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Whenever I see offers like this, I ask myself would I want my site to be submitted to 50 others... along with every other site that this service submits? Link farming - or as Malcolm Gibb has said, paid link directories - are a cheap and spammy way of padding out your profile (something some inexperienced SEO companies will do for smaller sites).

If you're going to pay.... You should be able to find more niche and relevant sites that may cost a little more for 'one link' rather than 50 links for a little cheaper.

Hi,

This is my first post/question in the forum - so apologies if this topic has already been covered - or if the question seems daft!

Here's the issue:

I have started working on two websites, and have been doing a lot of on-site work, increasing valuable content, etc... I'm now slowly moving onto more off-site stuff and have noticed that a lot of the backlinks to both websites (built by SEO companies before I got here) are 'dead' and simply return 404 errors (yet they still show up in site explorer).

I'll be honest, the links aren't great; the SEO companies have taken the word 'relevant' and completely re-defined it in their books!

Will these links - from sites that aren't relevant... but are dead - have any impact on my SEO efforts from now on? Or should I treat these sites as a kind of 'clean slate' and work on building the brand naturally through social media and user experience, etc?

Also - I'm re-structuring the internal pages of the site... would it be worth re-directing the old URLs (with all the dead in-bound links - that may have suffered a -50 penalty) to the new ones, or just start fresh with the new pages?

Any advice, tips or stories to share (relevant ones, of course!) will be greatly appreciated!

Thanks,

Nick