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Yes, you should have a real 404 page.

• You'll help the people that follow their links - you should have a list of links that they might be looking for - and a search box.  Remember, you want these visitors to stay on your site, not bounce.
• Google wants you to have one. In fact many bots will test your site has a 404 page that returns the correct status (404 of course). Make sure you test yours. Many incorrectly return 200 (ok) status.

If you want to keep (some of) the linkjuice, and you know where they want to go, you would 301 redirect to the correct destination.

+1

blog.domain.com is effectively a different site, so you lose out by spreading the love amongst two sites..

Do they or you have in-house developers? If so, going the open-source route will give them huge advantages over time when you want to modify the CMS. I wrote my own CMS years ago and I'm still finding things to improve - and many of my competitors with their OOTB CMS cannot keep up with changes.

Ah, the classic unanswerable question.

Many people have asked - and many people have guessed at the answer. There are numerous ways people have approached this "problem" - some nofollow outbound links, some use javascript to hide the links entirely from bots.

I keep coming back to the advice - what would you do if there were no search engines?  Building your site to make sense for people is still the advice that google offers.

Personally, I like linking out to relelvant topical sites from my ecommerce sites. I'm not being stingy with links to helpful places. I do however nofollow all my comments - for obvious reasons.

There are numerous ways for google to find your URL even if it doesnt have a regular link to it - security by obscurity isnt very effective, if you truly dont want anything to be crawled hide it behind a login.

I'm not sure how these pages are being created obviously but I wouldnt redirect - instead remove them from index using meta tag or robots.txt. Or just delete them

Don't miss the obvious - title is a conversion tool not just for SEO. This is what makes your customers click on your page in SERPs and on your category pages. You should consider making the titles (and meta descriptions) better at "selling the click" not just from a keyword SEO point-of-view..

A because it's easier to read - use the rel=canonical tag to "redirect" index.html to /

or do a real 301 redirect. the key here is to only have one of these indexed, or you will get duplicate content.

with that super-flat structure you are missing out on the category and subcategory keywords being present in your product URL. It's minor, but I wouldn't do it that way. The traditional category/subcategory/product is preferred.

Have you done this yourself and are talking from direct experience or is this just a "feeling"?  Not bashing you, just curious because some answers like this are too easy to write what everyone assumes rather than real experiences. I'm very interested in this question too - I have a similar situation.

"a lot more sites per visit" - I assume you mean pages per visit?

Don't rely on tricks like splitting the articles up over many short pages to increase your page views. You're only annoying your readers.

Instead focus on creating more and better content! There is no substitute for great topical content to keep visitors on your site!

In addition:

1. show related articles/products below the article
2. allow comments on your content
3. allow reviews on your content
4. add video and images to your content

I've toyed with this a number of times - and always stayed with growing and improving a single site. By splitting your focus amongst numerous sites I think you will get worse results - you'll have to build links to multiple domains instead of just one - with one site each link you get benefits the whole site! You're also running the risk of google filtering out some sites from the SERPs - especially if running from very similar or identical IP addresses.

Overall, it's something I'd discourage - even though I know you are thinking "better focus, smaller niche, more targeted" etc.. I know, I've been there

I really wouldnt take it offline - not for two months. Craziness

Make it read-only if possible - or schedule some new content if you can. If you truly want minimum SEO impact, then wait until the new site is out of beta then push live and setup your 301's..

I have raised this to the seomoz team a few times - it's a work in progress still. they are getting better, but my site still shows the same issues - duplicate content errors that even the semoz support team agree aren't really an issue because of canonical tags.

I suggest just ignoring that for now and waiting for an update.

It's a matter of trust - I wouldn't buy from a site spelling mistakes (or any one of a number of problems; bad design, technical errors, broken links, no SSL, etc, etc)

In order to pull out my wallet I need to trust the people running the site are competent enough to keep my info safe, and deliver the product. Unfortunately, a simple spelling mistake in a conspicuous place would be enough to put me off.

