Very good point. Thanks for the comment! Stay tuned for more SEO articlesQ

Great point about the Soft 404’s! Those can be harmful to your rankings, especially if nothing is done to resolve the issue. Its bad for user experience. Both Google and the site owner should always be cognizant of user experience when it comes to SEO.

In regards to your question about website migration and old sitemaps; after the full site migration has taken place, its common for people to include their old sitemap with their new website’s sitemap to show google where their redirects are taking place.

However, this is redundant. Google is smart. Only include and submit your new website’s sitemap to Google or else you’ll see an error message resembling something like:

“When we tested a sample of URLs from your Sitemap, we found that some URLs redirect to other locations. We recommend that your Sitemap contain URLs that point to the final destination (the redirect target) instead of redirecting to another URL.”

Another tip is to self canonicalize your new pages to themselves, further telling Google that your new pages are the pages you want shown on the SERPs.

Thanks for the comment! We have more SEO content on the way!

Google makes it easy for anyone to submit their content and website! Thanks for engaging us. Stay tuned for more SEO articles!

One thing I would add is that Soft 404s often show ecommerce categories with no products. This could be a good way to identify empty pages on a large site as well as giving an indication on if your site is close to the dreaded Panda.

I found the point you made about old sitemaps. When doing a site migration I tend to just replace the sitemap URL. Do you suggest that I give the sitemap a different URL and let the old one 404 after the redirects have been crawled?

That makes sense! If a keyword you’re bidding on is too costly, it can be very hard to get a good enough return on investment. Thanks for sharing your insight!

So now, all I do is create content and leverage social media and publications with links pointing back to DNN for improved SEO to get more traffic, likes and shares on social networks, and use organic content marketing as a means of getting more traffic and making money online.