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Hey guys, I'll get straight to the point - a small (growing) website I'm working on has a number links pointing to it from totally irrelevant sites (66, to be precise). These were built by an SEO company prior to me working on the site, and lead to an over-optimisation penalty for one keyword. This number doesn't sound large, but proportionally (to all other links), it is. It didn't used to be, but a lot of the links coming in have now 'died', and the domains they came from are now just parked. Anyway, I have managed to contact pretty much all the webmasters, and 27 of these links have been removed. Unfortunately - as I'm sure many people know all too well - a good handful of the contacted webmasters haven't replied, and the bad links still remain on their websites (either in-content or on links pages). I have decided to 'refresh' the website with some new (and better) content - providing much more information and a valuable resource. My question is - what should I do? Should I just replace the content on the existing pages (slightly altering the URL structure to match the topic more) and 301 the old URLs to the new ones? Or should I delete the pages and create new ones - thus making sure this particular section of the site isn't affected by any bad in-bound links? I'm more inclined to opt for the latter option, and 'start fresh' with the pages - so I know I've got total control over them, but wanted to get the opinion of the community before I made a decision. Thanks in advance for your responses! Nick

Hey guys, I recently asked a question similar to this, but wanted to spark up a bit of a discussion around it to see what everyone's feelings were on it. The web is always changing - as we're all too aware - so links you may have obtained (by however means) let's say 2 years ago may not be 'active' now. By that I mean you may have had a link from "example_-website.com" in 2010 and now "example-_website.com" is no longer an active website - but still shows a parked domain. The thing is... this parked domain is still cropping up in OSE, suggesting that Google may still believe there's a link there - and may not have re-crawled that site to prove otherwise. The issue I've had with this is an SEO company built links to the sites I'm working on now (one of the sites has been penalised as a result of their link building). These links aren't 'active' anymore and when viewed on OSE, they just head straight to a parked domain with no visible (or in-source) link to my site. What are everyone's feelings on this? What would you all do? I'm in two minds whether to re-write a section of the website.... but I'm swaying towards creating better content and NOT re-directing the old URLs to it (just contact the decent links and ask for a change of link). Looking forward to seeing your responses and speaking to you all! Nick

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