You wouldn't necessarily get a "penalty" from the search engines but the pages will eventually disappear from the search results if they are returning 404 response codes, and thus you will lose traffic as a result. Your best bet would be to 301 redirect the inactive pages either to the homepage or to other relevant pages on your site.
Best posts made by StreamlineMetrics
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RE: Mass 404 pages
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RE: Server Migration, Does it effect SEO?
As long as the site and URL structure remain unchanged, then a server migration shouldn't make any impact in the rankings.
That being said, there are a few relatively uncommon things that could potentially cause some issues -
1. If you are going to be moving from a PHP server to an IIS server and you need to change your URLs to .asp or something like that, then you make take a temporary hit while the search engines crawl and index the new versions.
2. If the new server is slower or is prone to frequent downtime, then yes, it could negatively affect your rankings.
3. If you are moving to a new shared server, make sure the rest of the sites on that server are all legitimate sites that haven't been blacklisted by the search engines for any reason. For example, if you move your site to a server that has 100 Russian sites or Nigerian spammer sites all on the same IP, then it's possible your site could be negatively impacted.
Again, these are all relatively uncommon scenarios as long as you are simply moving your site over to another server while keeping everything else the same, so you shouldn't notice any difference in your rankings.
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RE: Adwords account suspended for talking about SEO. Why isn't Moz suspended, too?
What did the ads say? And the landing pages? There are tons of AdWords advertisers that bid on SEO-related keywords, so this is the first time I've ever heard of anything like this.
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RE: Link juice from subdomain
I prefer putting the blog in a subdirectory rather than a subdomain for SEO. The search engines treat subdomains as a completely separate site so any backlinks you get pointed to blog.domain.com will not benefit www.domain.com's SEO whereas links pointing to www.domain.com/blog will.
Here is a great blog post for more details - http://www.agent-seo.com/blogging/seo-subdomain-vs-subdirectory/,
I've pasted a few highlights below -
**Subdirectory **
This situation for me is the most ideal from an SEO standpoint. I prefer to use a subdirectory (or “subfolder”) over a subdomain or external site any day.
Matt Cutts agrees with me:
“My personal preference on subdomains vs. subdirectories is that I usually prefer the convenience of subdirectories for most of my content. A subdomain can be useful to separate out content that is completely different. Google uses subdomains for distinct products such news.google.com or maps.google.com, for example. If you’re a newer webmaster or SEO, I’d recommend using subdirectories until you start to feel pretty confident with the architecture of your site. At that point, you’ll be better equipped to make the right decision for your own site.”
Rand Fishkin agrees with me too, but does go on to detail compelling usage examples for subdomains:
“Starting a blog? I almost always recommend yoursite.com/blog over blog.yoursite.com.”
**Subdomain **
This is the second best option in my opinion for SEO. A subdomain is basically a separate or third-tier website that just so happens to be residing off of the root domain. Search engines typically view them as wholly separate entities. I would only use this if the blog was completely separate to your services (or if your site infrastructure does not allow you to add blogging software to the root domain).
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RE: Dot Net Nuke generating long URL showing up as crawl errors!
Are all of the problematic URLs variations of the SendPassword page? Otherwise, if you are getting long URLs for other pages, just make sure you are using rel=canonical tags to tell the search engines the correct URL to use for each page.
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RE: Safest way to launch a redesign
How big is the site? It would be ideal to either keep the existing site structure so you don't need to worry about redirecting pages OR 301 as many pages as possible to the new URLs for those pages. If you have any pages on the current site that won't have a counterpart on the new site, then I recommend 301ing as many of those pages to the most relevant page on the new site as possible.
Of course, if your site is thousands or millions of pages large, then it's likely not feasible to manually go in and redirect every single page so I'd recommend at least redirecting the most popular pages to their new counterparts and then possibly redirect all of the remaining pages to the most relevant mid-level pages or even the homepage.
The last thing you want to do is simply redirect all of the pages to the root domain...
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RE: Adwords account suspended for talking about SEO. Why isn't Moz suspended, too?
Hmmm, I still don't know why your account would have gotten flagged simply for "being about SEO" so something is definitely up... I would suggest submitting your story to the big SEO/PPC news sites like searchenginewatch.com, searchengineland.com, searchenginejournal.com, etc. because people need to be aware of this and then maybe you will get a more detailed response from Google.
