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Luckily, 301 redirecting from one site to another (when moving a site) and using the Google Change of Address Tool has taken out a lof of the risk that used to exist. if done properly, you should benefit from combining both sites and not lose any rankings.

You're on the right track, I would outline the content and make sure that there's not any content that overlaps--every product/service and every page should be unique and not cause any duplicate content issues.

Generally speaking, you'd want to do what you're planning, which is to use a directory off of your main domain and then 301 redirect the pages from the old site to the new pages on the new site. Use the Google Change of Address Tool to tell Google about the change.

I would fully integrate the pages into your main navigation on the site rather than just provide a link--it's important that the new pages get all the internal links that they can.

Rosemary, Gaston is right--we generally list our sitemap URLs in the robots.txt file, which typically is enough for the search engine crawlers to find them. Keep in mind, though, that a sitemap file or files isn't really required at all if you have a really good site structure.

What you do with the content really depends on how much content you're talking about. If it's less than 50 posts, you may want to remove the content entirely and 301 redirect to a new post--which explains that you're no longer providing those services, and then highlight the services that you do offer.

I would, though, look at your site's Google Analytics to see how much traffic those posts are getting. If there is a lot of traffic, but it's irrelevant, consider moving them to another domain and 301 redirecting them from your domain to the new domain name. You could then advertise your other services on that site with banner ads or be a "sponsor". That way others may see the posts and then click thru to your main site because they're interested in the services you do have to offer.

If the posts just don't get much traffic, then it may be worth it to just delete the posts entirely (keep a backup of them, though) and that will allow Google to re-evaluate the content and topic of your site.

Bruce, whenever you lose rankings, there are a few things that you should check. First, I would crawl your own website using Screaming Frog, Deep Crawl, or another crawler to see if you can identify any issues. I would also look at the links to the site--have you lost links or gained any "shady" or unnatural links recently? Have you done anything related to a disavow file that might have caused this?

There are so many potential issues to deal with that could have been the culprit--but I would first crawl your own website and see if it's can be crawled properly. Then look at the links.

As for the sitemap issue, I don't think that it's going to be a sitemap issue if your pages are being indexed. But, if the sitemap does not have the current pages on your site and is not up to date I would fix it.

sym_admin is right--you'll want to find the source of those pages, as Google apparently is seeing them from somewhere and still requesting them. If there are links to those pages somewhere, you will need to remove them. Also, if you're able, I would change those URLs so that they serve up a "410 Gone" error, and not a 404.

Felix, there is a good chance that this is referral spam. The goal of a referral spammer is to get you to notice those URLs, and investigate them as if they are sending traffic to your website. Typically, those visitors won't stay long on your website, and they won't have your domain name as the "hostname" in Google Analytics.

Take a look at the traffic and see if it does have a hostname associated with it, and if it's actual human visitors. I bet it's not.

Dieter, one other way you can do this is to use a proxy service. There are several proxy services out there, such as SurfEasy, Strong VPN, or Hola that allow you to surf the web as if you're actually surfing from another country. You can choose the country and then you'll use a VPN to access the sites you need to from another country.

Rosemary, in order to remove the content quickly, you have to do several things. You see, Google's processes for crawling, etc. and removing content from the index don't always happen all at once. So, it's best to do several things:

• Remove the content. When visitors or bots visit the URL, use the "410 Gone" server header code to ensure that it's not just a 404 error being used.

• If the content must stay and cannot be removed but still needs to be removed from Google's index, consider password protecting the content, putting it behind a paywall, making users log in to see the content, and/or adding a meta robots noindex tag on the page.

• Add a robots.txt file on the subdomain so that it tells the bots to stop crawling. If you use something like dev.yourdomain.com for a dev section of the site, make sure that you have a robots.txt file at dev.yourdomain.com/robots.txt.

• Use Google Search Console to remove the content. Once logged in, use the removal tool: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/removals?pli=1

By using several approaches, this is going to be the fastest way to remove the content.

JM123, you can be assured that Google and it's bots don't create accounts--so they will never be able to sign in and sign out.

