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You've made some great points here David! I agree there is no way they built those links last month, that's for sure! And by no means did I mean to imply that waiting around for Google is only course of action. Just figured I'd share the link. It certainly can't hurt! I like the point you made about risk tolerance. Risk vs Reward is all around us in business. I just feel that it could become a slippery slope in regards to following what we know is not best practices regarding website optimization. Cheers!!

Hi Monica, Thanks for the fast response. I'm a bit wary of 301 redirecting the old pages -- this would be extremely easy to do - however: if we were being penalised on those old pages, wouldn't this just redirect all the penalties to our new squeaky clean pages? I submitted a new sitemap to Google the day we made the changes -- probably about three weeks - a month ago including the new URLs (or as many as we could include with the 500 URL limit) and removing the old spammy ones. Penalty-wise, we've never had a manual warning or anything in WMT. However, this doesn't discount the idea that we may have been suffering an algorithm penalty, right? It'd be great to hear from anyone about their experience with 301's and the likeliness of passing on 'bad' linkjuice from old pages (does this even happen?). Also whether a 410 would help - stops all the 404 errors from continuously occurring and Google assuming there's something bizarre going on. Thank you again.

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