Cameron, I always recommend businesses link to their press releases. Doing so provides value in different ways. First, if there are no links and no references to it, it basically has no value, Second, you get a little bit of third party validation from it. Third, you can get visitors from it and brand recognition. I know of releases that we published in 2005 that still get hundreds or thousands of visitors each month, because they have incoming links. Don't base all your decisions on what immediate link juice you might get from an action you take, because it may hurt you some time in the future. And yes, prlog is good. I have some I will send there this week.

Thank you Keri.

Yes, good idea, but whatever you request, that page or directory must respond with a 404, otherwise, it will be ignored.

• that is why I couldn't do that with the send to a friend URLs

(would have been a nice thing to do)

I guess I could have cheated, and made them return a 404 if it was google, just to dump them all out of the index.

The 15,000 I did request to be removed were individual pages, that returned 404 response code, so thats why I did them one at a time. I could have waited, but if you wait, then google keeps trying to fetch those missing pages and they keep reporting them in your GWT.

That is a good reason to request the removals.

I actually gave up when the number of deletions got to 1.5 million. I figured it was just too hard to do.

I would have said the same thing, except that a few weeks ago, I removed a rule from the robots file and I changed the affected pages to have a noindex.nofollow and the next day, tens of thousands of those pages appeared in the index and overpowered the content pages.

So my advice, is don't trust noindex,nofollow and just stop the robot going down that tree (as you are doing) and find another way to get those pages out of the index.

You can use the URL removal request tool.

It only seems to allow you to remove 1000 per day.

I have done this before by automating the removal using a macro program.

I think I removed about 15,000 over the space of a month, doing that.

They are fairly fast at removing URLs these days, 24 hours or less.

Here is another way you could handle it, in a separate program that detects a smartphone.

For a phone that can handle it, you do a redirect and for one that doesn't, you do something else

(obviously, I haven't tested this, but this way also has the upside that it tracks the clicks.

If your site uses this style of URL
Call 555 555 5555

Or this if you handle URLs this way
Call 555 555 5555

Hi EugeneF

The problem with tel: is that most browsers don't know what to do with that, so they see it as a URL relative to your site, and when you try http://www.google.com/tel:1231231234  there is no such thing and of course, you get a 404 error.

So here is another gotcha that we will all have to cater for in our robots files and .htaccess files.

What you need to do, to handle that, is to detect that you are dealing with a smart browser that understands what to do with it, and only display those anchor links to those browsers.

The upside, of course, is that either robots or hopefully, real people are clicking on your phone links.

The downside is that if they are real people and they get a 404 error, you are giving them a bad surfing experience.