That said, you could technically deliver unique content to all signed-in users, because Google will never sign in and see that content.

What's important is the content that you do give to users that are NOT signed in. You should concentrate on that content to that it's unique and other pages aren't duplicated (thus having a duplicate content issue).

Excal, I've always looked considered the links that are shown in Google Search Console to be a "snippet" of all of the links to your website. For example, there are links that I know are pointing to our website that are good links--but they come and go in Google Search Console. They don't show us all the links. So, just as  you have seen them go away, there's a good chance that they will come back and be listed again.

I do know that the more often you download the links the more often they will refresh the list of links.

Stephanie, Logan is correct--we used to submit blog posts on YouMoz, and they could have the potential to be boosted up so they would show up differently if the post was good enough. That has been paused for now, and I'm looking forward to being able to contribute again.

Rosemary, in order to remove the content quickly, you have to do several things. You see, Google's processes for crawling, etc. and removing content from the index don't always happen all at once. So, it's best to do several things:

• Remove the content. When visitors or bots visit the URL, use the "410 Gone" server header code to ensure that it's not just a 404 error being used.

• If the content must stay and cannot be removed but still needs to be removed from Google's index, consider password protecting the content, putting it behind a paywall, making users log in to see the content, and/or adding a meta robots noindex tag on the page.

• Add a robots.txt file on the subdomain so that it tells the bots to stop crawling. If you use something like dev.yourdomain.com for a dev section of the site, make sure that you have a robots.txt file at dev.yourdomain.com/robots.txt.

• Use Google Search Console to remove the content. Once logged in, use the removal tool: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/removals?pli=1

By using several approaches, this is going to be the fastest way to remove the content.

Excal, I've always looked considered the links that are shown in Google Search Console to be a "snippet" of all of the links to your website. For example, there are links that I know are pointing to our website that are good links--but they come and go in Google Search Console. They don't show us all the links. So, just as  you have seen them go away, there's a good chance that they will come back and be listed again.

I do know that the more often you download the links the more often they will refresh the list of links.

No, you do not need to write unique meta titles for the others. However, you may want to swap out the name of the color so that the title tag of the page reflects the page that the user is on. This is really more for 'user experience' since than for the search engines or for SEO.

For example, if someone likes one particular color, they may choose to bookmark that page in their web browser. If they bookmark it, then the title tag would appear in the title of the bookmark--so having the correct product information there (the color) would be helpful.

Brian, when this happens, there is typically one reason: somewhere there is a link with that URL in it. What we've seen before is that oftentimes those links are created by hackers or spammers that then try to create content on your site with that URL. For example, when a site is hacked, they will create a page on your site and then link to it.

Without the URL (or the page name without your domain name), it's tough for me to see what might be causing this. But, there has to be a link somewhere to it in order for Google to want to index it.

What I would do is use a server header check tool (such as http://www.rexswain.com/httpview.html) to see if the page has a "200 OK" server response or a 404 error. Google typically doesn't index pages that deliver 404 errors. It could be that the server is set up to deliver a "page not found" on your site but it comes up with a "200 OK" in the server header, so Google indexes the page.

Check your site to see if there is a link to the page. If the link exists, then fix it. Then, look at Majestic.com or Open Site Explorer to see if they show any links from other sites to the page. If those links exist, see if you can get rid of those links.

Donnleath, I wouldn't worry too much about this. In fact, Google has been rewriting title tags for about 3 or 4 years, now.

Google, for whatever reason, has decided to rewrite your title tag for you if the one you're using better matches the actual search query being used by the searcher. It's quite possible that if your home page, for example, ranks for one search query they will rewrite it but for another search query they won't rewrite it.

Google will use, from time to time, your brand name, company name, and even elements of your site's navigation to rewrite your title tag. I've seen them take internal links from a site's navigation and breadcrumb trail and use those words in the title tag.

In your case, what you need to decide is if the title tags that Google is rewriting are better or 'worse' for your searchers. If they're worse, then you might consider looking at your site's navigation and breadcrumb trail to see if there's something that you can fix on your site to maybe influence Google to rewrite them another way.