Rightly or wrongly, I think there is an inherent distrust of foreign websites - they are tainted by stories of scammers, spammers and organised crime...

..so YES, use a spell checker and check the grammar too!

It is a reciprocal link, no matter how you attribute it.  nofollow works great to tell bots that the link is not recommended by you - for example on URL's in comments - but if you are trying to increase the influence of the inbound links I think you are selling google short. If I were them I would totally count that as reciprocal.

A better question is, if you are recommending those blogs, why NOT link to them? They are links you control, the fact you link to them tells Google what neighborhood you think you belong to. Not a bad thing.

If you're looking for truly apache mod_rewrite stories I cannot help, but I have implemented site-wide redirect schemes so that (for example) all URL's are put into Title Case, all folders are redirected to ensure trailing slash, and much more.

It made a big difference and is highly recommended. Our duplicate content (that google wasnt even reporting but that we saw with tools like the IIS SEO toolkit http://www.iis.net/download/seotoolkit) dropped to zero and shortly afterwards our traffic increased as a result of increased keyword ranking almost across the board.

Too many people ignore this.

I expect some won't agree Donna. Trouble is, we're all guessing.. and we're guessing based on today's ideas. We've seen over the last 2-3 years just how quickly and radically the rules can change. Google has made it clear (I think) what they value. Links from real people writing content about you.

I have a private blog that I use to record everything I do to the site. This is password protected and (obviously) not indexed by search engines, so it's literally a prvate journal that I often add results from mozbar to so I can compare month-to-month how my moztrust etc changes.

I also make notes inside my google analytics by adding "annotations" under the graph. This is useful to track if changes you make have any result on your traffic or conversion..

#3 or #4. Think of about.com - getting a link or two from an article on there is great, and makes sense to google. Getting a link from the front page (content area) is a great endorsement too. #1 and #2 are easily discounted by bots and users alike as being lower quality.

Linking from articles is still "worthwhile" - obviously don't spend a ton of time on it because it is still an internal link after all..

General rule of thumb; make your decisons based on the customer, not the bots.

A descriptive domain name is always a good thing if you're telling someone what you do in the elevator. It helps with SEO too, if your keyword is in it. Just don't go spammy - not www.blue-green-red-widget-widgets.com

Or you can go for memorable; flickr.com, etc.

The best of course is when you manage to do both, but given the choice I would always try for my premium keyword.com!

I've read numerous reports that Google effectively ignores (or perhaps not ignore; downgrades) the "site template" - so what appears on every page, e.g. header, footer, sidebar(s) has less effect than links inside the content area.

bear that in mind - a link from your home page content to a category may be more effective.

Send links to the new (ugly) URL. Consistency is critical, all links to the same content must use the same URL. The actual URL is less important; more a "would be nice" rather than a "must have"

I haven't done this personally, so this is pure conjecture - but I would be a little concerned if the sites were mainly identical (layout, content, products) and running on the same (or very close) IP address. Who knows when/if it could be found, but this would be quite easy for Google to track and potentially treat as duplicate content. You may not see any effect now, but for the long-term I'd try to think of alternative strategies..

If they were treated as duplicates, then typically Google will pick one and hide the others from SERPs

Are these URL's to categories/folders or product detail pages? Generally you'd expect the trailing slash on folders only, e.g.

/foldera/
/foldera/producta

The sitemap must match the exact URL's used on the site obviously - I would expect a slight penalty if your URL's in sitemap cause a redirect. That would be sloppy.

Having said all this, consistency is key - not necessarily whether there are slashes or not. You must be careful though that whichever someone uses (and they'll link to you both ways) you always redirect to the same style.

1.8mb is HUGE, what on earth is in there? I have a full background complex image for one of my websites - it's 90kb. Even the biggest CSS sprite image I have is just 30kb that includes most of my site template.

I recommend that you revisit this and use a different image format if not jpg/png/gif - for example never use tif or BMP online.

