Please suggest! Overstuffed URLs - to change, or not to change?

[Meditinc.com]

Hello guys,

We are in doubts about changing URLs on our http://www.fiberscope.net/ store

The site was hit by Google in January and has dropped from top 3 to top 20 for most of its keywords.

Now we're working on some redesign, including removing of over optimized content from it.

It looks like our categories and content pages URLs are overstuffed with keywords. Here is a dilemma. Should we rewrite them and set up 301 redirect or just leave as is?

I look trough the seomoz Q&A and find out that a lot of guys got in troubles after redirecting

PLEASE, Suggest!

[DennisSeymour]

I suggest making sure if that is really your problem.

Fix the minor details, alt tags, remove your meta keywords, fix your sitemap

Dropping to Top 20 doesn't really look like a penalty, more like there are other pages that are better than you.

Take a look at your webmaster tools first for problems and fix those.

Check your keyword average rankings in there and look at your impressions on when you dropped

I also suggest looking your links...its a mix of Russian and sape links

[Meditinc.com]

Thanks Dennis,

And you got it right - we received a message from Google with a warning about "silly" links

We have enough links from very trusted, industry related sources but paid junk damage it

We've stopped buying links, but what can we do with existing ones we bought? I think we have to wait 2-3 months and resubmit to Google?

[jesse-landry]

just glanced at your backlink profile... you've lost something like 10,000 links over the last week or so. if those were all poison links, that's fantastic for you!

NOW you need to start building quality links or you'll never regain your rankings.

so get out there and do some link building. That's my best advice to you. apart from a redesign and better optimized content.

img alt tags are a problem as Dennis suggested. a quick peek shows one alt tag that says "search" and another that reads "McAfee SECURE sites help keep you safe from identity theft, credit card fraud, spyware, spam, viruses and online scams"

These are both perfectly wrong examples and should be fixed.

Also, clean up that HTML it's gonna be difficult to manage in such a cluster like that. (my own personal gripe.. you may work differently than I)

[Meditinc.com]

Thanks for ideas, Jesse

[jesse-landry]

keep us posted on how this works out for you

[Meditinc.com]

sure!