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Thanks for the responses.  I spent this morning 301 redirecting the most important pages from Site 1 and Site 2. Hopefully this will help.

Over the past couple years I had 3 sites that sold basically the same products and content.  I later realized this had no value to my customers or Google so I 301 redirected Site 2 and Site 3 to my main site (Site 1).  Of course this pushed a lot of page rank over to Site 1 and the site has been ranking great.

About a week ago I moved my main site to a new eCommerce platform which required me to 301 redirect all the url's to the new platform url's which I did for all the main site links (Site 1).  During this time I decided it was probably better off if I DID NOT 301 redirect all the links from the other 2 sites as well.  I just didn't see the need as I figured Google realized at this point those sites were gone and I started fearing Google would get me for Page Rank munipulation for 301 redirecting 2 whole sites to my main site.

Now I am getting over 1,000 404 crawl errors in GWT as Google can no longer find the URL's for Site 2 and Site 3.  Plus my rankings have dropped substantially over the past week, part of which I know is from switching platforms.

Question, did I make a mistake not 301 redirecting the url's from the old sites (Site 2 and Site 3) to my new ecommerce url's at Site 1?

We are a 15 year old ecommerce company.  Most of our category descriptions are about 3 years old.  Our product descriptions are 5-8 years old.  While our category pages still rank well in Google our product pages have dropped significantly over time.

How often should product page descriptions be rewritten so they do not become stale to Google?  We have about 1,000 products on the site.  If we rewrite them we are thinking about 250 words each.  Thanks.

We have operated a small ecommerce company for over 10 years in the home and garden industry.  Our product niche is small and there is not a lot of "community" around it as it is just not a social product, yet the product is interesting.  Our internal time is very limited and therefore we have hired external help over the years to do our SEO.  As you all know, this is very challenging to do affordably and not get spammers.

As part of our SEO strategy we would like to do some guest blog posts but do not have the internal time to research and build the relationships needed.  We basically have no internal writing skills and have always hired writers to do our blog postings.My question is if you had to hire someone to do guest blog posts how would you go about finding the right person to use?  Of course an excellent writer would be required.  What would you expect to pay for this type of service?  Would you do it hourly or "pay per live post". Any ideas on where to find this type of person?  Thanks.