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Hi Dirk, perfect, thanks a lot for clarifying. All the best. Sam

Thanks again for your response Gary. With regards to how many reffering domains and backlinks, it depends on how much i trust various bits of software (eg. Majestic SEO) when they tell me if the link is live or not. In total there's about 3,200 referring domains historically with over 350,000 backlinks (lots of spam). Looking at whats live today, thats about 600 domains and 30,000 backlinks or so. So far I've audited all links (from whats live) into keeping, changing to no follow or removing. Ive reached out to all no follows successfully and I've justified in depth the list of domains I'm keeping. I'm now in the process of reaching out to the poor quality links (first wave) and have covered about 200 referring domains. The main question here is just exactly what to do with the rest of the links that majestic and GWT are telling me are no longer live (after checking some examples, there are some live that say they aren't live on majestic). Initially I was just going through them and throwing poor quality ones (even if they no longer link) straight into the disavow file to be safe. But since, I've worked with my developer to create a script to check which of the 2,500 none live domains are still live (and therefore cutting down my time considerably). So overall, I am confident with my approach on links that are live (as this is the standard approach) and I am being as thorough as is possible. But when I wrote this question initially I was unsure whether I had to deal with the 'none live' domains (mainly because I didn't know whether to fully trust Majestic when its saying that they're not live) and so I wanted to check whether it was something I needed to do because it would be extremely time consuming. Hopefully you understand where I'm coming from with this? Sam

It is always a good idea to work closely with your developer when making changes like this. I'm glad you got everything figured out!

Right. Did you see Rand's latest post on URL structure? Solid overview there: http://moz.com/blog/15-seo-best-practices-for-structuring-urls. Cheers!

Hi Tom, Thanks a lot for your response, this has really helped! I've just set up about 10 recipes on IFTTT after discovering what it does, amazing tool, can't believe I didn't know about it before! I haven't successfully set up the Moz side of it as it stands because Moz keeps telling me there is a redirect loop, but I look forward to trialling that out. Thanks again for the tips. Sam

Hi Sam, Sorry for the late response. If I had to guess...I would look into a after-market shops (Fast and Furious type places) and car clubs. I could see those places having a good following...but, you're right, Joe's Automotive Repair...not so much. Ruben

Great question, and great answers from some of the other commenters. I've struggled with this question myself in building landing pages. The 20% rule is a good one, and makes sense, especially as Google gets better at semantic search and "keywords" become a bit less important in favor of query meaning. In a perfect world (one where search engines could understand queries the way your friend would when you told him what you searched for), if you cannot come up with 20% of a landing page that is entirely unique to that page, it's not something you should be building a landing page for. In the world we operate in, it's a nice guideline. My method for long tail landing page creation is: figure out what the head keyword that this long tail landing page is most related to (if you are trying to reuse the same value prop), and just rewrite every sentence. You should alter your word choice, sentence structure, and page organization (it's a nice opportunity to test those things as well, a long tail page that does unexpectedly well may give you some insight into a better converting format). At this point, I add the unique content. For keywords that aren't different enough to have true unique content, I'll generally write a section summarizing a few of the others all together, or add a different customer testimonial. To the commenter who mentioned that you can create unique content to search engines, but humans would laugh - a landing page for long tail keywords really shouldn't be something a customer can get to without coming to it from an external referrer. The root domain shouldn't link out to both domain.com/landing-page-head-kw and domain.com/landing-page-long-tail-kw.

That's the problem...it's often hard to tell whether a link is natural or not.  For example, a local directory listing might be ok, but it could be unnatural.  If it helps, I wrote a Moz article that describes different kinds of unnatural links: http://moz.com/ugc/what-is-an-unnatural-link-an-in-depth-look-at-the-google-quality-guidelines