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RE: I need to hire writers.
I've used www.thecontentauthority.com and have been happy with their prices/quality of work and turn around time. You simply submit a request for an article about any topic you want, choose how many words it should be and the quality level and their writers get right on it. A 750 word blog post on a specific topic written by a "good" quality writer usually only takes 2-3 hours.
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RE: canonical URL tag
A canonical tag is to tell the search engines which version of the page should be indexed. Each page should have only one. For example, let's say http://www.example.com/index.php and http://www.example.com/index.php?utm=whatever are the exact same page except with different URLs, you will put the following canonical tag in the HEAD of this page -
This tells the search engines to ignore http://www.example.com/index.php?utm=whatever so they don't put that URL in the search engine results instead of your actual homepage.
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RE: Can anyone help me understand why google is "Not Selecting" a large number of my webpages to include when crawling my site.
Hmm, I just tried to click on a listing in Google but I was served a popup which required that I enter in my contact information before I could access the site http://luxuryhomehunt.com/view-property/40096215. Did you just add this pop up? Since there is no way for users to opt out of entering in contact information to view a listing, then it may be possible that the search engines are being blocked as well.
I also tried crawling the site with Screaming Frog SEO Spider and Xenu, but my connection was refused... not sure if my IP was blocked or if the site is blocking crawlers, but my guess is the search engines may be having some trouble accessing all of the pages on your site.
At the very least, I'd recommend removing that popup since it's bad for user experience and may be causing problems with the search engines.
EDIT - I did some more digging and looked the Google cache for one of your listings - http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:L6LzTqj9gQUJ:luxuryhomehunt.com/view-property/40445850+&cd=6&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a. On this page, you have the rel="canonical" tag set to http://luxuryhomehunt.com/view-property so that tells the search engines that all of your property listing pages should use that canonical URL, which explains why most of your pages are "Not Selected" per Google -
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2642366
http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139066
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RE: 100's of versions of the same page. Is rel=canonical the solution???
Yup, use the canonical tag to tell the search engines which URL should be designated as the "correct" page to index. Here is some more information from Google - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html
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RE: We recently fixed a Meta Refresh that was affecting our home page - But something still seems wrong. Any suggestions?
It will take some time before OSE updates its index. Let me know if you don't notice any changes once OSE has been updated.
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RE: Find out what keywords a site is ranking for
SEMRush is exactly what you are looking for. Just plug in a URL and you will see the top organic keywords as well as PPC keywords any website is currently ranking for, the number of searches each month and the estimated percentage of traffic any particular keyword is responsible for generating. It's very useful to quickly find out the keywords your competitors are targeting and ranking for, as well as on your own site to uncover keywords that you may be ranking 19th for that you weren't even aware of.
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RE: Duplicate Footer Content
If you can rewrite the text on each page, then that's what I would do. But if the site has thousands of pages and it's not possible to rewrite the content on every single page, then I'd suggest either moving each section of text to its own dedicated page (like History would be its own page with its own link in the navigation) OR if you think the content is important enough to be seen on every page, then you could try putting the text as an image...
Your site won't necessarily be penalized for having the same text on every page but you certainly won't benefit from it since the key is to make every single page as unique and high quality as possible.
Hope that helps!
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RE: Are meta tags useless?
Meta Keywords are worthless. None of the major search engines use them as a ranking factor anymore. If anything, their use can actually have a negative impact since you will be revealing your targeted keywords to your competitors. (Most competent SEOs can determine your targeted keywords by looking at your site anyways but no need to make their job that much easier!)
That being said, Meta Description is still important, even if they aren't necessarily considered a ranking factor, they allow you to have control over the snippet of text that shows up under your listing in the SERPs.
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RE: We recently fixed a Meta Refresh that was affecting our home page - But something still seems wrong. Any suggestions?
1. I'm betting you are having infinite loop issues when you are trying to add the redirect, am I right? If so, that's because both versions of the URL are both hitting the same page. Anyways, to fix this, simply add "<rel="canonical" href="<a href=" http:="" www.ccisolutions.com="" "="">http://www.ccisolutions.com/" /> to the head of both URLs to tell the search engines to only count that version of the URL in its index so you won't have a problem with duplicate content.</rel="canonical">
2. The canonical tag should fix this issue as well.
Hope that helps!
