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A few days ago deployed a new site. A funny thing happened within one day. Google Analytics commenced reporting Organic traffic as lifting by 25%. At the same time Google Analytics commenced reporting that direct traffic dropped by 25%. All other traffic sources remained at the same level. This is all being reported through GA Universal. Has anyone experienced this before? Any advice is appreciated. Also noted that with Google Webmaster is reporting, since the day of the new site deployment, a 40% drop in impressions and click. Reported referrals on this deployment day also went through the roof. All of the Google tools I am depending on are not supporting my discovery of a solution to this. If anyone has been through this on universal analytics or traditional analytics please help! Offering lots of good karma points in return. Cheers.

Hi all, I'm working on an e-commerce site that sells products that may only be available for a certain period of time. Eg. A product may only be selling for 1 year and then be permanently out of stock. When a product goes out of stock, the page is removed from the site regardless of any links it may have gotten over time. I am trying to figure out the best way to handle these permanently out of stock pages. At the moment, the site is set up to return a 404 page for each of these products. There are currently 600 (and increasing) instances of this appearing on Google Webmasters. I have read that too many 404 errors may have a negative impact on your site, and so thought I might 301 redirect these URLs to a more appropriate page. However I've also read that too many 301 redirects may have a negative impact on your site. I foresee this to be an issue several years down the road when the site has thousands of expired products which will result in thousands of 404 errors or 301 redirects depending on which route I take. Which would be the better route? Is there a better solution?

In reference to mobile - am I walking a fine SEO line when it comes to hidden content on mobile? On the responsive variations of sites we are working on some content is hidden (that displays on the desktop version of the site) so that pages on mobile can display correctly. Is this negative for SEO? Appreciate any feedback Cheers.

Currently working on a retail site that shows over 1200 404 errors coming from urls that are from products that were on the site, but have now been removed as they are seasonal/out of stock. What is the best way of dealing with this situation ongoing? I am aware of the fact that these 404s are being marked as url errors in Google Webmaster. Should I redirect these 404s  to a more appropriate live page or should I leave them as they are and not redirect them? I am concerned that Google may give the site a penalty as these 404s are growing (as the site is a online retail store and has products removed from its page results regularly). I thought Google was able to recognise 404s and after a set period of time would push them out of the error report. Also is there a tool out there that on mass I can run all the 404s urls through to see their individual page strength and the number of links that point at each one? Thanks.

Currently looking at adding a blog to our company site subdirectory and wanted to know if there was a SEO distinction between the following methods: Integrating a bolt-on blog tool with the site to create the blog VS. just using the current site infrastructure to build blog functionality. What's better for SEO? (and if tool integration is the overwhelming response - which tool?). Cheers.

Currently working on a retail site that has a product category page with a series of pages related to each other i.e. page 1, page 2, page 3 and Show All page. These are being identified as duplicate content/title pages.  I want to resolve this through the applications of pagination to the pages so that crawlers know that these pages belong to the same series. In addition to this I also want to apply canonicalization to point to one page as the one true result that rules them all. All pages have equal weight but I am leaning towards pointing at the ‘Show All’. Catch is that products consistently change meaning that I am sometimes dealing with 4 pages including Show All, and other times I am only dealing with one page (...so actually I should point to page 1 to play it safe).  Silly question, but is there a hard and fast rule to setting up this lead page rule?