Should you replace the url on a damaged page and 301 to it ?

[SarahCollins]

Hi,

We have a couple of pages which have been damaged due to an SEO person we hired creating a stupid amount of bookmarks and generally poor links.

I've tried to get the links removed where I can but on most of these blogging sites there is no contact webmaster etc so I am struggling. Panda update as also affected traffic by about 35%.

My question is , should I consider creating new urls for the "damaged " pages and then doing 301 redirects to them from the damaged page to the new page. Then start to build up good links to the new page whilst google should de-index the old pages over a couple of months ?.

Just at my witts end how to get rid of these blogging rubbish etc etc.

Thanks

Sarah.

[Klarke]

A 301 will transfer those unwanted inbound links to the new url.  You'll essentially have the same problem.

A google employee said recently that if you want to disavow inbound links, you should make the target page 404.  So create a new url for the "damaged" pages, but don't 301 them.  Let the "damaged" pages go to a hard 404 (no softies).