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RE: Google Analytics data - Canonical problems?
If both versions of the page are serving the same content via different URLs, then Google Analytics would consider them to be different landing pages if you received visits on both. To resolve this, try using only one version of the URL for each specific page via 301 redirects since the rel="canonical" tag does not affect how Google Analytics tracks views of pages.
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RE: Spam posts indexed, what to do now?
Do you know how the spam posts were published on your site? Just make sure the vulnerability is fixed so it doesn't happen again. Once the spam posts you found have been deleted from your site, you shouldn't have to do anything more since they will fall out of Google's index. Keep an eye on Google Webmaster Tools though to see if you notice any more spam pages pop up on Google's radar and then manually remove them.
Here is Google's official answer - http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=164734
When a page is updated or removed, it will automatically fall out of our search results. You don’t need to do anything to make this happen.
However, if you urgently need to remove content from Google's search results (for example, if you’ve already removed, updated, or blocked a page accidentally displaying confidential information like credit card numbers), you can request expedited removal of those URLs.
Our removal tools are intended for pages that urgently need to be removed—for example, if they contain confidential data that was accidentally exposed. Using the tools for other purposes may cause problems for your site.
Another Google resource if your site was actually hacked or compromised - http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1269119
To take your site "offline" after being hacked. If your site was hacked and you want to get rid of bad URLs that got indexed, use the URL removal tool to remove any new URLs that the hacker created—for example, http://www.example.com/buy-cheap-cialis-skq3w598.html. But we don't recommend removing your entire site, or removing URLs that you'll eventually want indexed. Instead, clean up the hacking and let us recrawl your site.
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RE: Are meta tags useless?
Simply view the source of a webpage and you can see the Meta Keyword tag in the HTML code. To view the source, go to a webpage, right click and select "View Page Source" and you'll see the HTML code. Hope that helps!
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RE: We recently fixed a Meta Refresh that was affecting our home page - But something still seems wrong. Any suggestions?
Hi Dana,
If all you are doing is adding the canonical tag, then it may take some time before Google picks up on it. Probably looking at a few days or maybe a week or so, but you should definitely notice an improvement (if you have in fact seen a negative impact in your rankings/organic traffic due to the meta refresh/duplicate content issue). My suggestion is to simply add the canonical tag and keep an eye on Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics to see if you notice any changes. I'll keep an eye on this thread in case you have any more issues or questions.
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RE: Newsletter tracking event GA- Magento
That code looks like it should work, but it's hard to determine exactly what the problem is without actually looking at the page itself to see how the main GA tracking code is configured. Can you share the URL?
Otherwise, here is a great Chrome extension that helps you debug issues with Google Analytics - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-analytics-debugger/jnkmfdileelhofjcijamephohjechhna
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RE: Client error 404
A 404 error means the page is not found/it doesn't exist. My guess is that you accidentally linked to exampleX.com somewhere on your page with this URL http://www.example.com/www.example.com/exampleX.html. Simply change that to http://www.example.com/exampleX.html. Otherwise, it's hard to tell specifically without seeing the actual link/page so please provide the actual links here or you can PM me if you don't want them to be made public.
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RE: Temporary Redirect
If you can keep doing it manually, then that's what I would suggest. If you want to try the robots.txt route, try putting the following code in the robots.txt file in the ads.espectador.com root -
User-agent: *
Disallow: /Here's a helpful blog post with more details - http://www.seomoz.org/blog/robot-access-indexation-restriction-techniques-avoiding-conflicts
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RE: 301 doesn't redirect a page that ends in %20, and others being appended with ?q=
Try putting it in quotes -
Redirect 301 "/products/product-name%20" http://www.site.com/products/product-name
Let me know if that doesn't work...
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RE: Weird Analytics Question
I've seen this happen before - Is the "Default page" setting in Google Analytics being used? If yes, is there a "/" at the front of the Default page setting? My hunch is that the default page setting is set to "/index.html" or just "/". If that is the case, simply remove the slash and it should work.
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RE: No_index of parent page
Does www.example.com/house/ have any content? Just curious since ideally it should, but that's not what you are asking. Anyways, to answer your question, yes, you can no-index a particular page with the following Meta Tag -
The search engines will still crawl that page and follow the links so www.example.com/house/kitchen should still be indexable.
