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Thank you very much for this answer.  What I needed most is a good overall direction to take and you definitely provided that.

I wonder if using canonicals to start 'centralizing' content might be a good way to round up the old versions of the site.  Yes, when I originally built the site it was by hand, each page individual .html and google still indexes those.  I removed them at the start of this journey and ended up with 24k 404s... who knew they were in that long!?

Was great to hear of a similar experience... happy to hear more stories as well.

Looking for opinions and guidance here.  Would sincerely appreciate help.

I started a site long, long ago (1996 to be exact) focused on travel in the US.  The site did very well in the search results up until panda as I built it off templates using public databases to fill in the blanks where I didn't have curated content.  The site currently indexes around 310,000 pages.  I haven't been actively working on the site for years and while user content has kept things somewhat current, I am jumping back into this site as it provides income for my parents (who are retired).

My questions is this.  Will it be easier to track through all my issues and repair, or rebuild as a new site so I can insure everything is in order with today's SEO?

and bonus points for this answer ... how do you handle 301 redirects for thousands of incoming links

Some info to help:

CURRENTLY

• DA is in the low 40s
• some pages still rank on first page of SERPs (long-tail mainly)
• urls are dynamic (I have built multiple versions through the years and the last major overhaul was prior to CMS popularity for this size of site)
• domain is short (4 letters) but not really what I want at this point
• Lots of original content, but oddly that content has been copied by other sites through the years

WHAT I WANT TO DO

• get into a CMS so that anyone can add/curate content without needing tech knowledge
• change to a more relevant domain (I have a different vision)
• remove old, boilerplate content, but keep original

Thanks for the feedback!  As for hosting on separate servers, I have thought about going that route, but then I look at some of the larger networks with hundreds of sites if not thousands and I am not guessing that they are all on separate servers.  I could do the leg work of some reverse DNS to find that out (will update this post)

I can see with spammy sites how the same server would hurt a network as it could quickly become a 'bad neighborhood', but I don't think google would likely penalize sites on the same network if the incoming links are from outside root domains and the site is of decent quality

I feel like the answer to this lies in the inbound links and the content quality of the sites, but am looking for some hard evidence to support my thoughts.

A good example is Smashing Networks series of sites... I need to do some research on that

I would base this on the number of pages and your ability to get into the database of the CMS environments.  Depending on how deep your link structure is, this may be a quick process.  If you are able to map the fields correctly, you can duplicate the aliases with a little elbow grease.  Simply export the main drupal content table and reconstruct it as a wordpress table, then upload.

If you don't feel like handling the MySQL for this, I would still recommend duplicating the aliases... 301's are very useful, but it does seem like their is a small bit of decline as the SE's reset your info.

Do keep in mind the your page code will also need attention.  Drupal vs Wordpress in its rendering will produce different code.  Your SEO capabilities are also going to be effected by the plugins that you are using in WP

I tend to use the pipe as the delimiter, but the arrow could work as well.  I think that once you get the need SEO information in your title tag (which you do) the next step is to think about usability on the SERPs.  I think the second example is more intuitive and visually catching to the eye which can draw you some extra clicks in itself.

Part of the SEO battle is that once you are on the SERPs, what little things can you do to capture the user's attention.  I think your second example does that better than the first.

#2 - completely new url's says it all for me.  The others are all subs of that change.  If possible you need to address these changes in some form of 301 redirect so that the spiders can follow your changes.  update the .htaccess file or even create static php redirect headers or similar if you have to.  This should prevent the search engines from reporting the dreaded 404 and getting the page dumped.

#4 - The no-index is not something you have to worry about as you are removing pages from the SERPs, not trying to get them ranked.  Any page that is getting no-index is out of the SEO equation at this point.

#3 - this will improve rankings/search-ability so you are not looking at seeing a negative effect here.  Updates on these pages, if done correctly, generally have favorable results and at the worst have 'no change' in the SERPs

#1 - I would need to know more detail on this one, but the new architecture will probably be reflected in #2's urls so if that it solved, so is number 1.  Again, a more clear, easily accessible architecture hopefully allows the spiders to effectively categorize the sections of your site.  The new IA will probably be more pleasing to users which will have its own benefits as well.

---- And the final vote... All at once, just address the 404's and you should be ok

--- I am moving this into open discussion to see if I can get a few more responses, I am very curious if anyone has experience in this area ---

Hello, As a resource for my link building strategies I have often wondered if building my own 'web network' of sites would prove to be valuable in link building.  For example, if I were targeting the travel industry (or insert a niche here) and created 30 websites on various related topics in the industry, would using outbound links from those sites to other relevant websites help increase domain authority?

Obviously, I would need to avoid creating unusable sites with boilerplate content just for the sole purpose of linking.  I am envisioning working websites/blogs that would be valuable on their own.

