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If the rankings of the criminal defense pages have direct links then those links are helpful to any query that any page of the site competes for.  So, I would not delete them. There are law firms with strong websites that rule the SERPs for everything in their town.   Their office takes any call that comes in, accepts the cases in practice areas where they have interest and expertise, and refers the rest to other firms for a referral fee.

Hi Pete, Glad I was able to help you identify Possum.

If the urls follow any particular pattern then you can use a  htaccess redirect and return the header code 410 / 403 / 404 to Google. (I suggest 410) They will soon drop out of the index. I don't know the exact .htaccess syntax off the top of my head but it will be something like this: If they all come from the same folder then it would look something like this: RedirectMatch 410 ^/folder/.*$ If they have a common character string after the forward slash (such as xyz) then it would look something like this: RedirectMatch 410 ^/xyz.*$ If they have any common character string footprints at all (such as xyz) then it would look something like this (now I'm guessing): RedirectMatch 410 ^/()xyz.$ This would be a pretty easy fix if all of those spammy urls have any common characters after the forward slash or they all originate from a certain folder.

My site got a revoke in May 2013 and took until the refresh in Oct 2014 for it to show recovery in SERPS One way around this is to use hreflang and set your main site to x-default and create a new site that targets your main language. Basically set your new domain to hreflang "EN" and you should see an instant recovery!

Whether or not you're allowed to copy and paste the article verbatim is something you'll have to determine from the site you copied from, but even noindex wouldn't address the problem of plagiarism if that's what you're worried about as the article would still be on your site.  Basically what you're doing is the reverse of what's in the Google guide on Canonical: _Content you provide on that blog for syndication to other sites is replicated in part or in full on those domains.    _ http://news.example.com/green-dresses-for-every-day-155672.html (syndicated post) http://blog.example.com/dresses/green-dresses-are-awesome/3245/ (original post) So in this case the News site (The Daily Business Review) is the source of the article, and you're one of the sites syndicating what they wrote so you point back to them as canonical. Still the questions you bring up are part of the reason why several sites--HuffPo, The Verge, SlashDot, etc--write their own take on a source article instead of reprinting verbatim when linking back.  It's more of the annotation model I mentioned above.

Sorry for viewing this just now... but - forgive me if I am wrong due to a bad understanding of the question - but I think Tom answer is not correct. You are telling that your main site is in English, but that has also a Spanish subdomain with just half of it localized in Spanish. If this is the correct interpretation of the origin of your doubts, than, in the Spanish subdomain the hreflang should be implemented so: IN CASE OF SPANISH SUBDOMAIN URL WITH SPANISH CONTENT <loc>http://www.example.com/</loc> IN CASE OF SPANISH SUBDOMAIN URL WITH ENGLISH CONTENT <loc>http://www.example.com/</loc> Why? Because those "en" and "es" mean "English Language" and "Spanish Language", so you cannot declare as Spanish something that Spanish is not. As well you cannot declare both URLs as to shown to English speaking users, because that would create an hiccup to Google, who would not know what of the two it has to finally show to English speaking users. More over, if you don't want to extend the use of the hreflang suggesting also the countries where to show some given URL, then you should canonicalize the spanish.domain.com URL with English content to the original www.domain.com URL. The idea of using also the country code ISO could solve - somehow - this issue, because writing something like this: <loc>http://www.example.com/</loc> Then you will be telling Google to show the spanish.domain.com URL to the people using english in Spain (Google.es), and the English one to all the people speaking English in the rest of world. Be aware, though, that Spanish people using Spanish will see in the www.domain.com URL in their Google.es SERPs, because the x-default is telling Google that all the people not using the language indicated in the hreflang="x-X" annotation (which is English), will have to see the main domain URL, and not the spanish subdomain one. Hreflang is quite a sudoku, but it is extremely logic.

I think this white board Friday may help you out a little http://moz.com/blog/how-google-knows-what-sites-you-control-and-why-it-matters-whiteboard-friday I would just start creating fresh content on the old site and wait for natural organic links to grow.  The traffic will come back over time.

Hi Pete, If you are physically located in Sheboygan, then you should be reflecting this in your: Titles, meta description tags, content The footer of your website that should list your complete NAP (name, address, phone) The Contact Us page of the site, which should again feature your complete NAP So, yes, if you're in Sheboygan, do optimize the site so that it makes this clear, in a natural, non-spammy manner. If you don't have a staffed, physical office in Sheboygan, that's another story. Hope this helps!

As previously mentioned, it's natural that sites get certain links without doing anything. These types of links are natural. Typically I see many of them have nofollow attributes on their outgoing links, but some do not. I wouldn't worry too much about them. It wouldn't hurt to disavow them, but again most likely they're not going to hurt your site's rankings.