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Hello there, Thanks for your suggestions and sorry for the late response. In fact, I also left an inquiry with the Bing Webmaster Tools mail support (I did not even realise they offered this service), and they answered within one day. They confirmed that the site runs without any errors and that the sitemap has now been submitted successfully. Upon checking I can confirm this (the sitemaps URLs have finally been submitted). Therefore, all is in order now. I still do not understand why prior to this the JA sitemap URLs were not being submitted (for weeks), even though I tried to make Bing Webmaster Tools re-crawl it by re-submitting the sitemap. In any case, I guess this is one of these episodes where the problem simply fixed itself. Kudos to their support though... Thanks everyone

Hi James, You are saying do not add to it more than 4 times, but what if they appear every single day.

Using the Change of Address feature in Google Webmaster Tools and having your host point the DNS at the new site will help Google understand that the site has moved. However, you will probably see URLs from the old site outranking URLs from the new site for a while. If you can't create entirely new content for the new site, it would still be worth refreshing and rewriting the content for at least your highest-traffic pages, so they aren't exact duplicates. Reclaiming as many links as possible by reaching out to get them pointed to the new site, rather than the old site, is definitely worth doing. You should also start thinking strategically about how you're going to market the new site to earn more links links once it launches, to make up for the links you can't get re-pointed to the site. It will probably take a few months for the new site to start performing well and outranking the old site, but it's definitely possible.

Matt Cuts said literally about this that if this is your main concern, you should probably take one step back and see if there are not some more important issues to resolve regarding your SEO strategy like page speed, usability issues, ...etc. Full video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AsLWIuNNMU&t=11 According to an (old) study on Moz (http://moz.com/blog/results-of-google-experimentation-only-the-first-anchor-text-counts) - apparently only the first link is counted (in terms of anchor text). Matt Cuts mentioned this in the video as well, but wasn't sure if this was still the case today (last time he checked was 20009). An older question also adresses the same topic (http://moz.com/community/q/is-there-a-seo-penalty-for-multi-links-on-same-page-going-to-same-destination-page) - answers seem to agree that there is no SEO penalty. So to answer your question - I wouldn't really have big concerns about having multiple links to the same page. Must say that based on the description you give, I worry a bit about the usability of this menu. rgds, Dirk

Hi Hermski, You're welcome! We did not have any warnings in GWT. No messages, nothing. So it's my humble opinion that it is valuable to check the detox tool regardless of whether or not there are warnings. I was pretty surprised at what I found there. Good luck and keep us posted!

Hi Chris Thanks for your answer. Well, that's good to hear. I looked around for more threads related to the subject and as you hinted, even if the number of on page links is above 100 (not in the 1000s of course), it should be ok, if they are relevant and add to the user experience. Oh yeah, I am not trying to hide links or menus I am perfectly fine with the content offered on the site and where it takes the visitors, but I guess there's not much you can do about the links count, if the ones within menus are tracked as well. Unless your site consists of only a few pages... Then you may be able to make it under a 100 links, but it doesn't sound feasible. Thanks again!

Hi sherohass and Wendy Ang Thanks for your replies! Ha, I like the one about Google continuously changing their  algorithms to their own benefit. Yeah, even though some people would disagree, it's a constant battle with a monopoly that has grown out of proportion. Therefore, if you want to rank profitably before 10 years have gone by and before you've smothered your identity across all them social networks out there, I believe there is no other way than applying a bit of black hat. Personally I don't do heavy black hat (some I guess you even do unintentionally) as my knowledge in the area is not good enough to risk it and loose out altogether. But as mentioned before, it's annoying to see some keywords crawl up 3 positions, while another one gets the boot with a 25 positions drop. Well, so long...

Thanks for your reply Moosa! The author of the WP plugin has responded to me with the following: Pretty Link does send a nofollow/noindex in the http header of the request (you won't see it in the HTML because its sent with the http request). I don't think he's making things up, at the same time I'm not code savvy enough to confirm it. What do you think? One or the other way, I will also follow the hard coded no follow from now on. Just to wrap it up. If by any chance, all outgoing links are still FOLLOW, I believe it would be the wrong move and suspicious to search engines, if I went out now NO following all links that there are in the site. Correct? Thanks again for your help!

Thanks for your answer Ryan I understand the point you're making about the duplicate anchor text back links and will look into this. It's still ironic that the problems surfaced once the issue with the YouTube account  set in. I'll see how to turn the rudder. Thanks again