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There isn't much traffic at all as the link is actually in a sub-sub-menu in the nav (the strange things people do). But I'm more concerned whether removing the link will actually have a negative effect on our SEO

Haha well done

Hey Sven, Thanks these are some good ideas! Just got to try and keep his 5-10 hours full, shouldn't be too hard, fingers crossed! T

Even if it's legit, if there's anything I don't like about a potential company, I wouldn't employ their services - there's plenty of competition. Would you want your company associated with the sort of content you mention? You could always ask them about those links and see what they say. It might be worth paying more money just to go with a company that has a reliable reputation. There's some good advice about employing a link builder below the video here: http://www.stephanspencer.com/hiring-a-link-builder/

I guess as you mention .htaccess you are running apache - try this example: http://www.isitebuild.com/301-redirect.htm If you are using cpanel I would add it as a parked domain - then follow the instructions in that link to do the redirect through .htaccess . Parked domains on cpanel/whm don't redirect, so you will have a duplicate content problem if you miss out the .htaccess step.  Remember to update as many incoming links as you can as well. Although the 301 will pass the rank on, it does keep a little to itself, so update your biggest incoming links to point to the new domain.

Tim The essential pages to redirect are; Ones that have backlinks pointing to them (check in opensite explorer, majestic seo, google webmaster tools, and analytics for referring sites Carry ranking value for specific keywords that are valuable to you Have ever been a landing page (look at your landing page report in analytics for the past 6-12 months) - although it seems like you've got this figured out. Is it a fairly small site?  (Under 50 pages or something?) Depending on how your site is built there are several options for doing the redirects in an efficient way.  Assuming it's a custom site and you've got a good clean URL structure, I might try something like; Spider both sites with Screaming Frog Export the URLs into Excel Do some sort of lookup function to match the corresponding URLs from the old site to the new site Use that to construct the text for the .htaccess file. If the site is so small, you might not need something intense like that.  Cut and paste will do just fine  If some other setup, I'd need to know more to suggest a different way to create your redirects. After you do everything, check webmaster tools for the next few weeks for any 404s that might pop up. Hope that helps. -Dan

Will google actually be penalizing me for just targeting one keyword, hence the lower ranking?