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RE: How google handle with Title when is invisible on the page?
Hiding text by making it the same color as the background is a big no-no. It might work temporarily, but if Google ever discovers it, your site will certainly be penalized. I would suggest adding the H1 tag as the main headline but styling with CSS it so it is not in a huge 24 point ugly font, but still make it the primary headline for users and search engines to both access.
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RE: What is click2.scour, and why is it showing up as Referral Traffic in Google Analytics?
I believe it's some kind of browser redirect "virus" or exploit. So if your computer is infected, your search results pages will redirect to click2.scour.com or some other variation instead of Google's results. Then once a search result is clicked, like your site, it would be tracked as a referral visit from click2.scour.com instead of Google organic. I would normally assume this traffic is coming from the same user/person who frequently visits the site, so the fact you say it's 100% New Visits is a bit odd. Can you dig into the data further to confirm the traffic is coming from different ISPs/cities? And different browsers/operating systems?
Here is some more info on this kind of exploit - http://www.pchell.com/support/scour_redirect.shtml
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RE: What's our easiest, quickest "win" for page load speed?
1. Here's a tool to show what takes the longest to load on your page - http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/
Let me know if JavaScript is in fact the culprit here and I can provide some additional help.
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RE: SEO NEWBIE!!!
I would suggest starting out with the SEOmoz Beginner's Guide to SEO - http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo
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RE: 301 doesn't redirect a page that ends in %20, and others being appended with ?q=
Hmmm... I was going to also suggest trying replacing the %20 with an actual space -
Redirect 301 "/products/product-name " http://www.site.com/products/product-name
Now that you say none of the redirects are working as expected, did you try adding the 301 redirects above the Drupal rules in your .htaccess file? Can you paste the contents of your .htaccess?
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RE: Cookies/Tracking/Code developement
Hi there,
I had the same issue and couldn't find any simple solutions so I went ahead and created a free tool that does exactly what you are looking to do. It captures information submitted through a lead form along with where they came from and if they came from a search engine, it automatically tracks the exact keyword phrase they searched for. Then all of the lead information is sent to you in an email as well as stored in a very basic database for you to manage them. It's still a work in progress but it accomplishes what I want it to do for the time being. Feel free to check it out at http://convertable.com and please let me know if you have any suggestions or comments.
Another option is to add a Unique ID number to the Thank You page URL. For example, add a hidden field to your application form named "uid" which is a random number like 399285. Then when the form is submitted, redirect to a Thank You page such as www.yoursite.com/thankyou?uid=399285. Then you can look up that pageview in Google Analytics and reverse engineer it to see more data about who submitted the form and how they got to your site, such as referral information, keyword, etc.
Hope that helps!
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RE: Do I need redirects for a .asp to a .htm?
Yes, you should 301 redirect .asp pages to .htm even if they have the same page name.
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RE: On Site Problem Caused Rankings To Drop?
It's hard to diagnose exactly what happened going off only the info you provided. Has the site seen a drop in rankings for all of your keywords, or just certain ones? How much of a decrease? And all your pages? Or just your homepage? Have you made any changes recently either to on-site content and/or linkbuilding? Have you received any messages or noticed anything unusual within Google Webmaster Tools?
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RE: Redirecting a Page from Domain A to Domain B
I would just add the 301 redirect directly on the page. If you are using PHP, this should work -
header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently"); header("Location: http://www.domainb.com/page.php"); ?>
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RE: How to set up a 301 redirect
By default, most web servers don't automatically redirect the non-www to www (or vice versa). If you have a Linux server, then you should be able to add the 301 redirect via your .htaccess file. Add the following code to your .htaccess file and it should work -
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^adagiowaterfeatures.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.adagiowaterfeatures.com/$1 [R=301,L] -
RE: Multiple Domains pointing to one IP
If multiple domains are resolving to the same website but with different URLs, then it's a potential problem for duplicate content. The best thing would be to choose one domain to use as your primary domain, and then 301 redirect all the other domains to your primary domain.
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RE: Similar content multiple pages
This situation is quite common. If you are able to move the corporate information to its own page that you can link to from each product page, then that's what I would suggest doing.
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RE: We recently fixed a Meta Refresh that was affecting our home page - But something still seems wrong. Any suggestions?
