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>

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.

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)