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According to Google's John Muller

"404 errors on invalid URLs do not harm your site’s indexing or ranking in any way. It doesn’t matter if there are 100 or 10 million, they won’t harm your site’s ranking"

Just moved a WordProcess site over to a new host and skinned it. Found out after the fact that the site had been hacked - the db is clean.

I did notice at first there were a lot of 404s being generated, so I setup a script to capture and then return a 410 page gone - and then the plan was to submit them to have them removed from the index - thinking there was a manageable number

But, when I looked at Google WebMaster Tools there was over 1,300,000 404 errors  - see attachment. My puny attempt to solve this problem seems to need more of an industrial size solution.

My question, is that what would be the best way to deal with this? Not all of the pages are indexed in google - only 637 index but you can only see about 150 in the index. Where bing is another story saying that over 2,700 pages index but only can see about 200.

How is this affecting any future rankings - they do not rank well, as I found out because of very slow page load speed and of course the hacks?

The link profile looking at Google is OK, and there are no messages in Google Webmaster tools.

am5cMz2

I've experimented with - and pushed the limits - with rich snippets. When they do work, they were the single biggest factor in increasing CTR , I've ever used.

As you noted, the first thing and easiest would be to itemscope itemptype your business with the real estate agent classification and then add your address etc. all the basics. ( you can use your logo as a business image ). Maybe this helps in Local search, but it is difficult to tell. But it can't hurt and it is easy to do by simply wrapping the itemscope itemptype pointing to real estate sales agent in the HTML tag.

Now the following are just tactics

My next focus would be setting up the authorship verification so that I could get my picture in the SERPS.

Second, I would code my breadcrumbs - in the past I've found that the schema.org metadata doesn't work as well as the other formats. Download Yoasts Wordpress SEO plugin and look how he formats his breadcrumbs. His way works - you can mix types on a site without problems.

Since your homepage doesn't typically have breadcrumbs, make some, these will show up as a mini menu, remember that in the SERPs the breadrcrumbs will show from right to left - truncating the left side items first, put your your most important link at the left to always show up in the SERPs

Every site that I've wanted or didn't want shows breadcrumbs on almost every page.

Images and video objects seem right now at least to work just as well with sitemaps and descriptive alt and title content and I would not waste my time adding the schema info.

There are some others that work well still but perhaps not right for a real estate site.

Last but not least, I would not waste my time coding up the addresses etc for the MLS real estate listings as they are IMO just a mass of duplicate content across the web. Think about it, why would you trust a geo coordinates more than just a simple address?

I'd focus on the neighborhood landing pages - perhaps making them quasi blog posts so that I could get use of the authorship pic.

Then  make the property pages templates more appealing, ones that t will convert by moving away from the standard MLS format.

The frustrating thing about schema.org and the other formats is that when they work one day and then they are gone the next. Your CTRs increase when they are working , but testing and coding takes time as they testing tool has bugs and information on the web and examples can be outdated or just plain wrong.

As for whether it helps with rankings, I'm not sure and my gut feeling is that right now they are not a highly rated signal in the algo if at all, but as I said before, the rich snippet portion if and when it shows up in the SERPs dramatically increases CRT

Lastly and most important, it is my opinion, that, based upon your post, you are granulating the process too much. Basically making it too complicated - as I believe John from Distilled pointed it out. This tendency to overcomplicated the scehma.org info is perhaps  the reason this data is not a stronger signal yet nor been adopted widely.

As you stated, just keep the top level real estate sales agent as your top level, forget about the offerings, WebPage, SearchResultsPage,  etc, next if you have a blog as part of your site add the authorship.

You can then focus on the itemproperties ie NAP and breadcrumbs, etc. Best to keep it simple for now.

If you need some up-to-date info about this check out John Mueller on Google + http://goo.gl/Ow7jI  He always answers questions directly and has been a big help to me and others

I really question the statement that ' do exact match domains of .net get the same bonus that .com does'. First, it is my experience that exact match domains at one time did hold some advantage, but one sees it less and less in today's world. Even in low volume low competptive keyword arenas, it is easy to beat an exact match domain be it .com .net or .org with a couple of strong links - even a yahoo paid directory link can work. I would make a wager that within a couple of years at most exact match domains will have little or no value - of course if there is some real meat behind the site and it is more than just a gimmick to pic up affiliate or Adsense income I'm not sure what you want to accomplish here, but if you are planning on building a site that you want to grow and brand, I would forget about exact match keyword site be it .com or .net and try and come up with a branded name using something memorable. Hey look at Google' s URL shorter, even I can remember it goo.gl Runner2009 Burt Gordon

I see this is a Wordpress site.

