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I'm getting a bunch of 404 crawl errors in my Google Webmaster Tools because we just moved our site to a new platform with new URL structure. We 301 redirected all the relevant pages. We submitted a new site map and then deleted all the site maps to the old website url structure.

However, google keeps crawling the OLD urls and reporting back the 404 errors. It says that the website is linking to these 404 pages via an old outdated sitemap (which if you goto shows a 404 as well, so it's not as if Google is reading these old site maps now). Instead it's as if Google has cached the old sitemap but continues to use it to crawl these non-existent pages.

Any thoughts?

This seems like a dumb question, but I'm not sure what the answer is. I have an ecommerce client who has a couple of subdirectories "gallery" and "blog". Neither directory gets a lot of traffic or really turns into much conversions, so I want to remove the pages so they don't drain my page rank from more important pages. Does this sound like a good idea?

I was thinking of either disallowing the folders via robot.txt file or add a "no index" tag or 301redirect or delete them. Can you help me determine which is best.

**DEINDEX: **As I understand it, the no index meta tag is going to allow the robots to still crawl the pages, but they won't be indexed. The supposed good news is that it still allows link juice to be passed through. This seems like a bad thing to me because I don't want to waste my link juice passing to these pages. The idea is to keep my page rank from being dilluted on these pages. Kind of similar question, if page rank is finite, does google still treat these pages as part of the site even if it's not indexing them?

If I do deindex these pages, I think there are quite a few internal links to these pages. Even those these pages are deindexed, they still exist, so it's not as if the site would return a 404 right?

ROBOTS.TXT As I understand it, this will keep the robots from crawling the page, so it won't be indexed and the link juice won't pass. I don't want to waste page rank which links to these pages, so is this a bad option?

**301 redirect: **What if I just 301 redirect all these pages back to the homepage? Is this an easy answer? Part of the problem with this solution is that I'm not sure if it's permanent, but even more importantly is that currently 80% of the site is made up of blog and gallery pages and I think it would be strange to have the vast majority of the site 301 redirecting to the home page. What do you think?

DELETE PAGES: Maybe I could just delete all the pages. This will keep the pages from taking link juice and will deindex, but I think there's quite a few internal links to these pages. How would you find all the internal links that point to these pages. There's hundreds of them.

thx u.

Hi Everyone -

I'm not a technical person at all. I have some content that will be hidden until a user clicks "learn more" where upon it will be displayed via jQuery Fancy Box script. The content behind the learn more javascript is important and I need it to be crawled by search engine spiders.

Does anyone know if there will be a problem with this script?

I have a client who has an online outdoor gear company. He mostly sells high end outdoor gear (like ski jackets, vests, boots, etc) at a deep discount. His store currently only resides on Ebay. So we're building him an online store from scratch. I'm trying to determine the best site architecture and wonder if we should include subcategory pages. My issue is that I think the subcategory pages might be good from a user experience, but it'll add an additional layer between the homepage and the product pages. The problem is that I think a lot of user's might be searching for the product name to see if they can find a better deal, and my client's site would be perfect for them. So I really want to rank well for the product pages, but I'm nervous that the subcategory pages will limit the link juice of the product pages.

Home --> SubCategory --> Product List --> Product Detail

Home --> Men's Ski Clothing --> Men's Ski Jack --> North Face Mt Everest Jacket

Should I keep the SubCategory page "Men's Ski Clothing" if it helps usability?

On a separate note, the SubCategory pages would have some head keyword terms, but I don't think that he could rank well for these terms anytime soon. However, they would be great pages / terms to rank for in the long term. Should this influence the decision?

You probably have more links pointing to your PAGE, but your competitor probably has more links pointing to their DOMAIN.

I do have SOME text on the landing pages. Here's an example of one of the landing pages... remove the XXX in the url (I don't want this page to get indexed some how):

XXXkidecals.com/product-category/school-labels/XXX

There's probably 90 words describing the content of the category page. And there's about 50 images.

If you think the ratio of content landing words to images is fine. What do you suggest in terms of Alt Tags -- do I use any keywords?

A site I manage is mostly images on our main landing pages and very little text based content. And many of the images are used across multiple landing pages which we're trying to optimize for different keywords. My problem is trying to use best practices for images and yet at the same time rank well for different keywords.

How can I optimize for certain keywords, when the majority of "content" is likely coming from image file name and alt tags which have the EXACT SAME images across multiple landing pages.

Hope that makes sense?

I do have SOME text on the landing pages. Here's an example of one of the landing pages... remove the XXX in the url (I don't want this page to get indexed some how):

XXXkidecals.com/product-category/school-labels/XXX

There's probably 90 words describing the content of the category page. And there's about 50 images.

If you think the ratio of content landing words to images is fine. What do you suggest in terms of Alt Tags -- do I use any keywords?

If a blog does product reviews and we give them a free product for a review is it breaking terms of service if we ask for a follow link for the product?

"1) do you really need to repeat those links?"

I don't think so... what do you think is the best way to promote social sharing?

"2) why do you care how many external links your site carries?"

I'm worried that we could be losing our juice by having so many compared to how many links we have pointing to us. Do you not think that I should worry about this at all?

You probably have more links pointing to your PAGE, but your competitor probably has more links pointing to their DOMAIN.