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You should steer clear of creating yourself a rule to say that you need to link out at least once to an external source on every page of your website. On some of your pages, multiple outbound links to great resources can be fine. On other pages, it might not make sense to link out.

If an outbound link adds value to your website visitors, then it's a good thing to do. If it doesn't, don't do it. It really shouldn't be any more complicated than that.

Linking to (or not linking to) your social media profiles will have absolutely zero impact on your SEO, but could be useful for your audience.

I'm not sure what industry you are in but a government white paper should be a superb resource to link to if you think it adds value.

I see a problem already, although it could be that these links have been disavowed (there is no way something like Open Site Explorer can tell this).

Check out the image attached. You have used some very aggressive link building tactics which target exact match anchor text links - and lots of them! Very unnatural indeed.

Can you confirm that these have been disavowed?

Matt

bROmGPS.jpg

What search term as the specific page dropped for?

Hmmm, I understand. It can be frustrating.

The problem is that even if you are trying (and trying hard) to sort the issue out, if they still see bad links they wont lift any manual penalty.

I'm not saying that it is worthwhile in your case but sometimes it can make sense to throw away a domain and start again. Does it take many sales?

Just remember that if you start again with a new domain, do it properly and don't outsource to people who can't be trusted

Yeah, use SEOMoz's very own Open Site Explorer. If you need help figuring it all out add me to Skype (Matt.GlassApple).

Try not to copy a competitors link profile though. While you may find a few useful places to get a link from by looking at competitors pages, they too might be using underhanded tactics.

You can install Wordpress on the same domain on a page like mydomain.com/news

Blogs can be a great source for gaining visitors and also keeping your website's content fresh.

Also, with regards to blogging on other sites or your own site, I wouldn't assume you should limit yourself to one or the other - do both As long as you blog on other sites and build natural looking links then this should help your site rank better and in a safe way.

Don't underestimate the role that a blog can play in building links to your site. If the content is good, you might find some natural links firing your way but even if this doesn't happen you can build links to your blog posts manually which would then send "juice" through the rest of your pages

Matt

It would mean duplicated content if you kept the description the same, yep. However, there are many ways of saying the same thing... You would have to rewrite the descriptions for sure.

Whether or not it would give your website any benefit is hard to say without knowing which product it was you were thinking about splitting down and which keywords you were targeting for that product.

As an example. One of the sites I am working on sells plastic chains. We optimise the category page for the main plastic chain keywords, within the category we add the products and split them up based on colour. This allows us to target long-tail keywords such as "Green Plastic Chain". This benefits us because (even though they are fairly low) there are people searching for this term. If nobody is searching for your product in a specific colour then there is no real advantage other than having more content on your site.

On the other side of the coin, it does mean more clicks for visitors. As we know, more clicks often means losing visitors. The only real answer is to test test test. I always recommend using a combination of both methods after lots of testing and analysing.

Hope this helps?

Matt

Tough to explain where you should start with this without a 10,000 word reply.

It sounds like you might benefit from reading this... http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo

Once you have read that, there are a few other things you need to do before thinking about building some nice, relevant and natural looking links.

• Add the keyword to the page title in an natural looking way
• Add some relevant content to the page and make sure you include the keyword once or twice
• Add a H1 and H2 heading on the page with the keyword in

There are loads of other bits to do but these are certainly something which will help you on the way.

Have you got a link to the site Matthew? I'll take a look.

It sounds like just a replication of the menu to me? If so, this is perfectly fine - it just means more links going to the pages. If both links point to the exact same URL's then there are no issues at all.

Before answering, it's important to understand your motive for removing 100+ pages from your site.

• Are the pages you plan on letting expire unique and useful content?
• Do these pages generate traffic?
• Do any of these pages have visibility in search at the moment? If so, removing them will limit your visibility (and traffic) - regardless of redirects. If there isn't a relevant page on the new website to redirect the old page to, your rankings won't last too long once Google figures out that the replacement page is useless for the specific search query. Arguably, setting these URL's to a 410 instead of 301 redirecting them to a non-relevant page is the best way to proceed.

In some instances, removing pages could actually help your site if the quality of those pages is poor, the content is taken from elsewhere, or if they are relatively thin pages.

There are lots of other questions, too, depending on your answers. Would you mind sharing the URL's in question?