Running a Web Page Test your real problem is the Time To First Byte - generally a poor figure here points directly at bottle necks with your server .

I see that you are using a number of jQuery scripts locally instead of through CDN.  The first thing I would do would be to go into the function.php file and deregister those scripts and then register them so that they access the google depository for jQuery scripts and others.

This will help by decreasing wait time on parallel http request and that you will find some of the vistiors will have those scripts already cached.  All this sounds complex, but it is really simple to do.

You can use the add_action('wp_enqueue_scripts', 'your_function_name') to wp_dergister_scripts and wp_register_scripts .  You just have to look for the name space that the theme registered the script to de_register it correctly.  (lol this sounds hard)

easiest one is the jquery most themes use the 'jquery' for the namespace so it would be like this i:

add_action('wp_enqueue_scripts', 'new_scripts');

function new_scripts() {

wp_deregister_script('jquery');

wp_register_script('jquery', 'http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.7.1/jquery.min.js', false, '17.1');

wp_enqueue_script('jquery');

}

Because of the issue with TTFB,  I would look into is a relatively new WordPress Centric hosting.  I've just started using them and they are very good .... WP Engine  they can help with the TTFB  issues as they are running varnish cache and supposedly have something even faster in the works called TachyCache.

I believe last summer Google, Yahoo and Bing all agreed to support microdata - which is part of the HTML5 specifications (correct me if I am wrong).  The specifications are at http://schema.org

For recipes there is a specific schema http://schema.org/Recipe  This will produce the rich snippets that you witnessed.  You can test out your recipes etc for rich snippets by using the Google Webmaster Tools Rich Snippets Tester at http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets

Supposedly there are three types of formats that will produce rich snippets; microformats (hCard etc ..), micordata and RDF.  I can tell you from experience that it does work (not for all schemas) and works quickly.

It has been my experience that the plugins for Wordpress for producing rich snippets are a bit clumsy and most seem to use the microformats instead of the microdata.

I would recommend using the microdata, one because it is supported by the major search engines and two it is part of the HTML5 specifications

I do not believe that having the microdata encode on your web helps with rankings, but I can say that it can dramatically increase your CTRs.

Runner2009

Burt Gordon

Here are the questions:

If you replace your top menu with a mega menu - like rei.com, target.com etc - that has dramatically more links and lots of non-optimized testimonials and calls for action, and locate the actual code of the mega menu at the bottom of the HTML , How will this affect your sitelinks?

Will this now, make your on-page content more visible and indexable? Or does the Google bott dismiss this as just navigation content?

In the past, I've have seen this technique work well, but that was before site links were easier to obtain.  Looking at sites with virtually no navigation on their home pages and good authority, I've seen site links seemingly gleamed from alt attributes.

This is an interesting question. It also goes with what to do with a mega menu and all its links.  I've wondered whether the SE can understand that this is in fact a navigation (you would think they would) for internal links and not penalize your links in the body of the of the page.

According to Google's John Mueller when discussing about HTML5 he stated the following:

"In general, our crawlers are used to not being able to parse all HTML markup - be it from broken HTML, embedded XML content or from the new HTML5 tags. Our general strategy is to wait to see how content is marked up on the web in practice and to adapt to that ..." http://goo.gl/0YehV

You would then believe from that statement that the SE can differentiate navigation menus and drop down list from links in the body? I mean the SE must have crawled zillions of page and that would be a natural conclusion?

That being said I've use two strategies; the first embedding the select options in javascript... something like this

`**<script type="text/javascript">
/* ");
document.write("<option values=" ">Select a Property...<\/option>");
document.write("</option><optgroup label="Beach Estates">");</optgroup>**
document.write("<option value="\/alii-estate\/">Alii Estate<\/option>");** ......**

**......**</option>` 
**This seems to work well.... but not sure if it is actually crawled**

The other strategy that I am more in favor with is to position the  drop down list or navigation with a position:absolute; and
then place them physically at the bottom of the page ... this seems a better way, but it can affect the site links.

I've not done any real testing on this.

Burt Gordon 

I've experimented with - and pushed the limits - with rich snippets. When they do work, they were the single biggest factor in increasing CTR , I've ever used.

As you noted, the first thing and easiest would be to itemscope itemptype your business with the real estate agent classification and then add your address etc. all the basics. ( you can use your logo as a business image ). Maybe this helps in Local search, but it is difficult to tell. But it can't hurt and it is easy to do by simply wrapping the itemscope itemptype pointing to real estate sales agent in the HTML tag.