A background this size will really look poor to your first time visitors - this is exactly why Google want to start using speed as a ranking factor.

Is the page indexed? That's more important than the length of that little green bar...

Also try the "trick" query of adding a /* to the URL.

site:domain.com/*

I always compare these results with the plain site:domain.com - it's conjecture but I believe the /* is showing the really indexed pages (primary index) and the other shows supplemental index. No-one really knows of course, but I track the percentage of one over the other as a way of measuring google's trust of your site. The numbers are relative, not absolute, but I use a yardstick of 20-30% as being good.

YMMV

Jaime, I'm a firm believer that there is no duplicate content problem except on-site - I would simply post the article on your site/blog and give a citation/link to the orignial source. I wouldnt bother but you could just post the first half and link on for the rest.

This is after all what Google News does.

I agree with Dejan SEO - I'd 302 the new to old right now, then 301 the old to new when launched

You should always link to the authorities in your niche anyway in my opinion. That shows google what network you are a part of..

This is a perfect opportunity to use the canonical tag: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=139394 so that only one of these pages is indexed.

Well, for a start, its very hard to see traffic figures for long-tail queries - by definition there are thousands of variations that may get only a search or two each month!  I'd focus on finding the keywords that make you money - the long tail will follow if you write good content and have a great natural link profile (varied anchor text)

Find the money keywords using adwords, then optimize your site for those.

yes, this is a problem! response.redirect is a 302 - you at a minimum should be using 301.

however, i recommend you get to the bottom of this and find out what the real intent is here. if one of the domains is old and needs to be shut down then redirects can make sense - but it might all be a mistake. Using 302's shows that whoever set it up didn't know too much about what they were doing

Acquiring links at a consistent rate is more sustainable; I've also heard (but cannot personally prove) that you should gradually grow links to make the link growth more natural - i.e. sudden spikes in growth may trigger some adverse reaction from SE's.

Personally, I think there are many natural reasons for spikes too - some event like a product launch, natural disaster or even something like being mentioned on the 10 o'clock news that I wouldnt worry about it.

But scaling up your link building sure makes it easier to build your systems and processes, adding more link building methods over time. You can't come out of the gate and expect to build a million backlinks in a month. At least not ones that will matter.

Personally I'd keep all the old pages, and on them show a list of similar cars.. so if it was a Mustang, show other mustangs, etc.

No difference - but it is true that some prefer | nowadays - more from a conversion point of view than for SEO. Google views them all the same.

In my opinion you are wasting your time with article directories now. They all got hit big time recently, and google are very open about saying it's a waste of your time and money. Stick to using those articles in better ways - guest blogging, adding to your own blog/site, ebook creation, etc.

We saw Matt Cutts yesterday at SXSW and he was very plain about this. Even EzineArticles (the least spammy in my opinion) is almost pointless now.

Ouch, they are nasty. Hiding the links like that is dangerous - super easy to detect and can be viewed as deceptive. I would leave the articles, but at the very least remove the CSS that hides the links. I would probably remove all the links in the article.

Of course, if the articles are pure junk (I'm not sure) then get some nice ones written and replace them.

Just to add to this: here is how you 301 in vbscript:

<%@ Language=VBScript %> <%' Permanent redirection Response.Status = "301 Moved Permanently" Response.AddHeader "Location", "http://www.domain.com/" Response.End %>

I followed the steps I read in some help forums - basically deleting it from one account and then claiming it again. I just had to answer my phone to get a PIN and it all took just a day or two..

http://www.google.com/support/places/bin/search.py?ctx=en:searchbox&query=transfer

Larry, +1 to Mike's advice.  Press releases are the way to go with high quality content like this. I recommend PRWeb also. Have facebook and twitter accounts setup and primed before the first of the press releases.

more linking root domains is almost always the answer, especially since you cannot "age" your domain (they may be older than you and benefiting from that). Just focus on quality links, not quantity (e.g. guest blogging)