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First off, getting your site mobile optimized is smart.

Next, you need to have a clear understanding of where all this traffic is coming from. If it's organic, dig into Google Webmaster Tools & even Semrush to determine how much of it is from branded queries. If a large percentage of your traffic is from non-branded organic searches, I would be very cautious of changing URLs & title tags - unless your organization is completely okay with the possible ranking & traffic loss that will most likely come with all the necessary 301 redirects. The current URLs are already far, far cleaner than a lot of sites (especially ecommerce sites that have crazy dynamic URLs).

With all that said, I have worked with a few brands in similar situations where we decided to move forward with a site overhaul (which is what you're describing) because (a) most of their traffic was either direct or branded organic and (b) they worked with an SEO agency years ago that implemented a number of spammy tactics that we needed to clean up. Ultimately, we decided that the benefits of sort of "getting straight with Google" was worth the possible ranking & traffic loss.

I hope this helps!

Another vote for SEMRush. I plug nearly every site I come across into it.

Hopefully someone with Hubspot experience will jump in here, but (setting the Hubspot detail aside) I'm thinking the best approach will be to use canonical tags. You would have to take a phased approach, first creating all the equivalent pages on the new site with canonical tags (across both domains) indicating that the new URLs are the preferred pages & to pass all linking/ranking equity from the old site to the new one. You would have to wait for all the new pages to be indexed & begin to rank before putting the old site behind the login. Once this is all setup, submitting new sitemaps may expedite the lay time.

I'm interested in knowing why your company wants to put a well-established/ranking site behind a login.

Update:  The technical part of this article reminded me of what you're trying to do: http://searchengineland.com/breaking-glass-ceiling-search-acquisition-209676

I agree with Kari's comment. Using this tactic is becoming more and more rare for me, as I have moved towards using tabbed content (which there's also a good amount of debate about its SE-friendliness) and anchor links for having additional content in an easy to navigate, lighter/better designed way. A good example is at http://store.apple.com/us/buy-mac/macbook-pro.

I hope this helps!

Thanks for clarifying what you mean about 'the main purpose of the blog' - sounds like you get it.

Here's an article I could find on the update back in 2011: https://www.seroundtable.com/subdomains-google-webmaster-tools-13960.html

Reading through it again, the update was more about links from subdomains to main domains being considered internal links rather than external. It's easy to assume that if Google is seeing the subdomain as part of the main domain, then links to the subdomain will help the entire domain - but from my experience, subdomains never perform as well as a directory/folder structure (on their own or in helping the domain as a whole). I would try my best to avoid using a subdomain.

Hi there! So lots of thoughts came to mind as I read your question, so here it goes:

• Yes, links to subdomains are counted towards the entire domain - I believe it was 2010 or 2011 when Google announced this change, which was to prevent black hat SEOs from using their own subdomain as a link farm/wheel to the main domain- which leads me to my next thought...
• This statement raises an immediate red flag: "The main purpose of this blog is to attract backlinks."
• Generally, it's best to have your blog at domain.com/blog - of course there are sometimes technical limitations preventing this.

I hope this helps!

I would update the canonical tag on your end to reflect that Page A (that's being redirected to Page B) is no longer the canonical/preferred URL. Add rel="canonical" href="http://domain.com/page-b" to the old & the new page.

I would also send the new tag to the 3rd party with something like 'Hi there- I know you're all super busy, so we thought sharing the new canonical tag with you might help get things updated more quickly' - or something to that effect.

First off, I like the way you're thinking through this - it's critical to understand that no one solution should be applied to every scenario, so here are my thoughts on what you should do:

• For programs no longer offered, I would leave the page up with a notification that it's discontinued plus related products ('this program is no longer offered, but here are some other programs you might like'). Your idea of having a custom 404 for discontinued products (with the same type of language) could also work. If you do 301 redirect visitors, I suggest going to the category page & also incorporating some way of letting the visitor know. You basically want to avoid confusing the visitor by taking them somewhere different than expected.
• For the programs temporarily on hold, do not 302 redirect them - 302s should be avoided in almost all cases. Instead, leave the page live & let the visitor know that this program is currently unavailable, with a CTA to be alerted via email as soon as it's available. Also have related products in case they need the program/service now.

