Hi Brad

ATP has the right idea indeed. I don't foresee there being any issues with this at all. You're biggest two risks with any migration (back or front end) are broken links and downtime. If you're not changing any URLs, then you don't need to do redirects. Just obviously minimize any downtime as much as possible and you should be fine!

However, you should allow Google to crawl your JavaScript and CSS (which is now blocked). Here's some background info on that:

• https://moz.com/blog/why-all-seos-should-unblock-js-css
• http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2014/10/updating-our-technical-webmaster.html

Hi - right, I should have answered your specific situation too

When the user selects a facet - does this change the URL too? Meaning, it's supposed to be a totally different page?

Hi - right, then if the URL changes for the user, you'll want to probably use the PushState method (linked above) to convey this to Google. They likely can't see the URL change by default.

You can check by trying to crawl the site with Screaming Frog SEO Spider with the user agent set to Googlebot. Then go to "outlinks" for the page with the facet links, and see if they are listed.

Hope that helps some more! Let me know if you need further direction.

-Dan

Hey Andy

To answer your questions:

1. So if you're 301'ing the page, it's not really a 404 page, it's a 301 So yes, you can remove the 301 redirect, making it a true 404 page (check that it returns a 404 code using fetch as google or a tool like urivalet.com).

2. If they are in the sitemap, this won't prevent Google from removing them from the index, but it will throw an error. And not that many people care about Bing, but Bing is apparently super picky about having XML sitemaps perfect.

So yes I would just 404 them without the redirects.

Hey There

I just did a reverse image search on two of your images and they are present in Google Image search

• http://screencast.com/t/QWKhqQfIH0Z8 - this one is indexed.
• This one is indexed and both versions are from Eyeem

But one issue, is that when I click 'view image' (what normally would open the image file in a new tab - instead it triggers a download box for me --> http://screencast.com/t/7LyLRRJ4CTb6 - perhaps this is because you are preventing people from doing so and just copying the images for free. But I was actually able to download the image for free straight from Google (the download worked).

Which leads me to another question... if the images are not free, maybe it makes sense to not index them? Or maybe index a watermarked version or small thumbnail?

Hi There

There does not appear to be any accessibility issues. I can crawl and access the images just fine with my crawler.

My guess is that since the images are duplicate, and they also exist on other websites, Google may be avoiding indexing them since they already are indexed and they are technically not being linked to with a normal tag.

Is this causing a particular issue for the site? Or is it just a pesky technical bug?

My initial thought is "ads above the fold". It's hard to tell in Archive.org's archive of your old design, but it looks like ad space increased a lot on the new site? You have the block on the left which kind of interferes with the content, as well as the banner ad on the right which is pretty large (but doesn't distract from the content much).

Plus these ads are not just on the homepage, they are on the inner content pages as well.

They way Matt Cutts explained "ads above the fold" - it's not so much you need to cut down the pixel size of ads, but make sure not ALL your pages have too many ads - so only make a %% of pages on your site have ads, and some not.

I would play with how ads are appearing on the site to begin with.

Your issue does not sound like a migration error, because that is usually immediate. This sounds like something Google takes a little longer to process (page layout / design, user metrics, ads etc).

You can do a "site:" search directly in Google like this and I currently see this --> http://screencast.com/t/ZVqq5iumQ - you can probably do a site: search on the whole domain, a subfolder or a specific page etc.