Some thoughts and questions that have crossed my mind:

1. If these sites are all hosted on the same server, would the link exchange end up in penalization in the SERPs?

2. Being that the sites are designed to be quality sites on their own, can they share links between themselves if the links are relevant?

3. This is already being done across the web, but what makes one network valuable and 'quality' vs another

Being a web dev / host as well as SEO guy I would like to utilize those resources to create a network that is of quality and of value, but am not sure about things appearing 'unnatural'... It seems that the majority of link building falls into the 'unnatural' category as we as SEOs are constantly trying to place our links throughout the web vs. site owners linking naturally back to a website

I was hit pretty hard at lasr.net, a niche travel site focusing on attractions and events.  While the site has been up for over a decade we are currently down 50% from where we normally are.    We had the same issue of having placeholder pages where users could submit their own attractions, events, etc.  While normally operating around 400k pages indexed, I did notice that we ballooned to over 1 million indexed weeks prior to the farmer update.

On the downside for us, the majority of our pages that ranked very well were original content that had been present on the web for a minimum of 5 years.  

I am aggressive on the site with adsense / advertising as it provides the revenue for site production and I could see those placeholder pages or pages with low content being targeted (not unfairly so) as their ratio was a bit skewed.

Currently we are focusing on reevaluating both on page and off page SEO with a primary push for unique content generation.  In the last month we have seen slow, but steady, growth in search traffic.

You make a good point.  That depending on the project requirements and timeline, the extensions may not matter too much.  Great job on the quick rankings!

This is great to hear that you have done well.  I have always believed that, all things being equal, the domain extension should have minor effects on SERPs.  With the spamming of the .info and other cheaper extensions I would imagine that Google would have to put some check in place to eliminate the abuse of the cheaper domain.  I wonder if it is possible that the .co (being a newer domain extension) didn't have the checks against it that a .info would

Danial made a very valid point about branding vs keyword rich domains... we shall see as we move forward.

I have a large US travel site and am looking to make targeted pages for specific locations, attractions etc around the United States.  With many of the TLD's already purchased for these niches, I thought about using the .us extension as it seemed relevant to the topics.  Does this hurt seo possibilities or does the .us extension come across as spammy?

I would base this on the number of pages and your ability to get into the database of the CMS environments.  Depending on how deep your link structure is, this may be a quick process.  If you are able to map the fields correctly, you can duplicate the aliases with a little elbow grease.  Simply export the main drupal content table and reconstruct it as a wordpress table, then upload.

If you don't feel like handling the MySQL for this, I would still recommend duplicating the aliases... 301's are very useful, but it does seem like their is a small bit of decline as the SE's reset your info.

Do keep in mind the your page code will also need attention.  Drupal vs Wordpress in its rendering will produce different code.  Your SEO capabilities are also going to be effected by the plugins that you are using in WP

Looking for opinions and guidance here.  Would sincerely appreciate help.

I started a site long, long ago (1996 to be exact) focused on travel in the US.  The site did very well in the search results up until panda as I built it off templates using public databases to fill in the blanks where I didn't have curated content.  The site currently indexes around 310,000 pages.  I haven't been actively working on the site for years and while user content has kept things somewhat current, I am jumping back into this site as it provides income for my parents (who are retired).

My questions is this.  Will it be easier to track through all my issues and repair, or rebuild as a new site so I can insure everything is in order with today's SEO?

and bonus points for this answer ... how do you handle 301 redirects for thousands of incoming links

Some info to help:

CURRENTLY

• DA is in the low 40s
• some pages still rank on first page of SERPs (long-tail mainly)
• urls are dynamic (I have built multiple versions through the years and the last major overhaul was prior to CMS popularity for this size of site)
• domain is short (4 letters) but not really what I want at this point
• Lots of original content, but oddly that content has been copied by other sites through the years

WHAT I WANT TO DO

• get into a CMS so that anyone can add/curate content without needing tech knowledge
• change to a more relevant domain (I have a different vision)
• remove old, boilerplate content, but keep original

I was hit pretty hard at lasr.net, a niche travel site focusing on attractions and events.  While the site has been up for over a decade we are currently down 50% from where we normally are.    We had the same issue of having placeholder pages where users could submit their own attractions, events, etc.  While normally operating around 400k pages indexed, I did notice that we ballooned to over 1 million indexed weeks prior to the farmer update.

On the downside for us, the majority of our pages that ranked very well were original content that had been present on the web for a minimum of 5 years.  

I am aggressive on the site with adsense / advertising as it provides the revenue for site production and I could see those placeholder pages or pages with low content being targeted (not unfairly so) as their ratio was a bit skewed.

Currently we are focusing on reevaluating both on page and off page SEO with a primary push for unique content generation.  In the last month we have seen slow, but steady, growth in search traffic.