Now the following are just tactics

My next focus would be setting up the authorship verification so that I could get my picture in the SERPS.

Second, I would code my breadcrumbs - in the past I've found that the schema.org metadata doesn't work as well as the other formats. Download Yoasts Wordpress SEO plugin and look how he formats his breadcrumbs. His way works - you can mix types on a site without problems.

Since your homepage doesn't typically have breadcrumbs, make some, these will show up as a mini menu, remember that in the SERPs the breadrcrumbs will show from right to left - truncating the left side items first, put your your most important link at the left to always show up in the SERPs

Every site that I've wanted or didn't want shows breadcrumbs on almost every page.

Images and video objects seem right now at least to work just as well with sitemaps and descriptive alt and title content and I would not waste my time adding the schema info.

There are some others that work well still but perhaps not right for a real estate site.

Last but not least, I would not waste my time coding up the addresses etc for the MLS real estate listings as they are IMO just a mass of duplicate content across the web. Think about it, why would you trust a geo coordinates more than just a simple address?

I'd focus on the neighborhood landing pages - perhaps making them quasi blog posts so that I could get use of the authorship pic.

Then  make the property pages templates more appealing, ones that t will convert by moving away from the standard MLS format.

The frustrating thing about schema.org and the other formats is that when they work one day and then they are gone the next. Your CTRs increase when they are working , but testing and coding takes time as they testing tool has bugs and information on the web and examples can be outdated or just plain wrong.

As for whether it helps with rankings, I'm not sure and my gut feeling is that right now they are not a highly rated signal in the algo if at all, but as I said before, the rich snippet portion if and when it shows up in the SERPs dramatically increases CRT

Lastly and most important, it is my opinion, that, based upon your post, you are granulating the process too much. Basically making it too complicated - as I believe John from Distilled pointed it out. This tendency to overcomplicated the scehma.org info is perhaps  the reason this data is not a stronger signal yet nor been adopted widely.

As you stated, just keep the top level real estate sales agent as your top level, forget about the offerings, WebPage, SearchResultsPage,  etc, next if you have a blog as part of your site add the authorship.

You can then focus on the itemproperties ie NAP and breadcrumbs, etc. Best to keep it simple for now.

If you need some up-to-date info about this check out John Mueller on Google + http://goo.gl/Ow7jI  He always answers questions directly and has been a big help to me and others

I see this is a Wordpress site.

Running a Web Page Test your real problem is the Time To First Byte - generally a poor figure here points directly at bottle necks with your server .

I see that you are using a number of jQuery scripts locally instead of through CDN.  The first thing I would do would be to go into the function.php file and deregister those scripts and then register them so that they access the google depository for jQuery scripts and others.

This will help by decreasing wait time on parallel http request and that you will find some of the vistiors will have those scripts already cached.  All this sounds complex, but it is really simple to do.

You can use the add_action('wp_enqueue_scripts', 'your_function_name') to wp_dergister_scripts and wp_register_scripts .  You just have to look for the name space that the theme registered the script to de_register it correctly.  (lol this sounds hard)

easiest one is the jquery most themes use the 'jquery' for the namespace so it would be like this i:

add_action('wp_enqueue_scripts', 'new_scripts');

function new_scripts() {

wp_deregister_script('jquery');

wp_register_script('jquery', 'http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.7.1/jquery.min.js', false, '17.1');

wp_enqueue_script('jquery');

}

Because of the issue with TTFB,  I would look into is a relatively new WordPress Centric hosting.  I've just started using them and they are very good .... WP Engine  they can help with the TTFB  issues as they are running varnish cache and supposedly have something even faster in the works called TachyCache.

I believe last summer Google, Yahoo and Bing all agreed to support microdata - which is part of the HTML5 specifications (correct me if I am wrong).  The specifications are at http://schema.org

For recipes there is a specific schema http://schema.org/Recipe  This will produce the rich snippets that you witnessed.  You can test out your recipes etc for rich snippets by using the Google Webmaster Tools Rich Snippets Tester at http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets

Supposedly there are three types of formats that will produce rich snippets; microformats (hCard etc ..), micordata and RDF.  I can tell you from experience that it does work (not for all schemas) and works quickly.

It has been my experience that the plugins for Wordpress for producing rich snippets are a bit clumsy and most seem to use the microformats instead of the microdata.

I would recommend using the microdata, one because it is supported by the major search engines and two it is part of the HTML5 specifications

I do not believe that having the microdata encode on your web helps with rankings, but I can say that it can dramatically increase your CTRs.

Runner2009

Burt Gordon