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Thanks Everette, your candid response is much appreciated.

Thanks for the reply Erwan. Unfortunately, a new domain just is not in the cards for us at this time.

We used an SEO firm back in the day to create gateway landing pages for our site heavily optimized for certain keywords and phrases. They ranked well for years and then the panda/penguin updates hit and the pages no longer rank at all. The content on the pages is actually useful and decent (http://payloadz.com/info-sell-ebooks.asp). The html is over-optimized on keyword though.

What should be our strategy here? The keywords and phrases are still important for us. Should we move the content to another URL with less HTML optimization, remove the existing optimization on the pages where they are? The backlinks are of poor quality as well.

We have gone through a disavow process and still no affect on these pages after a month.

Thanks for confirming! Yes, I agree about user experience, but the many links come from two navigation menus which expand down to lower categories. It is a pretty simple UI: http://store.payloadz.com

I'm a new Moz Pro user and see that the on-page optimization report includes "too many links" on page and references the "100 links" guideline that Google no longer endorses: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=l6g5hoBYlf0

Too many links is still an issue in terms of passing link juice, but not much else. Matt Cutts has stated that it is fine to have many internal links in this regard.

Please correct me if I am mistaken.

Thanks Everette, your candid response is much appreciated.