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Hi Steve, First of all, don't worry about internal pages being added that have a 301 feeding them. Remember that link juice flows all ways, not just continues down a site structure. I think I understand what you mean above, and I would copy the content from the old pages, produce them on the new site and then have a 301 that points from the existing pages to the new pages on the mens. All this tells Google is that the content has moved from one location to another and it doesn't need to get any more complicated than that. By all means, rewrite the content if you feel it needs a bit more of a mail spin, but a cross-domain 301 is not an issue. Google talks about these issues here as well. -Andy

That's a pickle! Yeah, whatever you choose I might suggest making the changes gradually. Introduce elements one at a time instead of all at once. In this way, you might be able to preserve some of your established link equity and relevancy signals.

Sorry for the delay rpaiva, yes it would be two URL's with unique content.

Hi Steve, htaccess can be tricky! That link above is a good overview of the options. What you want in your case I think is to make sure that the specific individual page url rewrites are before the generic domain rewrite so they are triggered first and the generic redirect is only triggered if none of the individual page urls above it are hit.

If I were you I would add the new content and put a plan in place to build up your links then use the disavow tool to cover yourself with Google

Steve, sorry, I completely misread that original question, if it is a manual penalty, things are somewhat worse and recovery, in my experience is a whole lot harder. You will have to be absolutely fastidious in your approach and get rid of everything manipulative or start over. Sorry buddy, skim reading whilst stuffing my face at lunch time!

Dump the bad links like your doing but try and gain some 'super' links as well. Find some relevant blogs, maybe there is a hub website or a few in your industry and try and sort out a guest post or 2 on a few of these.

Yes - we removed many of the irrelevant ones and we also put no follows on the remaining ones.

Thank you all for the positive feedback. Lately I have made the time for SEOmoz Q&A as I have been doing various SEO research and these boards can be a great way to stretch thought processes.

Hi Steve, a lot of consideration needs to be placed on the scale of the website. How many countries around the world, how many continents etc etc. In terms of coming up with an intuitive and relatively simple way to reduce the number of clicks to an actual city, I'd recommend a large, full-width map with big dots for more popular cities and that sort of thing. Could like be created using HTML5/CSS3 for maximum SEO friendliness. The advantage of a map is it's immediately intuitive and doesn't require drop-down menus or anything of that variety. So the structure I'm suggesting would theoretically allow one-click to top cities which is going to make a lot of people very happy