We are doing a "soft migration" of a website.  (Actually it is a merger of two websites).

We are doing cross site rel=canonical tags instead of 301's for the first 60-90 days.  These have been done on a page by page basis for an entire site.  Google states that a "change of address" should be done in webmaster tools for a site migration with 301's.   Should this also be done when we are doing this soft move?

I am seeing thousands of 404 errors.  Each of the urls is like this:

abc.com/abc123/tel:1231231234

Everything is normal about that url except the "/tel:1231231234"

these urls are bad with the tel: extension, they are good without it.

The only place I can find this character string is on each page we have this code which is used for Iphones and such.  What are we doing wrong?

Code:

Phone: <a href="[tel:1231231234](tel:7858411943)"> (123) 123-1234a>

I will try and provide some useful information as a follow up.

Sales on site B are slowly dieing.  The brand that this web site  sells is no longer in business.  It has great rankings mainly because no one is competing for this brand and it specializes in that brand.  It has a good link profile from other site pointing to it as a place to get the brand it sells (as they are now hard to find).

Site A is the site that has the longer term potential an is trying to be built up.

If a merger can only help site A sell the brand of site B, then there is no reason to do it. The desire is to boost the overall rankings for site A.

Our Client owns two ecommerce websites.

Website A sells 20 related brands.  Website has improving search rank, but not normally on the second to fourth page of google.

Website B was purchased from a competitor.  It has 1 brand (also sold on site A).  Search results are normally high on the first page of google.

Client wants to consider merging the two sites.   We are looking at options.

Option 1:  Do nothing, site B dominates it’s brand, but this will not do anything to boost site A.

Option 2: keep both sites running, but put lots of canonical tags on site B pointing to site A

Option 3: close down site B and make a lot of 301 redirects to site A

Option 4: ???

Any thoughts on this would be great.  We want to do this in a way that boosts site A as much as possible without losing sales on the one brand that site B sells.

My understanding is that a link from a page with 100 links is worth 1/10th the value of a link from a page with only 10 links.   Link "juice" is diluted.  Some tools seem to indicate that the total number of links going to other domains is important.  I didn't think that was important.  My understanding is that it is the total number of links as more links will dilute the power of the link.

I want to be very clear.   I am talking about two types of outgoing links from a page.  Links to other pages on the same website and links to pages on other websites.

I thought that the important factor in the value of a link was how many outing links a page has total.  Some tools seems to tell me that the important data point is how many EXTERNAL links a page has.   Which number should I be paying attention to when looking at pages I want to get linked from?

(Yes, I know there are many other factors that are important)

Just some more info:

we used "opencube" to make our menus.   Fantastic software.

Just adding a few things to this posters questions.

I was always told that Java drop down menus were bad.  I made sure my menus were html that could be seen in the code.   I read recently that Google is getting better at reading java menus.  I am not sure I believe this.

I have menus that open up into a tree structure; refining the search as you go.  I find this to be good for the user experience as fewer clicks are required to get where you want to go.  I am unsure of the seo downside to my menu structure as it means each of my pages have 170 links.