Hi,

URL format and length it's a ranking signal - that means shorter URLs are "more important" but only if there is a taxonomy in place. If all your URLs are directly on the root - then this doesn’t play any role. So if your domain has a lot of content and some or most is structured domain/folder/ and domain/folder/folder etc - then moving from /blog to the root will bring some signals that this content might be important.

But note that having short urls on the root directly it's not a roadmap to good rankings

On the user side - if the content is "blog related" - blogging, articles, opinions etc - then I would keep it on the /blog/ as it can influence the CTR in SERPs - that also depending on the queries of course and if it will match what users are expecting - a blog thing or some other resource ...

Hope it makes sense.

Cheers.

Hi,

There are tools that you can use - though for close 50k pages is harder to crawl. Best bet is the Web master tools count - although is not 100% exact either.

The site:domain is a good indicator but it's generated "on the fly" but it will show you a better result if you go "deeper" and click on page 10-20 and so on.

However right now it looks like there is an issue with site:domain. for more info see: http://www.seroundtable.com/google-site-command-cluster-16829.html

Cheers.

No. No correlation with SEO.

However the same way you block your temp or admin folder, there is no need in letting any bot crawling your cgi-bin folder.

Cgi-bin folder holds executable file - you don't want external sources to see it anyway - it's "very" private from security reasons. You need more then knowing what's inside the folder to do harm but keeping it hidden is the wise call. Better safe then sorry.

Hi,

Depending on your domain registar you can do URL forwarding (URL forwarding is in fact a fancy name for a 301 redirect). In this case you don't need a hosting account.

For example if you host with Godaddy you can easily do that using the control pannel of your domains.

What domain registar do you use ?