Webmaster woes - should I re-direct or re-structure?

[Danapollo]

Hey guys,

I'll get straight to the point - a small (growing) website I'm working on has a number links pointing to it from totally irrelevant sites (66, to be precise). These were built by an SEO company prior to me working on the site, and lead to an over-optimisation penalty for one keyword.

This number doesn't sound large, but proportionally (to all other links), it is. It didn't used to be, but a lot of the links coming in have now 'died', and the domains they came from are now just parked.

Anyway, I have managed to contact pretty much all the webmasters, and 27 of these links have been removed. Unfortunately - as I'm sure many people know all too well - a good handful of the contacted webmasters haven't replied, and the bad links still remain on their websites (either in-content or on links pages).

I have decided to 'refresh' the website with some new (and better) content - providing much more information and a valuable resource.

My question is - what should I do?

• Should I just replace the content on the existing pages (slightly altering the URL structure to match the topic more) and 301 the old URLs to the new ones?

• Or should I delete the pages and create new ones - thus making sure this particular section of the site isn't affected by any bad in-bound links?

I'm more inclined to opt for the latter option, and 'start fresh' with the pages - so I know I've got total control over them, but wanted to get the opinion of the community before I made a decision.

Thanks in advance for your responses!

Nick

[Anthony_NorthSEO]

Hi Nick,

I agree with you, deleting the pages and starting fresh is probably the best bet. Once they've been deleted and return a 404 code, I'd go ahead and have Google remove them from the index via the GWT URL removal tool.

I'd say the risk of having those in-bound links sticking around outweighs the reward that 301s might yield.

Good luck.

-Anthony

[Danapollo]

That's one thing I hadn't considered thus far - thanks for the tip, Anthony! I'll make sure the URLs are removed properly.

I just think creating 'new' pages would be easier than working through the mess the old SEO company left behind.

With decent content on-site and a few relevant in-content links, it shouldn't (hopefully) take too long to get back up the rankings!