If you see that Google is rewriting ALL of those title tags, though, on all pages, then you might want to take a look at your site's title tags and see if they do need to be rewritten, taking what Google is suggesting, into account.

Meisha, this can definitely be frustrating. When it comes to local listings, and individual units, keep in mind that every unit should have it's own unique unit number, so it would have it's own address.

You mentioned this: "He has also taken ownership of the building Google Plus page, Facebook page, etc. He only owns a handful of units in the building. "

If that other person has taken ownership of the entire building essentially, and the entire Google Plus page, Facebook page, etc. then is sounds as if he is misrepresenting his ownership. Therefore, pressure can be put on him to disclose his ownership of only certain units in the building, and you should be able to force him (legally) to only represent the units that he actually owns.

If this is the case, then he would need to update his Google Local listing(s) so that they only show the actual address of the unit(s) that he owns. If it doesn't currently, and it shows that he owns the entire building, then he should be forced to update it.

You should consult a lawyer, but most likely a stern letter to him asking him to update the website, Google Listings, and any Facebook (and other URLs) so that they only show the unit numbers he actually owns would probably go a long way. In the meantime, any listings that you create should also reflect the actual units that you own, as well.

When it comes go Google's local listings, it's perfectly fine to have multiple "businesses" at one location, as they have unique suite numbers. In this case, there are individual unit numbers, so there is an option to create a listing for each unit. It's not okay for this other person to misrepresent his ownership.

Becky, if you are aware that you have a lot of content that's going to be duplicate, then you've already identified the first step--which is to recognize that they are duplicates. Too many people just upload those pages and don't realize that they're duplicates and then wonder, after the fact, why their site's traffic went down. So for that, I commend you.

In order to deal with this, though, you need to determine which pages are truly going to be duplicates of other pages. Once you've done that, then you should use the canonical tag. The canonical tag should be placed on the duplicate pages and point back to the main page (or the one you don't want to be marked as duplicate).

Come up with a strategic, realistic plan for making those pages unique by adding or rewriting the content. And you might want to look at information such as your site's analytics or make a list of your best-selling products and deal with those first.

Adding a noindex tag to pages and removing them from the index really shouldn't be an option, because you DO want those pages indexed--adding content to them will make them unique and you'll be able to remove the canonical tag. Once you mark a page and tell the search engines not to index that page, it's much tougher to get it BACK in the index, so I wouldn't do that.

Spacecollective, your website's sitemap file(s) don't have any direct impact on search engine rankings. If you have a large website with over 4500 URLs, then most likely you're using content management system (CMS) that "should" be able to create a sitemap file.

If your website's CMS can't do that, then I would recommend crawling the website yourself and updating the sitemap file. However, keep in mind that if you do it manually then you'll need to update it whenever you add or remove a page on the website.

Typically, if your navigational structure is set up in a way that all pages on the website can be crawled via links on the site, you generally shouldn't have anything to worry about.

Roy, this is definitely a complex task--which should take careful planning and organization. The steps that are outlined in the link that you provided is a good start, but that's only a small part of what needs to be done .There are a lot of sub-tasks that need to be taken care of in between those larger tasks.

When it comes to moving site A to B, there is no site C involved--so just think about it as if you're moving site A to C and then B to C. Or, you could also first think about combining both sites and rather than moving site A to B you can choose the best content on each and then just move them to site C.

What's important, though, is to figure out which content and pages are duplicated on both sites and then choose the best page(s) and move those to site C. There will be content that's essentially not on both sites, so those can just be moved. The key is to spend plenty of time organizing the content and deciding which content can go away, which needs to be moved, which needs to be combined, and soforth.

There is one major step that's missing in that other list, which is to use verify all sites (http and https, as well as http://www and https://www) in Google Search Console, set up those 301 redirects, and use the Google Change of Address tool to tell Google that the site's moved.

There is also a mention of rel canonical, and since the sites are moving entirely, canonical tags won't be appropriate to use. You'll need to use 301 Permanend Redirects to move the content from one site to another, especially since site A and B won't exist anymore (they'll be redirected).