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This is true, you can wait for google to deindex them, but that can take 6 months or more. You could also wait for the 404s to show up and check the referrer and then manually set up the redirect, but if you miss seeing them, you may also risk the linking site removing the link. Another thing you could do is pull reports from GWMT and Bing WMT and Majestic to discover who is linking to which pages, and then start with those redirects, then watch out for the 404s and pick them up as you discover them. If you do want to push google along with removing the old pages, you can do it by requesting them in WMT. 12,000 isn't really many, and last time I tried it, you can ask for 1,000 per day, but you have to do them one at a time. That means either a slow manual process or do it with a macro. I think I've had 20,000 or more deleted that way.

Yeah this is really strange. We have now dropped out of site for all of our main keywords. Weirder still, is that for some of the keywords the contact page on our site is ranking above the target landing page. The thing I have noticed about the new hosting is that we no longer show for 'pages from the UK' and also the site speed on analytics seems quite a bit slower. Do you think this could have all been caused by adding that one link? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Our website is www.mysocialagency.com

Hey thanks for the reply. Yeah I was thinking a 301 of the whole of site a to site b's home page. Do you think that is worth it? exactly the same industry and same keywords...... It would be like me buying out a direct competitor to my company and 301'ing their whole site to mine.....

Also thanks for confirming Vladimir very useful.

great stuff. thanks for your help Robert

Cool - have you figured out what the problem might be yet?

As far as I know it's accurate. Send an email to help@seomoz.org with a couple of examples and they can help you sort it out.