Hi Dana,

It looks like some of the *.cat links are still being used through your site.

For instance, /StoreFront/B8I.cat is actually 301-ing to /StoreFront/category/B8I.cat and /StoreFront/B8I.cat (with anchor text "headphones or earbuds") is being used on the /StoreFront/category/controlling-the-low-end-on-your-stage page.

The /StoreFront/category/controlling-the-low-end-on-your-stage page is at level 7 in your site and is linking to /StoreFront/B8I.cat, making it at level 8, which then 301s to /StoreFront/category/B8I.cat, keeping it still on level 8 because of the 301, and finally redirecting with a 301 to StoreFront/category/headphones (which is a level 1, because it is accessible from the homepage (level 0) navigation).

Does that make sense?

It did in my brain... just let me know if it does on paper : )

Hope this helps.

Mike

It shouldn't. As xoffie says, if they are noindex and not linked to, then Google really doesn't care about them.

If they were linked to I still don't think that they would affect you negatively, you just wouldn't rank well for them - unless it was automatically generated duplicate content. If they were just blank pages or some system generated page that was "unique", my guess would be the search engines would just ignore them as not being overly valuable.

Just my opinion.

Mike

... killing me Steven ; )

It is really tough to say; however, I typed "website builder reviews" into Google Trends and it looks like there was a drop in searches for that terminology in March, which would correspond to what I am seeing on your graph.

Mike

Hi Steven,

My guess would be you are seeing the downtrend, because of the season.

Here is the data I pulled from Google Trends for "hockey stick" - as you can see, the peaks tend to be in December and January for the year.

My guess things will be slow until next year when the season picks back up.

Hope this helps.

Mike

Hi Alexander,

If not a lot of people are linking to them AND if the page has an expiration date of sorts, you'd probably want to 410 the page.

404 and 410 both tell Google that the page no longer exists; however, the 410 (GONE) is more specific than the 404 (NOT FOUND).

The 410 "should" naturally get the page out of Google's index faster as well.

Or, if it is an ongoing thing, you could consider changing your URL to /group-course and then just constantly change the content on that particular page, letting the URL accumulate inbound links and drive traffic... I don't know exactly how you are using the page, but just an option.

Hope this helps.

Mike