txt, then use Google's Remove URL tool in Webmaster tools
3. Return a 404, and use the Remove URL tool

Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.

I agree with Shane - this sounds like a bad idea all around. It's fine to generate the title tag dynamically, but it should generate on the backend or your CMS, before the page renders in a browser.

Google does try to parse javascript for links and content, but it's inconsistent and I'm almost certain they would either see your non-scripted title, or get really confusing signals that could cause trouble later.

The best solution may be to explain to your Devs that Google most likely wont parse the javascript, and see if they can come up with another solution.

Best of luck.