Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Like David says,

What you're creating is a link network, which is a rather dated method of going about your link building. After the recent algorithm updates that sort of tactic really got hit hard.

High quality guest posting, press releases and other brand building exercises are going to put you in far better stead as far as your link building and SEO goes.

I've tried to change my focus with SEO this year. I now concentrate almost exclusively on establishing myself as an authority/expert and almost ignore "mechanical" link building methods. I believe that while I'm providing good quality stuff to a wide range of people, the links will come.

I also think that if you're still concentrating on keyword density then you're doing something wrong.

Write naturally. Show people why they should like you. Profit.

Hi LW,

What system is backing the online store? Are you using a CMS-driven e-commerce solution?

My suggestion would be to create an automated sitemap for the products. Pay careful attention to the priorities you assign and the update frequencies. (Hourly/daily is fine) I definitely think that you'd be spending far too much time on updating a sitemap if you had to do it manually.

This method will result in you having a more accurate sitemap on crawling.

Also, if you are planning on offering the same project in future, it might be an idea not to remove the product altogether, but rather have a page saying "This offer is currently not available" or something along those lines.

Another option might be to have an archive category of products, where all your expired offers can be placed, not available for order. This could allow you to keep your indexed pages, avoid 404s as well as use the product pages to direct new visitors to related/newer products should they see the products in the archive.

Just thinking out loud.

I'd be interested to see the website and the solution that you do eventually implement.

Regards
Mark

One thing to bear in mind is that you are never going to retain all of the link juice that you've got with the old site when redirecting to the new site.

If I were you, I would really try to clean up the backlink profile of the site as much as possible before doing any sort of redirection. I would argue that you might even be able to salvage the existing site's rankings by doing some rescue work in terms of your link profile.

One very important consideration is that your domain is 10+ years old already, which is in itself a pretty good authority indicator.

My suggestions to you:

• Clean up really spammy links by using a tool such as Open Site Explorer to find and weed out the bad links. Follow whatever process is required to remove some of these links. (Contact the administrator of the site, remove your URL from the directory etc.)

• Help dilute the effect of the spammy links by building new, higher quality backlinks to your site. Diversification is very important. If you have 100 spammy links, but 200 really good links, I don't feel like the Big G will worry too much.

• Check your on-page factors. What sort of content do you have on your site? Are you stuffing keywords everywhere? Are you using unique content, or spun nonsense? Do you have title tags and headings that are both relevant and unique? Are you duplicating any content throughout your site?

The problem, however, with salvaging the site is that, like you say, you're running on a static platform.

If your rankings are really that bad now, perhaps it would be a good idea to start fresh. Just bear in mind that this won't be a quick fix, particularly if you're using a new domain.

If you insist on creating a new site (CMS based) and using the same content, then you'll have to do the redirect to avoid duplicate content issues. I would just take a long, hard look at your content to ensure that it's really worth copying across rather than starting fresh.

Put it this way, I would use the 301 redirect to inform the search engines that the site has been transferred and is under a new domain now. I wouldn't use the 301 redirect to try and salvage much link juice.

Do your model blogs have any traction of their own? What's the traffic and domain authority like? If they don't have any traction of their own, they're probably not worth much at all.

I'd argue that a single, well thought out guest post on a high authority website (e.g. SEOMoz, Sitepoint.com, etc. but something relevant to your niche) will be worth more than 10 posts on your "blog network".

Are your mini-blogs all hosted on the same C-block as the main site?

P.S. When you say "unique" I really hope you mean unique, and not spun!