There's an old Moz post (that I can't find atm) where Rand explains how he dealt with this situation - I believe he had the same idea as I shared, followed by closely monitoring the traffic to the pages; then adding 301s to the very low trafficked pages & working to improve the messaging/CTA/UX of the ones still receiving traffic.

I hope this helps!

Wildcard placements are always tricky, so be sure you test it in GWT's robots file tester. You can also look into adding meta noindex, rel next/prev, or canonical tags to those pages.

I hope this helps!

Sure! What I mean is if (for example) your domain is debtlifestylemanagement.com, then having the dlm folder spelled out in the URL (i.e. debtlifestylemanagement.com/products/debt-lifecycle-management/hire-collection-agents) would be redundant & appear spammy. The same could happen if your domain had 'collection agents' in it.

I'm suggesting that I would "tend towards not including a keyword in the URI if it alreadyappears in the domain," especially if including it would only be for SEO purposes.

First off, I do think URLs help theme pages, which can indirectly help with SEO, but that shouldn't be your main goal. Aim to create a consistent structure for how all category, subcat, product detail pages are organized. This will not only make your life a whole lot easier, but it will also make more sense to users, help keep linking consistent, and (indirectly) help rankings.

I would have 3 category pages that lists all relevant products: /gallery-wood, /prefinished-wood, /parquet-reclaimed-wood. I would probably then have subcategory pages that drill-down to more specific product listings (i.e. /gallery-wood/brown-engineered-flooring). *This is the page level you'll want to target "brown engineered flooring."

From there, you have to decide if you want the product detail page URL to follow the folder structure (i.e. /gallery-wood/brown-engineered-flooring/[product-name]) or if you want it to only have the product name (.com/[brand-product-name/number]) which is usually better for complex ecommerce sites where products fall under multiple categories.

You could also drop the parent category from the URL structure, which is probably what I'd do. Something like:

• Category: /gallery-wood  *optimize for "gallery wood" & related terms
• Subcategory: /brown-engineered-flooring   *optimize for "brown engineered flooring" & related terms
• Product Detail: /brown-engineered-flooring/brand-product-name *optimize for brand, product name & related terms

Depending on search volume, there may even be an opportunity to create brand categories or landing pages.

I hope this helps!

If you think about the original use of bold/italicized text, it was to emphasize certain words/phrases/concepts to readers. Search engines would then use the markup as an indicator of what the most important concepts were on the page, and what search queries the page would make the most sense to rank for. Then came SEOs who overused the once-valid editorial tactic to manipulate search engine algos & rankings. The same thing happened with linking - the original purpose was to help users navigate from page to relevant page, but SEOs went overboard focusing too heavily on rankings & links (spam/black hat SEO) and not enough on user experience. All 3 of these tactics are now scrutinized via specific content & link quality algorithms.

I do not recommend bolding, italicizing, or even linking 'just for SEO.' However, if bolding/italicizing certain parts of text will benefit the reader (helping them better understand your point) or if linking to other pages on your site would provide the visitor with more relevant/useful information that will help with their purchasing decision, then by all means, add the markup. In general, I try not to do anything "**just for SEO" **;) Always ask whether or not a tactic would benefit the user - more often than not, user-friendly efforts will also be search-friendly.