Hmm... I just looked up the site in OSE and I see that ccisolutions.com is being credited with the most internal links and I don't see the other URL anywhere in the top pages. http://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?page=1&site=www.ccisolutions.com&sort=page_authority&filter=&source=internal&target=page&group=0
Are you seeing the same thing? If not, can you let me know what you are seeing and where you are seeing it?
I see that you do have the rel=canonical tag set up correctly so even if you left the breadcrumb link to the old URL, eventually it shouldn't matter. However, if you're able to, I would recommend changing that breadcrumb link to point to the correct URL just to keep everything consistent.
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RE: Google referral drop after setting preferred domain
I am assuming by Google Referral you are not talking about Google Organic or Google PPC, correct? (Some people may consider "Google Referral" to mean "traffic from Google including organic/AdWords" so I just wanted to ask to make sure I am understanding the question clearly)
Assuming you are talking about Google Referral traffic, did you notice any changes in Direct Visits or Organic Visits on the 29th? A big change in Direct and/or Organic on the 29th may mean that there's simply a change in the way your analytics tool is tracking traffic sources.
If the only thing that has dropped was Google Referral traffic, then I think that Google's new Image Search is likely to blame. Google Image searches used to be tracked as Google Referral since the webpage was loaded in the background, whereas the new version does not load the webpage and thus is not tracked by Google Analytics/web analytics as a Google Referral visit. If this is the case, then it's likely it's simply just a coincidence that you noticed the drop in Google Referral traffic the same day the new Google Image Search was made available for a lot of people.
Here's a blog post showing similar declines in visits - http://www.webpronews.com/image-search-changes-google-said-would-be-good-for-webmasters-might-be-hurting-some-sites-2013-01
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RE: Joomla Title Help - Plugin?
There are a number of SEO plugins available for Joomla, most of which allows you to customize the title tag. Here are some that I've found that may be what you are looking for -
http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/site-management/seo-a-metadata/meta-data/17926
http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/site-management/seo-a-metadata/4102
http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/site-management/seo-a-metadata/meta-data/14113
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RE: Is Rel=Canonical the answer???
Would it be possible to only post the content on the blog and then add a few paragraphs on the main site which then links to the blog for the full article? I think that would be ideal.
Otherwise, you could try using the cross domain canonical tag in order to get the blog ranking for the content. The issue is that Google considers the canonical tag to be a hint rather than an absolute directive, so it might not necessarily work. http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/12/handling-legitimate-cross-domain.html
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RE: 301 Re-Directs Puzzling Question on Page Returned in Search Results
I can't say for sure what happened last time since I am not exactly sure what you did. But as long as the 301 redirects are set up correctly and Google is not having any trouble accessing and crawling them, then you shouldn't experience any major negative results over the long term.
Now that I've read your initial post again, I see that the Maine page is one of the States you tried to redirect as part of your test. However, as I posted above, the old page is not being 301 redirected to the new page, so Google may have dropped your site in the rankings since you essentially had two very similar pages competing against each other for the same terms.
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RE: Link being indexed
That link is showing up in OSE. It appears to be passing authority and when I checked the Google cache of that article (so it is definitely indexed), your link shows up so there isn't any kind of cloaking/trickery going on there. Have you tried downloading all of the URLs from GWT? Sometimes the table of links in GWT are not updated that often, but the link may show up when you try to download the CSV file.
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RE: Question about collapsible/Expandable
Here is what I have found, a solution using CSS3 - http://www.cssportal.com/css3-preview/showing-and-hiding-content-with-pure-css3.htm.
Not sure how well it works across all different browsers though.
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RE: URL question
I just went to the site in both Firefox and Chrome and I am getting the http protocol. My guess is that your site with the https is cached in Firefox and that's why you are seeing it. Have you tried clearing your cache and restarting your browser?
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RE: Should I remove 404 urls in webmaster tools?
I would recommend just letting them drop out of the index naturally. Google basically suggests doing the same thing - http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/05/do-404s-hurt-my-site.html
If you find that the 404'd pages are still in the index after a period of time, then it may make sense to manually remove them via GWT.
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RE: Non ranking keywords driving traffic !?
The rankings can vary person to person depending on several different factors. So just because you are not seeing your site in the rankings, it is still possible that other people are seeing it and that's why you are getting visits for those keywords. I would check your Google Webmaster Tools Search Query report for more information.