Welcome to the Q&A Forum

I was a member for several months. I ended up canceling.

The content was pretty valuable/informative (the periodic interviews and associated materials). I simply found that I wasn't getting much value out of the community forums. And, in fact, the forums were filled with a lot of hot air - people who really hadn't figured out the online marketing game, but were happy to offer their advice nonetheless.

The folks at Copyblogger make great stuff - I recommend listening to their Internet Marketing for Smart People radio show. They get some great guests (Seth Godin, Guy Kawasaki, Steven Pressfield, etc), and Robert Bruce, who hosts, does a great job interviewing.

You'll find some similar good audio content inside the Third Tribe, with some deeper discussions on the nuts/bolts of getting started with a content marketing strategy. But you'll also find a lot of very basic information that, depending on your experience level, may not float your boat.

If what you're looking for is more sophisticated discussions - the kind of higher level of online marketing education you'll get here at SEOmoz - I think Third Tribe is more geared for beginners on the whole.

If you've set up 301 redirects for the important pages (those with links or that get direct traffic from bookmarks, etc), I would simply let the old pages fall out of the index on their own.

Just be sure those old pages are properly returning a 404 status. When Googlebot requests a page and gets this server response, it will deindex the page.

If the old content is problematic for sensitive reasons, you may want to request removal of specific pages - this will stop them from being accessible in Google's cache. There is no other benefit here, and unless there is truly sensitive information or some legal reason to remove those pages, requesting removal of those pages is not worth the effort. It won't help the new pages get indexed faster.

Think of Googlebot like a web user (who happens to be somewhat aimless and browses without JavaScript support).

Googlebot requests a page that it finds by A) following a link on another page, B) following a reference in a sitemap.xml file or C) some other usage data we don't know about (i.e. it scraped the link from a source it doesn't "officially" have access to or users have hit that page frequently with Google toolbar installed, etc).

This is a basic server request for the page. The server gets the message "load this URL" - if there's an .htaccess 301 redirect in place, it does not matter whether the page would ordinarily display content, because the server never gets to that point. It handles the redirect first.

I'm hung up on the second part of your question. "If the page doesn't need to exist...you want this website to redirect to another website." I'm not sure under what circumstances you'd need to do this. If the page doesn't exist, it shouldn't be referenced anywhere on the web, and if it's not referenced anywhere on the web, there's no need for the redirect.

Perhaps you're planning to set up the page as a vanity URL - such as a short URL, for easy reading/remembrance.

In short, for whatever reason you want to achieve this, .htaccess bypasses the need for the first URL to exist - it works on the request for that page, whether the page is there or not, the redirect will bypass it and work properly.

I'd expect you'll find, if you look closer at the inbound links site.com/home has, they'll explain why it's ranking for those terms.

And, in such a case, I'd expect you'll generate similar rankings with site.com once the 301 carries - which is what I'd recommend doing.

Unless (there's always an "unless") there's another page on the site relevant to what site.com/home is ranking for (or you could build one) - in which case, you can use that 301 to send that link juice to that deeper page. Never a bad thing to build deep links, but I'd want to be sure the topic is a match. (Again, I'd take a look at those links and their anchor text.)

Without knowing the specifics I'd say 9 out of 10 times you want to achieve a canonical home page URL and consolidate link juice by redirecting all alternative home page URLs to site.com via 301.

Barry is quite right - I assumed these pointed to the same page. Two links to two separate pages on the same domain will both be counted.

Good catch, Barry.

Generally speaking, the links higher to the top of the main content block tend to get more weight, but it's slight. For most intents and purposes, they'll be getting equal weight (not worth fretting over).

Happy to help!

Rand published this blog post, the result of an SEOmoz study on this very topic, a couple of years ago: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/results-of-google-experimentation-only-the-first-anchor-text-counts

By most accounts this approach by Google, only accepting the first anchor text, still prevails.

If your main objective is the second link, you may want to render the first invisible to Googlebot. Otherwise only the first anchor text will factor.

Hi Tiago,

All public statements by Google and by white hat SEOs are going to call this a dirty, worthless tactic.

The reality is, many dirty tactics still work - and this is one of them.

Glen Allsopp from Viper Chill, by any definition a successful affiliate marketer whose central strategy is SEO, touts a tool called Bookmarketing Demon as one of his secrets to success. The tool automates the social bookmarketing process, creating many low-value links with very little hands-on work. And it works, according to Glen.

[Edit: I should say it works for sites in low-competition verticals. You're not going to rank for competitive keywords with these links.]

Now, the question to ask yourself is this: how important is my website to me?

There is risk here. Google may burn your site. How likely is that? Hard to say. But if they do, and the site represents your core business, you're in trouble. If it's a thin affiliate site you can live with losing, that's another story.

Personally, I stay away from these tactics - but I'm not riding on a high horse. Moreso my SEO work has always dealt with properties I couldn't afford to risk.

You're going to see more tactics like this working for competitors. Link buying, for example, is still massively successful for many organizations. J.C. Penney was just "outed" for this, but they're a big, visible company. Many of the mid and low-level properties have been profiting for years off a link-buying strategy.

Google will never squash all of these sneaky tricks (there will always be loopholes), but they always catch a few and penalize the ass out of them. Unless you're prepared for the possibility that you'll be the one they catch, I don't think it's worth the risk.

I hadn't noticed that - shame, could have been interesting if they kept up development.

I'm a little late to the party (just trying out the new Q&A for the first time).

I was looking for a solution myself yesterday and found two free ones that, while definitely not as full-featured as those shared by ninjamarketer, might do the trick.

WriteMaps is a nifty tool (free to use) that looks to have some potential.

SlickMap is an HTML/CSS template you can use to add up to three levels of hierarchy, and it looks pretty sharp (though it's clearly not as quick/convenient as some of the other tools).