First of all, welcome aboard. I always love to here of peoples first steps into SEO and the results they get.

My site has around 450 pages, thus its would be a major job for me to amend my page titles. Sites like SEOmoz have thousands of pages, and the vast majority of them are available in SERPs. Now as far as I know SEOmoz do not change their titles, again because it would be a massive job.

Saying that, if I run an offer or a sale on my website I will generally change my homepage title to reflect the fact I have a sale on, in the hope that the Sale text will be updated promptly in the SERPs and attarct a few extra click throughs.

In summary, no I dont think the freshness of your page titles has any positive effect on your SEO. But, It may impact your Click through rate (which I guess in turn could effect your SEO...now were going full circle).

Clear as mud?

Hi,

There are plug ins which handle 301 redirects so I'd start by checking your plugs section and seeing what is active.

Wordpress uses a HTAccess file to store its 301's and such. However if you are inexperienced with handling a HTAccess file, I'd leave it be ad ask a expert to have a look at it as you can seriously mess up your site.

Agreed Matt, that is scarey. though a years worth of work to deindex one competitor seems like a lot of hard work for little gain.

I'd rather spend the year doing something positive and not being a complete git.

After looking over the site in question, it may not be down to the negative SEO, theres an awful lot that could be improved on that site.

From a usability perspective I'd look at the redirects as a 404 is some what off putting when your trying to buy. It could lead to visitors losing trust and ultimately sales.

In turn, if usbility is effected in such a way then doubtless the SEO will follow.

If you have matching products which have indexed pages with some page authority, then I'd take the time to redirect them.

Your compromise is not bad, it would save a mountain of time which can be devoted to other cool things and its certainly better than several thousand 404 errors!

On reflection, this is the kind of story that is going to gain some momentum in the business/marketing world and will probably generate a bucket load of nice authority links for the site...could this be a double bluff?

either way mr negativeseo might have undone all his hard work simply by boasting about his exploits! I hope so.

If you had 1000 links coming from a russian porn site, then you may get penalised as it doesn't appear to be a natural link profile.

However one or two links from foreign sites is not a bad thing. If your site is being discussed/linked too in other countries then it should be a sign that its good if not great!