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sorry for the confusion -- they're only doing white hat from now on. thanks for responding!

The higher up the better. Some times Google doesn't crawl the full page, but definitely starts from top to bottom.  The higher you can get the meat of the content, ie top links, keyword phrases, breadcrumbs, the better! Hope this helps

Hi Daniel Yep - as Mat says there's no official solution to this. Do you mean deindexed by Google (without you wanting them to be) or deindexed by you on purpose? I suppose you could also; crawl your whole site depending how big the site is, do a site: search in Google. use the SERPs redux bookmarklet - get all indexed URLs in a column in a spreadsheet compare your crawl vs. the list indexed and whichever was not present in the SERPs could have been deindexed this method is faulty as it assumes all crawled URLs were indexed in the first place - but could get you part of the way there. -Dan

No this will work.  It is important that you maintain your categories the right way.  A lot of people confuse these with key words when your tags are your categories that signal the search engines about which category oyu think the content falls into.  It is important to think this out on the front end.  We are in the middle of cleaning up 1200 blog entries that were not categorized properly.  It is a big job at that point.  You don't want to get to this stage.

[Quote]Ahh, I read it as ..."then 301 redirect to the old URL."[/Quote] Hah!  I did the same thing first.  Then I had to rewrite my response.

As Egol & Michael said--stop immediately. Here is some helpful information for disavowing: http://moz.com/community/q/best-practice-to-disavow-spammy-links http://moz.com/blog/googles-disavow-tool-take-a-deep-breath http://moz.com/ugc/how-to-create-an-excel-spreadsheet-to-remove-link-spam-post-penguin Good luck Daniel!

If you're a global site yes, if local then they probably don't hold as much weight but still count. If you have a french section of your site and have links from .fr domains that's a good indicating factor as one of many factors.