Great insight John, thanks for the words of wisdom.

What are you thoughts regarding sub-domains? You could have also created a sub-domain and geo targeted a specific country for each.

Example:

www.website.com (Global)

uk.website.com (UK Only)

au.website.com (Australia Only)

I'm not sure if sub-domains or new domains have more weight than the other, but it makes sense to keep the site and brand as a whole intact rather than creating new domains and just geo target each for their respective country/audience.

Greg

Creating links on different websites is the key... Submitting multiple articles to the same websites/Directories wont have as much of an effect as if you submitted to other websites.

I have also heard that links in article directories and web 2.0 sites are devalued by Google as they are easily "created" and not "Earned"

If i was you, I would search Google for websites looking for guest authors and submit your article to those websites.

Search this in Google and you should get a few websites to submit your articles too.

"keyword"+“Guest bloggers wanted” OR “guest blogger wanted”

Greg

Yes it does effect your rankings.

I cant say how much, but is definately a factor that Google considers when ranking your pages.

Make sure you are using a reliable host as not only Google gets mad when pages become unavailable.

Greg

I would email each webmaster and save the corrospondance so that you can atleast prove to Google that you have tried to remove the links when you send your next Reconsideration request.

We wernt hit by any penalties, but after running the detox tool, we found a few sites that had been deinexed and got a decent response rate when asking for the link to be removed

If we ever get hit by a dodgy link penalty, we can at least provide some proof that we tried to clean up our link profile.

Greg

Thanks, that makes sense YouON. I could create interesting/funny/entertaining videos on YouTube for brand awareness, and more product/tour orientated videos on my site for  pre-selling and SEO

Thanks for the advice everyone

Greg

Hi,

I have an old Wordress website with about 300-400 original pages of content on it. All relating to my company's industry: travel in Africa. It's a legitimate site with travel stories, photos, advice etc. Nothing spammy about. No adverts on it. No affiliates.

The site hasn't been updated for a couple of years and we no longer have a need for it. Many of the stories on it are quite out of date.

The site has built up a modest Mozrank value over the last 5 years, and has a few hundreds organically achieved inbound links.

Recently I set up a swanky new branded website on ExpressionEngine on a new domain.

My intention is to:

1. Shut down the old site
2. Focus all attention on building up content on the new website
3. Ask the people linking to the old site to my new site instead (I wonder how many will actually do so...)
4. Where possible, setup a 301 redirect from pages on the old site to their closest match on the new site
5. Setup a 301 redirect from the old site's home page to new site's homepage

Sounds good, right?

But there is one issue I need some advice on...

The old site has about 100 pages that do not have a good match on the new site. These pages are outdated or inferior quality, so it doesn't really make sense to rewrite them and put them on the new site.

I call these my "black sheep pages".

So... for these "black sheep pages" should I (A) redirect the urls to the new site's homepage (B) redirect the urls the old site's home page (which in turn, redirects to the new site's homepage, or (C) not redirect the urls, and let them die a lonely 404 death?

OPTION A:

oldsite.com/page1.php -> newsite.com
oldsite.com/page2.php -> newsite.com
oldsite.com/page3.php -> newsite.com
oldsite.com/page4.php -> newsite.com
oldsite.com/page5.php -> newsite.com
oldsite.com -> newsite.com

OPTION B:

oldsite.com/page1.php -> oldsite.com
oldsite.com/page2.php -> oldsite.com
oldsite.com/page3.php -> oldsite.com
oldsite.com/page4.php -> oldsite.com
oldsite.com/page5.php -> oldsite.com
oldsite.com -> newsite.com

OPTION

oldsite.com/page1.php : do not redirect, let page 404 and disappear forever
oldsite.com/page2.php : do not redirect, let page 404 and disappear forever
oldsite.com/page3.php : do not redirect, let page 404 and disappear forever
oldsite.com/page4.php : do not redirect, let page 404 and disappear forever
oldsite.com/page5.php : do not redirect, let page 404 and disappear forever
oldsite.com -> newsite.com

My intuition tells me that Option A would pass the most "link juice" to my new site, but I am concerned that it could also be seen by Google as a spammy redirect technique.

What would you do?

Help

Meaning heading tags (H1, H2, H3, etc) are a critical part of good on-page optimisation. Fair enough. It helps humans and bots make sense of a page's content.

3 questions regarding implementation of heading tags:

1. Should heading tags appear in sequence in the HTML code. I.e. H1 first, then H2 lower down, etc.?

2. Can the page contain more than one H1 tag?

3. Can the page contain multiple H2, H3, H4 tags?

As long as YOU know that you don't promote your site via porn/gambling sites then who cares? Explain to them your sites history and then they wont jump to conclusions when they see your link profile.

Its impossible to remove that link anyway, unless you contact the web-master.

GREG