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I don't know how helpful this will be but we have recently been quite successful with a similar approach for one of our clients.

When their site was launched it was enjoying good rankings for their core categories and great conversions. Over time a ton of content was added all over the place and the homepage looked like a Xmas tree with the links, baubles and buttons on it. After about a year they started to slip and revenue on the core categories was dropping like a lead canary.

We got called in, asked them to be brutally honest about the importance of each category and created a hierarchy for them to sign off on. Once we had that we removed the non-critical links from both the homepage and the main nav, relegating them to sub-menus. We also cleaned up a whole bunch of other stuff that really should have been caught earlier.

The end result was an average 35% increase in conversions on the core categories within a month. Interestingly the "secondary" categories I thought we were possible sacrificing didn't suffer at all - most also saw modest increases.

Check Richard Baxter's posts - he is brilliant at this sort of thing and I'm sure he had something recently on choosing your homepage links in one of his presentations. You might be better off stepping back and following his approach from scratch to see what really needs to be there.

Hope this is of some help.

We did this a year or so back for a client merger - the soon-to-be-defunct domain was redirected to the new site and definitely did help things, but only after a delay of about 60 days. Having said that, the tactic would have passed human scrutiny because of the situation - not sure if that would factor in here.

Are the sites of a similar theme? If they are you could buy the new site and then email as many of the linking domains as possible and ask them if they would be willing to change their link to point to your client's existing domain. It's more work but could end up being a great solution if they agree to tweak the anchor text for you as well. Plus, you then have another relationship - and you can never have too many of those when link building.

I believe the (.*) captures the path of the original domain and $1 uses that path in constructing your redirect url. I'm replying without checking my trusty htaccess cheat sheet but this should ensure that you redirect all paths on the old domain to their new equivalent on your new domain.

This seomoz post would seem to indicate yes - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/panda-24-and-analytics-session-update-rolled-out-simultaneously

Larry, we're actually starting phase 2 of their project (had the first meeting a few hours ago actually). As part of that I'll be revisiting what we did in phase one and what we want to improve upon. Our client initially also felt the same way but changed their mind quickly - I just can't remember why.

If you want I can email you the details I dig up along with the designer/developer comments on the integration. I'll send it through your site contact form - I assume that's you in PA 19348?

I have a client who seems to be in the same $ volume ballpark as yours. They migrated to BigCommerce a year ago and I was part of the project. The developers/designers seemed to be able to implement most of my recommendations without too many problems. Like anything there were some tweaks and a compromise or two but overall its been a great experience - the client is really happy and sales are up several hundred percent, due in no small part to how seo friendly BC is compared to their previous solution.

I also found them very receptive to some of my off-the-wall requests, not what I was expecting for sure.

It does sound as if everything was removed from the old domain. Your best bet would probably be to take the old xml sitemap, paste it into excel and use Niels Bosma's SEO Tools to check the http status code of each url. If they have redirected everything correctly it should show 301 status codes. If you end up with a whole bunch of 404 codes you know they didn't implement things correctly.

If you don't have the old xml sitemap then another option is to get into webmaster tools and look for a list of urls in the 404 errors and inbound links sections - that will give you something to work with at least.

Hi David,

You need to get into webmaster tools for the old domain. Even though the pages may have been removed you should still be able to see the inbound link reports and hopefully the error reports as well. Here is a screenshot link (it's a clarify link) showing where you would find both of these - http://enzomaticus.clarify-it.com/d/3znqqc

The error report should be your first choice but the linked pages would be a decent second prize.

Let me know if you have any more questions - we've just been through a similar situation and I know what a pain it can be.

Hi Adam,

I know this is an old thread but if you get this you might find it useful. I just checked a particular brewery site; they have their menu marked up with the url and it seems to be picked up by the rich snippets tool OK, although it does throw a few errors.I tested it on a few of my other tools and it definitely gets picked up without a problem.

Here is the GWT link