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Oh, this is also my Q&A, ahh

People do tend to become attached to things and resistant to change, that said, I would opt for pulling it.  They are unsightly and take up space..........

Yes absolutely.  The sooner you start the sooner you start building trust and authority points for the site even in it's current form.

Hi Greg, Every single link points to www.bestholidaynews.com only and the only links to your page is javascript created. So they are the only ones getting juice as Alan said. I was just pointing out some tools you can use for future posts to check for external links to your site that pass link juice. Brett.

I believe that this is a clear demonstration that link metrics are a decoy that  pulls you away from what is really important.

I made a test and it seems that yes, the links from pdf count for ranking. The test is on my Romanian blog http://seogan.ro/link-building-pdf-urile-o-sursa-de-linkuri-test You can find an English translation here: http://www.seogan.com/pdf-link-building Hope it helps.

There is http://www.searchenginepeople.com/blog/22-dofollow-social-media-sites-offering-profile-links.html which has updates provided in the comments. SEOMoz also provides a good resource at: http://www.seomoz.org/article/social-media-marketing-tactics#101-social-media-sites Both of these are mentioned in the book The Art of SEO

Thanks for all of your help!

I agree it depends with the crawl rate on the site.Updating a new sitemap helps if you are adding new URLs and posting new content on Facebook, Twitter, Blogs gets the attention of Google, so if it seems to be going slow, try getting social. I think this question is already answered, unless you need more clarity?

the only way to inoculate the main domain if you go with a subdomain is if the topical focus of each is very different.  If they're very similar, it's much more difficult to pull off.  Of course if they're different enough, that's valid reason to not interlink. If they're totally related, and there's no interlinking, it could be perceived as attempting to stuff search results with multiple entries.

I like the idea of sending affiliate links through a redirect on a subdomain because you can kill off all of those links at once by removing the redirects so they don't affect the final destination page should you need to clean up your link profile of page-rank-passing affiliate links. Whereas, if you had those links go straight to the destination page you'd have to ask the affiliates to remove each and every link, and/or use the disavow tool on them. I have heard of people sending those though a URL shortening service instead of a subdomain, which should work just as well since they are 301s. I'm not sure how much sway keywords in the redirecting URL have, but it isn't a bad idea to keep them contextual as you described above. That just seems to make sense anyway. Since the affiliate.subdomain URL is going to 301 redirect it won't have a canonical tag. You could put a self-referencing canonical tag on the final destination page if you wanted to. The number in the URL is fine. This seems like a good topic for discussion so I will leave it open for you. PS: My answers assume you know the risks of passing pagerank through affiliate links and are willing to take them.

Awesome... thanks for the info!

I think you're saying you have mainwebsitethatsellsstuff.com securesubdomainof.mainwebsitethatsellsstuff.com and that you want to keep the main domain, and remove the subdomain, and that it's not a case of http vs https with the URL otherwise being the same, right? You can verify a subdomain in Google Webmaster Tools and remove the entire subdomain. I've had to do this for a dev subdomain that accidentally got indexed. I was able to keep the main domain, and remove the subdomain. The key is to verify that subdomain, and leave the main domain alone, provided I'm understanding your question correctly.

They were running several ad networks feeding ads everywhere - the system was choking on it.  Then there's the fact that it's a Drupal site, set up with default native taxonomy, causing serious data extraction bottle-necks. Both issues had to be addressed.  It's still slow, but much better.