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Tend to agree - it's hard to speak in generalities, but 4000 links from one site are likely to get devalued. Even if it's a great site and relevant links, multiple links from the same domain count less and less as you go. Getting 4000 links even from the New York Times wouldn't be nearly the same as getting 4000 links from different sites (probably not even the same as 40 decent sites). At worst, it could start to look manipulative and result in a penalty, but that's pretty uncommon based on just one site.

Thanks Keri.  That gives me some ideas for my next steps.  I won't go against Google's guidelines but if I can generate a few pre-generated search pages that would be helpful to my visitors then I may get a win-win.

I used to have lots of #1 - #2 and even #1 - #2 - #3 - (sometimes #4) listings. I still have some - but not as many. Over the past few months Google is still allowing some of these but it is much harder to get two of your pages listed in the top ten positions of the SERPs. You can really stack them up on the second and third page... but Google seems to be forcing more domain diversity in the top ten positions.

Stephen, Thanks for the explanation - I just had a client ask me about this script. Based on your explanation, this script will change your bounce rate. This is because once the event is triggered, the visit will no longer be considered a bounce, even if the user only visits one page. So it's an artificial/false decrease in bounce rate, not a "fix" as others claim. I wrote a short blog post on this (and referenced your description)! ~Adam

Hi Ben, Sorry for the late response - hope the question is still relevant to you. Short answer - yes, this could cause a problem, depending on how many 404's you are creating. The first thing you want to do is check with Google Webmaster Tools. Look at your Crawl Error report and see if Google is also reporting these URLs as 404'ing - my suspicion is that they are. Is it just one URL that is 404'ing, or several? If it's only one, that you realistically don't have much to worry about, but it's always best practices to fix it. Solutions: 1. Remove the 404. Let the page load in it's own browser window if need be. If you want to keep the page out of search results, there are better ways to do it. 2. Add a meta robots "NOINDEX" tag to the popup page. This will keep it out of the index. 3. After the page is gone from the index, add a nofollow to the link, or block the directory using robots.txt. Regardless, there are quite a few ways to tackle this. Hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO!

You'll definitely lose the authority inherited by the current long domain name. Especially if shorter domain is a brand-new domain. That said, these days everything you put through Twitter (why I assume you're looking for the shorter domain) is auto-shortened by their service, which Googlebots read through.

You can use Google Webmaster tools to flag up pages that should be de-indexed once they have been 301'd or if they now 404. This should speed up the process and ensure that pages that don't get indexed very often don't hang around.

Hi Ben, Did one of these responses answer your question for you? If not, also let us know if you're running anything like Wordpress or Drupal, and we can help give you more specific answers.