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Hi, We had a content manager request to delete a page from our site. Looking at the traffic to the page, I noticed there were a lot of inbound links from credible sites. Rather than deleting the page, we simply removed it from the navigation, so that a user could still access the page by clicking on a link to it from an external site. Questions: Is it bad for SEO to have a page that is not directly accessible from your site? If no: do we keep this page in our Sitemap, or remove it? If yes: what is a better strategy to ensure the inbound links aren't considered "broken links" and also to minimize any negative impact to our SEO? Should we delete the page and 301 redirect users to the parent page for the page we had previously hidden?

Scenario:
A website that we manage was hit with a manual action penalty for unnatural incoming links (site-wide). The penalty was revoked in early March and we're still not seeing any of our main keywords rank high in Google (we are found on page 10 and beyond). Our traffic metrics from March 2014 (after the penalty was revoked) - July 2014 compared to November 2013 - March 2014 was very similar. Question: Since the website was hit with a manual action penalty for unnatural links, is the content affected as well? If we were to take the current website and move it to a new domain name (without 301 redirecting the old pages), would Google see it as a brand new website? We think it would be best to use brand new content but the financial costs associated are a large factor in the decision. It would be preferred to reuse the old content but has it already been tarnished?

Hi, I have a client who have a solid, high ranking content based site (site A). They have now created an ecommerce site in addition (site B). To give site B a boost in terms of search engine visibility upon launch, they now wish to redirect approx 90% of site As pages to site B. What would be the implications of this? Apart from customers being automatically redirected from the page they thought they where landing on, how would google now view site A? What are your thoughts to thier idea. I am trying to talk them out of it as I think its a poor one.

I have had a long discussion with a client and their external SEO partner about their current footer. They have added all their product categories, both main and sub, to the footer. From a pure SEO perspective is it still advisable, after all the pandas and penguines, to stay away from keyword important site wide footer linking to internal pages? As the links will become a repeatable element and also containing the most important keywords, isn't the links actually hurting more than helping? With 5000 index pages, it will risk "marking" the most important keywords as repeatable, lowering ranking, instead of increasing as their external part say.

I have two categories currently "Men's Christian Jewellery" and "Women's Christian Jewellery" but neither pick up search engine traffic as well as just "Christian Jewellery" as a unisex category. My question is this; if I create a new category "Christian Jewellery" but then remove the two others and create 301 redirects from them to this new category, will this transfer all of the juice from the other pages to this new one? Thanks in advance for any replies! 🙂

Hi, I have about a dozen hotel booking sites in different cities. All content is unique on each site and specific to its city. Is it a good idea to cross-link them all? If so, is there any strategy to follow? Some of them are older and well established sites wheres others were created recently. The goal is to improve rankings of the newer sites. I appreciate any advice. Thanks!

I'm better ranked in Google for that link (http://www.vipgoldrj.com/paginas/ensaios.html) and not in (http://www.vipgoldrj.com/), you know you explain why? In all keywords, except that (luxury escorts in Rio de Janeiro) Sorry my english, I'm from Brazil and I'm using Google translator.

Hi I currently have two sites within exactly the same market.  I've just purchased a third website from someone. Should I link these sites together? (i.e. in the page header should I cross link them or point two of them to the third?) If I do this will it harm them if they are on the same C-Class IP blocks?  Is using private domains and different hosting companies considered dodgey in any way? Basically I'm a big wimp and don't want to do anything potentially that might potentially hurt my rankings;)