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Well, First I figured the internal links were simply not indexed. This would mean Open Site Explorer would not show info for pages low in your hierarchy. When I checked, it did, so I was initially wrong. However I also noticed a lot of external links from etoyszone.co.uk so I checked that site, only to find myself redirected to your current site. I think this problem will solve itself over time, since I expect that the deeper pages will not be crawled very often. Therefore I would advise to always double check and use crawler software (like Xenu) to map your internal link structure. cheers!

Thanks for your advice all of you. Much appreciated. Nakul has the issue exactly. We have links for a specialist website which ranks well for a specific keyword. We want to put that content within the main site, and then redirect to that section. From a users point of view it make complete sense, but I was worried that it would be seen as spammy. Bryan, we are only thinking of resirecting existing websites. Not URLs that have never had any content. If no-one thinks it might be risky, I suppose we should just get on with it. Also take the advice on doing the 301's carefully too. Thanks.

Hi, As the others have said, your backlink profile looks pretty nasty. Another thing to remember is your anchor text. A brief look through OSE shows you have 100% keyword rich anchor text. Natural links often use the domain as anchor text so try to get some good quality, relevant links using www.playhouses.co.uk or http://www.playhouses.co.uk.

The only thing internal site links can realistically do is adjust how PR flows within your own site. If you wanted to stretch for a corner case, you could have an island page or deep page that was not indexed or seen previously, but since you created a link to that page then it is seen. If that page had issues with it's content or links, then a penalty could be involved. Based on your replies and the small amount of ranking drop, I really don't think a penalty is involved. The maximum it would be is a discounting of links. If not do you know of any alhorithm changes in the past week? With around 500 algorithm changes each year, there seem to be changes every week. I am not aware of any major changes but minor ones happen all the time.

When link building, try to create an even and natural distribution of anchor texts.  Supplement your distribution strategy with anchors that use you domain name and brand as these types of links are most commonly allowed by webmasters and appear natural.