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Hi there, I'd agree with the comments from Richard and Jim below, the types of techniques you mention are not really the ones that I'd endorse when you're trying to build a business online. Social media links using Fiverr and link directories aren't as effective as they used to be and can cause link problems if you use them now. Instead, I'd recommend trying to make your website link worthy and using your business USPs to try and generate links. Here are some good guides to help you with this: http://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-link-building http://moz.com/blog/10-illustrations-on-search-engines-valuation-of-links http://moz.com/blog/link-building-101-the-almost-complete-link-guide-updated-for-post-penguin http://pointblankseo.com/link-building-strategies These guides and tactics focus on more sustainable methods of link building which should help you in the long term, I hope that helps! Paddy

I ignore those junk links. I figure that Google is pretty clear that disavow tool is only for extreme cases. ["In most cases, Google can assess which links to trust without additional guidance, so most normal or typical sites will not need to use this tool."] That being said, I do notice that many people talk about routinely disavowing low-quality links even when there is no penalty in play. It seems to me that that in itself could create an unnatural link profile—after all, if you just let your link growth happen naturally, you'd have those types of links accumulating. I too would be interested in hearing more about what people choose to do (or not) about bad links that arrive uninvited...

Can you elaborate more on your experience on certain penalties being passed vs being ignored? Would like to hear more. To your second point, if I understand you properly your are saying that a domain with authority may be able to counteract a passed penalty? If so, that case would not apply in this scenario as the new domain started from scratch and had to build up authority. However, the domain ranked pretty much from the first month.

410 means "Gone" and is used to indicate a resource no longer exists. If it exists use 200 (OK). If it is out-dated place a notice to that effect but still leave it as 200. Putting a noindex instruction in the robots meta element should be sufficient to remove it from the Google index, though it may take some time. Nofollow is probably not what you want to do as this will destroy any link value flowing through those pages. If it is so out-dated that it is considered valueless then it should be deleted and 410'd. A 301 redirect can be used where a new resource that substantially replaces the old resource has been created. Not sure why you would want to keep Google's index of your site 'lean' unless you have a lot of resources competing for the same keywords and are concerned about cannibalization.