Hi Eric, I'll try to answer your further question even if I'm not an oracle like Pete

First of all thanks Pete to underline that you need to give google just one response since you can't give them both 301 and 404, I was assuming that and I didn't focus on that part of Eric's answer.

Second. Eric, If your purpose is to give google the ability of recrawl the old content to let them see it has disappeared you want to give them a 404 or a 410 which are respectively not found and permanently not found. Before it was a difference but now they've almost the same value under google's eyes (further reading). In that way google can access your page and see that those contents are now gone.

In the case of 403 the access is denied to anyone both google and humans, so in that case google won't be able to access and recrawl it. If your theory is based (and I think you're in the good way) upon the thing that google needs to recrawl your content and see it ahs really gone, 403 is not the response you should give it.

Great! Look forward to see your results

Hi Eric, in my experience I've always found 4** better than 301 to solve this kind of issues.

Many people uses this response too much just because they want to show google that their site don't have any 404.

Just think about it a little, a 301 is a permanent redirect, a content which has just moved from one place to another. If you got a content you want to get rid of, do you want to give google the message "hey that low quality content is not where you found it but  now it's here", no. You wan't to give google the message that the low quality content has been improved or removed. And a 404 is the right message to give him if you deleted that content.

It's prefectly normal to have 404s in a website, many 404 won't hurt your rankings, only if those pages were ranking already so users will receive a 404 instead and if some external sites were linking there in that case you may consider a 301.

While I think that google has a sort of a black list (and a white list too) I don't think that it has a memory of bad sites he encounters, if you fix your issues you'll start to rank again.

The issue you may have is not that you're site may be tainted but that maybe you still have some issues here and there which you didn't fix. As it seems Googlers said that Panda is now part of the algo so if you fix your issues you won't need any upgrade to start re ranking.

Hope this may have helped!! G luck!

Hi Moby, first of all the difference between all the tags you mention:

• canonical: is a meta tag which indicates which page containing the same content is the original one, It may be used from one page to another to indicate which one is the main one or a as a self canonical indicating the same page where it is located, because you can avoid duplciates due to sessions id or other kind of tags (trackings and the like)
• noindex: is a meta tag which indicates to bots to not include that page to their index. It's used to avoid low quality pages to being shown in serps
• nofollow: is both a meta, used to avoid search engines to crawl all the links in one page, or is used attached to a link to indicate bots to not pass value to that link.

So if you got pages which are identical you want to use the canonical in both the original page (as a self canonical) and in the other oines pointing to the original one. If they're are almost identical. If they're not you may want to:

• noindex those duplicates
• add quality content to the other regions pages so google finds that they're not identical at all.

Maybe your regions pages are seen as identical due to:

• low content, an image and slight changes to the title tag is not enough to mark a page as different, try to add good content, or mash content from other pages.
• is the content accessible when not logged in? If not google is seeing identical pages because its bots cannot crawl the content (bots cannot login)

About the login page you may noindex it, but I don't see any hurry to  make changes to that page.

Hope that helps!

you're welcome, hope your site will be speeding up a lot!!!

as Paul correctly said, if your purpose is to improve the page speed just be sure that you're not resizing the images with css/html but that you're uploading the images in that dimensions.

An image of 10241024 resized to 100100 still weights as an 1024 image so my recommendation is to resize all those images to the desired dimensions, moreover if you can use an external cdn you'll save bandwith and have those images loading outside your website. That will help reducing the loadtime of the page.

Hi Ve, just as a further clarification, remember that when you use the 301 redirection you're passing that value to the new page although you lose something of that value (further reading here) that's why you should schoose wisely whenever perform a redirect or not.

In the case you need to do that consider that you won't be starting from 0 but not even from the same point you were with the other page which was ranking.

I think there's no agreement on that, it normally depends on personal choice. Normally I prefer to use all the separators just to make the site a little different and don't use always the same structure. However if I need to choose one I'll use user experience and readability for it, and personally I find the pipe much more readable than the hyphen just because separates better the sentences, However you may use a combination of both if the two portion of text are related.

Examples:

• Guide to Ibiza - Boat trip to Ibiza | IBIZATRAVELS.COM
• Hotel Ibiza | Bars and Restaurant in Ibiza

The first sentence (the last part is just for branding if you want although I don't love so much having the domain in the title), got an hyphen in the first part because boat trip seems to clarify which part of the guide to ibiza we're speaking about. The site name is not related that's why I put a pipe. In the same way I separated the two parts in the second option just because they're both about tourism in ibiza but they're not co-related in this case.

Hi Ve. A 404 is generated when someone reach a page which doesn't exist, so to have someone reaching such a page you need to give them a path to it. There may be two different paths:

• internal. You can remove this internal path changing all the links pointing to the old url to the new one.
• external. This may be trickier. There may be:

1. external sites pointing with links to the old page. In this case you need to think if it's really worth to change the url. If it is, get in touch with those websites and ask them to change the link.
2. Google having indexed that page and make it rank. That cannot be changed by YOU.

So make all the internal and external possible fixes

change your sitemap and submit that to google webmaster tools

and then you'll need to modify your htaccess (if your server is driven by apache, which 90% normally do) and create a rule which redirects from the old page to the new one. In that way even if the external site doesn't change the old link the user won't receive a 404 but will be redirected to the new page, and google will drop the old url (in a week or so it depends on the crawling rate) and then index instead the new one.

For the htaccess rule if you're not experienced with that kind of file leave that to your it guys, because a wrong comma there, may brake the whole site.

Hope this is clear