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I run a small seo company. We work uber white hat. We are small with only 4 of us but we have a good client base with great results. My question is related to my own websites because they are the only sites in which I practice this technique. I just watched the white board Friday about good vs bad link building. In the bad link building it mentioned never to externally link in the footer. Is this an all around statement? For instance, every new site we make we always put links in the footer of our clients. Usually says something like "Developed by Stodzy Internet marketing Almost all the web design companies I work with do the same thing. Is this going to help me or hurt me?

I have a an all html site that I can only work on through the ftp. The previous marketing company ran a script that built thousands of location landing pages, but all they did was change the tags and headers and the keywords in the pages, other than that they are all duplicate pages. I removed them, but Google is reading them as 404 pages. How do I tell Google those pages don't exist? or do I just need to let the bots crawl it a few times and it will see that eventually?

I have a directory that I am redesigning. Currently, the old directory is all 404 pages. I need to use the URL's in the old directory for the new one. Should I redirect all the old pages to the new pages? Or is it better to delete the old pages, let them de index - so that I can use those same URLs? I really need help with this.

I just read this great article about location search. I am going o read it over and over again, but I wanted to ask... When ranking organically for location searches, do you recommend posting articles (such as testimonials, etc) or build informative pages - that can link through the home page through the nav bar or through a drop down or what have you. There are so many ways to do it, what do you think is best?

I finally bought the seo moz pro version. I consider myself pretty knowledgeable in seo, content/social media marketing, but I am a rookie at conversion optimization. HELP PLEASE! I am trying to convert traffic into phone calls and/or contact forms.