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Will do. Thanks for the help.

Is it better to remove the robots.txt entries that are specific to the old URL's so Google can see the 404 so Google will remove those pages at their own pace or remove those bits of the robots.txt file specific to the old URL's and 301 them to the new URL's. It seems those are my two options....? Obviously, I want to do what is best for the site's rankings and will see the fastest turnaround. Thanks for your help on this by the way!

I am a little confused regarding removal of the robots.txt file since that is a step in requesting removal from google (per their removal tool requirements).  My natural tendency is to 301 redirect the old URL's to the new ones. Will I need to remove the robots.txt file prior to permanently redirecting the old URL's to the new ones? How long does it take Google (estimate) to remove old URL's after a 301?

When I say URL rewrite, I mean we restructured the URL's to be cleaner and more search friendly. For example, take a URL that was www.example.com/index/home/keyword and structure it to be www.example.com/keyword. Also, the old URL's (i.e. www.example.com/index/home/keyword) are being shows towards the end of the site:example.com search with just the old URL - no title or meta description. Is this a sign that they are on the way out of the index? Any insight would be helpful.

I recently launched a site and shortly after performed a URL rewrite (not the greatest idea, i know). The developer 404'd the old pages instead of a permanent 301 redirect. This caused a mess in the index. I have tried to use Google's removal tool to remove these URL's from the index. These pages were being removed but now I am finding them in the index as just URL's to the 404'd page (i.e. no title tag or meta description). Should I wait this out or now go back and 301 redirect the old URL's (that are 404'd now) to the new URL's? I am sure this is the reason for my lack of ranking as the rest of my site is pretty well optimized and I have some quality links.

Having a complete backlink profile is key to success. That means having follow and nofollow blog comment links along with authority links.

I recently purchased a domain from a someone with a large portfolio and my site's link is still found on thousands of his one page/low quality sites. I find these links on Open Site Explorer but not in WT. Should I ask the portfolio owner to remove the link from his low quality domain advertising sites?