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Hello all, I'm working on a large site that is being prepared for a migration. After scraping on screaming frog, WMT, and deepcrawl, and deduping I have a list of 404 pages that need redirected. Many of these URLs are just incomplete URLs. For example the incomplete URL would be: "https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to" when it should be "https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo" I have been finding the correct page manually searching google. With hundreds more to go, I am looking for a way the would be a little less laborious. Thanks! https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo

Here's our situation: Our company sells Employee HANDBOOKS (the book that explains to employees how the company itself is run, more or less).  That's the technically correct term for them.  However, many people use this term interchangeably with Employee MANUALS.  Employee MANUALS are actually slightly different.  (they're more specific, usually a list of common office policies and procedures and how to do them) When doing Keyword research, we learned that many, many people search for Employee MANUALS when they actually are interested in an employee HANDBOOK.  We've got our page optimized for the Keyword Employee HANDBOOKS, because in our copy we always refer to it as such. Here's my question:  Would it be "cloacking" or some other blackhat nonsense if we did this: #1.  Take a copy of the current page, and make a second page for it with a slightly different URL, but optimize the SEO-relevant parts for the phrase Employee MANUAL. #2.  That page will also include a 301-redirect towards the original page, which is identical except the SEO bits are optimized for Employee HANDBOOKS. My understanding here is that we'd get the SEO juice from the phrase Employee Manual, without actually having to do the upkeep on two different pages. We also avoid having to have a random page SEO optimized for an improper term just because of the general confusion about what the product is called. Are we on the right track here?  Or is this going to annoy Google, or not have the result I'm predicting?  Any insight is appreciated!

Hi Guys wonder if you can help my site www.economy-car-leasing.co.uk has just been 301 from www.economyleasinguk.co.uk The reason for the move is the site is going to be structured for both cars and vans separately we did the 301 around 8 weeks ago and initially we thought everything went well, all the new site was indexed within 24 hours, we updated WMT on the old site we monitored around 150 keywords many were top 10 in Google 99% were top 5 pages However 8 weeks on we do not rank for hardly anything, i have confirmed all the redirects are working, we have 200 ok from the home page and all the other canonical pages return 301 we just implemented the canonical tag to all pages. we did factor that we will get some down time but not 8 weeks worth, i have done a 301 on this scale before with no real loss of rankings (Different site) Really tempted to put the old site back however its not what i want to do, Bing seems to have picked up on the change really well but im thinking Google just needs time The change looks like its done perfectly and everything is working as it should however it looks like that none of the original rankings or juice has been pushed over from Google yet and im wondering how long does it typically take to get the site ranking again site have gone from 17k unique s per month to less than 2k Paul

Good Morning from 14 degrees C sunny Wetherby UK  🙂 My question is please.... "When a new site is given a total makover ie old urls are re written to radically different ones I know if you dont set up 301 redirects the infamous 404 error page will rear its head. But i wonder if 301 redirects were not configured how long on average does it take google to index the new site and serp links finally point to the new site". Thanks in advance 🙂

This is my first time asking so I will try to be as clear as possible. Ok, I have a micro site that is an (exact match domain) and the domain is a couple 3-4 years old and ranks very well for several search terms. The main two terms it ranks for are like this. houses for rent in XXXXX XXXXX homes for rent (XXXXX equals a city name) The issue is this site has no backlinks, zero advanced SEO, I only did basic optimization to it when i set the site up. Even site structure, url structure all are not good.
The only page I have ever even seen rank is the main root url. But with all that the site does really good in the top 1-2 results for key search terms. Now, I have a main site that is a very big site that has steadily been climbing in search terms every month with great backlinks, optimized for the city and all.
It currently ranks on second page for the listed search terms listed above. What I want to do is 301 redirect this microsite to my city page on my main site that is much better optimized for the key city terms.
The 301 redirect would point this "root domain"  (mymicrosite.com) to my city page that looks like this. www.mymaindomain.com/city/XXXXXXX If I do this will Google rank my main URL city page as well as it ranks this microsite with zero links, seo, etc, etc. What happens if it does not? Will I be able to turn off the 301 redirect and keep the microsite rankings? My main reason for wanting this is I want this city page to rank well and I only want to optimize one site instead of both. Any help would be great!

Hello, My question is: how important is it to wait for the a redirect to get seen and cached before you take down the old page? More in depth: my old platform has seriously limited my ability to add sitemaps and make edits to htacces. I just want to change nameservers (which will delete everything on there) and upload the htaccess is that alright? Another way of saying it: when redirecting a page, is it necessary for google to see the old page before it is deleted? Thanks Tyler

We have been asked to look at a website and have found a 301 redirect from the domain www.domain.com to www.domain.com/home.aspx.  Why would someone do this, this way round?  We can't think of a good reason and are wondering if we have overlooked something? Thanks for your help.