Not the easiest question to answer, but I'll share my thoughts:

• Keyword density - for me, a red flag is raised anytime this phrase is used even if it's checked only to 'make sure we're not keyword stuffing.' Content should be created to be as helpful as possible to the human visitor; if that's done, search bots should pick up on what your site is about '_organically.' _ Pun intended.
• A quick control-find for "office" shows 36 instances of the word just on your homepage, which is spammy in my opinion. Try using some pronouns to help the content read more naturally.
• Yes, href and alt tags do help search engines understand what your site is about. So if (for example) "office space" is used throughout the page's copy at such a high frequency AND in the link & image tags, then I would consider this kw stuffing / spammy. I'm not familiar with SRE tags, sorry!
• In general, your site seems to offer a lot of valuable content that's just over "optimized," especially on the homepage. I would even suggest redesigning the homepage to be a little more brand and user focused - or at least a refresh of the "What's your search scenario?" section, which is pretty busy/overwhelming & was probably created mostly for SEO.

I hope this helps!

What you described is a link scheme that I highly recommend avoiding.  Google's advanced algorithm will very likely identify the footprint you're leaving & could lead to a link penalty.

It's good that you understand that links are valuable for SEO, but this is not the way to go about getting them. Instead, focus on building relationships with other non-competing brands or people with large followings that will broadcast your content within your industry. This WBF has some good, safe link building ideas: http://moz.com/blog/anchor-text-rich-links-without-spam-or-manipulation-whiteboard-fridayIn general, tactics that you have to question are usually ones to stay away from.

I think SEOs get used to seeing duplicate content issues caused by the same page having various URLs (parameters, www, filters, slashes, etc), so it almost catches us off guard when we see pages flagged for having the same copy (real / true duplicate content!). At one point, I believe Matt Cutts shared that internal dup content will not hurt your site, but I would work to update all pages to have unique copy. It looks like all of your product pages have the same boilerplate copy, so this may be a big undertaking but it'll be worth it both from an SEO & UX perspective - as you add more descriptive copy, these pages may begin to rank for new queries not previously captured & you'll be providing more value to the visitor.

Side note - I clicked around on a few pages & when I land on a product detail page, 4 gray boxes pop up (one saying Site Map). Something funky going on there.

Hope this helps!

There probably isn't much harm in deleting them, but I'd also see if there's any way to repurpose some of the pieces or maybe some of the topics are still relevant & can be rewritten/updated to not be "crap." Even if you don't do any updating to those old posts, I would consider archiving the pages (making sure you don't create any duplicate content!) rather than deleting them as they're likely influencing how Google understands the overall context of your site. I would review the content relevancy report in Webmaster Tools to see how Google understands your site... Click on any of the listed terms to see if those old posts are where your top KWs are occurring - should help you decide on keeping or nixing some pages.

Hope this helps!

First thing you need to do is determine which is your preferred URL (probably www.site.com/fishing/). Once you have that, the key to good linking is consistency (using the same, preferred URL for any given page you're linking to & also using descriptive, naturally-occurring anchor text that's relevant to the page's content).

The fact that your site has other versions of the page (/fishing/ and /fishing/index.html) means that you probably need to implement a solution to prevent dup content issues - either 301 redirect all variations to the preferred URL or implement rel=canonical tags to tell search bots which is the preferred URL to include in its index. You can read more about this here:

• http://moz.com/learn/seo/duplicate-content
• http://moz.com/learn/seo/canonicalization

I hope this helps!

The other thing is that creating unique, high quality, share-worthy content requires creative planning & resources that would be better spent towards your main site than on various microsites.

What you're dealing with is duplicate content caused by URL inconsistencies. My first move would be to implement rel="canonical" tags to tell search bots which is the preferred URL (lower-case, then either with or without the trailing-slash). You can read more about it here: http://moz.com/blog/rel-confused-answers-to-your-rel-canonical-questions

I always use the Moz bar on the actual Moz site to see how things should be implemented - that's allowed, right? & I noticed that they have added rel=canonical site-wide (to prevent any unforeseen dup content issues). You can see an example of how it's used by viewing the source code here: moz.com/rand/category/archives/events/ and http://moz.com/rand/category/events/

Before you take any action, though, **you need to determine the preferred structure for all URLs on the site. **

No, you don't want to NoFollow 301s. The point of a 301 permanent redirect is for "everyone to be redirected" - users, search bots, & link juice - but adding NoFollow would prevent this.