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One possible solution would be to add the 'family' of pages you currently list to your sitemap page, and just have your 'parent' pages listed on the sidebar.

People coming to your site will only visit the 'children' pages through exact-match search terms or through their user journey, so you needn't worry about listing everything on the homepage. Your homepage is there to help entice people to look further - let them discover your other products easily, rather than being given a list of options they must choose from.

That's an opinion - not a solution, really, but it gives you an option at least! Your site would be cleaner and easier to crawl if you just had the parent pages in the sidebar

I see you're at the 'why isn't anything happening stage' of SEO work!

This doesn't necessarily mean that the work you've done isn't helping your website - but you need to analyse your link building strategy.

How did you go about getting the links? What anchor texts did you go for? If you've gone keyword heavy on links, for example, it's likely you've been penalised.

I can't stress how important it is to look natural. What you perceive as natural may be completely different to how Google perceives 'natural'. Remember, a link should look like someone is referring to you/referencing you as the source of information/a product. You've almost got to have an element of paranoia about you when thinking about whether something looks natural.

As for the impact time - this all depends when Google is crawling your site and how often. If you're updating content pretty often - why not stick some news content in there too, or reviews, or offers... something people can share and interact with rather than simply read and click away from.

Good luck, hope your site gets to where you want it!

Hey,

I seem to be getting some old data too - just links from websites that are no longer active. Don't think it's anything to worry about, just knuckle down on your site and check back in a week or so to see if any changes have been made. As long as you know what you've been doing (by keeping a log of it), there's nothing to worry about.

On the plus side, your DA has increased - that's gotta be worth a smile and a pat on the back!

While it may affect your presence higher up in the search engines - to start with - it's a perfect opportunity to develop some exciting content for that section of your website, an excuse (not that you need one) to present something new, if you will. And I don't just mean static pages, I'm talking content people can share - interesting, educational, inspiring (insert other relevant word here) content that links well throughout your website (and sends your readers/audience on a buying journey, starting at information/education, ending at checkout).

Sure, 301 the old pages to the new one to gain whatever benefit you can out of them - but make sure you don't spend all your time worrying about this... jump on the social side of things and look at how visitors are interacting with your content, then think about how they might be tempted to share it (special offers, for example...) - the opportunities are endless.

That's just my take on it. Don't spend all your time worrying about the re-structure; that's something I've just learned!

Hi,

This is my first post/question in the forum - so apologies if this topic has already been covered - or if the question seems daft!

Here's the issue:

I have started working on two websites, and have been doing a lot of on-site work, increasing valuable content, etc... I'm now slowly moving onto more off-site stuff and have noticed that a lot of the backlinks to both websites (built by SEO companies before I got here) are 'dead' and simply return 404 errors (yet they still show up in site explorer).

I'll be honest, the links aren't great; the SEO companies have taken the word 'relevant' and completely re-defined it in their books!

Will these links - from sites that aren't relevant... but are dead - have any impact on my SEO efforts from now on? Or should I treat these sites as a kind of 'clean slate' and work on building the brand naturally through social media and user experience, etc?

Also - I'm re-structuring the internal pages of the site... would it be worth re-directing the old URLs (with all the dead in-bound links - that may have suffered a -50 penalty) to the new ones, or just start fresh with the new pages?

Any advice, tips or stories to share (relevant ones, of course!) will be greatly appreciated!

Thanks,

Nick

Whenever I see offers like this, I ask myself would I want my site to be submitted to 50 others... along with every other site that this service submits? Link farming - or as Malcolm Gibb has said, paid link directories - are a cheap and spammy way of padding out your profile (something some inexperienced SEO companies will do for smaller sites).

If you're going to pay.... You should be able to find more niche and relevant sites that may cost a little more for 'one link' rather than 50 links for a little cheaper.

Not too bad really - there are some links that could be questionable, but they're just from press releases (the links themselves are OK, it's the other links on the referring sites that are concerning). The only real concern I had was all these 'rubbish' links that had suddenly expired and whether that was going to have some sort of effect on the site.

My instinct was telling me that there wouldn't be an issue - but thought I would make use of the community here to see if people had experience of this!

Thanks again!