Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Thanks for all the responses.

Think I'll opt for a server 301 to a suitable page

I've got some crappy pages that I want to delete from a site.

I've removed all the internal links to those pages and resubmitted new site maps that don't show the pages anymore, however the pages still index in search (as you would expect).

My question is, what's the best practice for removing these pages?

Should I just delete them and be done with it or make them 301 re-direct to a nicer generic page until they are removed from the search results?

Alan - thanks for your response. OSE is good, but it doesn't provide a management platform for logging your research.

Competitive link finder again is pretty useful as a standalone application, but I'm looking for something all encompassing.

I'm looking at packages to help with link finding, outreach, acquisition and management. But I'd appreciate some views from fellow forum members on the best choice;

BuzzStream

Link-Assistant

Link Research Tools

Other?

BuzzStream looks pretty promising to me. Has anyone else got any experience or views?

Thanks

John, thanks - I'll check out Adobe Indesign.

Ideally I want something like the up coming infographic creation tool from Visual.ly?

It's not live yet http://visual.ly/labs but if there's a running alternative that would be great!?

Ivaylo - Thanks for the resource, they look pretty decent

In the interests of creating some quick, but nice link bait;

Does anyone know of any software or online info-graphic generation service? i.e. Something that is easier to create infographics in than gimp/photoshop.

Something that you can enter some data in to create some nicely laid out graphs would be amazing.

OSE share data is based on page rather than domain, so that's a massive number of shares for a single page!

It almost certainly has to be a follower/like service. They're a dime a dozen. If they were running significant facebook ads you would expect their facebook page likes to be much higher than 25.

Buying a aged domain name has numerous problems, not least of which is that if the domain registration information changes and then shortly after the site is up, but completely different to what it had been in the past, Google may wipe any ranking clean and consider it a new site with a new owner.

You'll still benefit from any existing inbound links, but it's worth bearing in mind.

OSE doesn't drill down as deep as say Google would and so you may not find all the links you would expect to. Some pages simply aren't included.

The latest Linkscape build I believe went shallower than previous updates so that more URLs were encompassed instead. You have to offset one with the other, otherwise the computing power required would be huge.

Also if the links are new, that may be relevant. Remember that OSE updates once per month.

Also, Press releases in general, I believe are not considered as 'significantly influential' links, therefore there's another reason they may be left off the linkscape build.

Martijn - Thanks.

That's worked for me before as well, but I was having no success yesterday!

I'll raise it with Moz

Yes, I remember seeing that! Someone had made a comment about it (obviously I'm spending far too long in the forum!)

Has this happened to anyone else?

I keep running reports in OSE and then exporting them, but I only get 120 rows exported to the csv when it should be several thousand.

Thought I'd ask around before raising it to the Moz team!

PS I would give you a Good Answer, but I've reached my 3 limit for this thread!

Not that it should really matter to an associate - but I've seen your excited tweets in the past about reaching x number of MozPoints!

Nice bit of investigation Keri - thanks for that!

Their practices looked a bit dubious to me (ie. the forum links and blog posts), but that facebook comment doesn't exactly help their cause!

Think I'll stay clear.

Got anyone you can recommend?

Yes, we do have craigslist, but to be honest I've never used it. I'll check it out.

Thanks again

Egol, yep certainly is. Unfortunately as it's my area as well, it's proving quite challenging for me at the moment as well.

It's often hard to stay away from the black hat 'easy' methods. But Rome wasn't built in a day was it!

ha, it's an actual photo.

ok, thanks for the pointers.

Know any good copywriters?