We have had no desire to rank for that since then. We did however link to our homepage from the plugin with that keyword (and despite it being no follow) Google did not respond well to an influx of 350,000 inbound links to one page with the same anchor – and since that time, our homepage never ranked for that keyword.

Now, could we fix that, (yes) and rank another page, but honestly, it is not that important (other keywords were not affected) and we are essentially exiting the client model anyway, so, no need to hit page one for such a competitive keyword if we have no need of offering a service.

Now SEO Consulting Services on the other hand, has been #1 for years… and makes more sense to us. So, I never really looked back and put more emphasis on clients rather than our site.

Has something changed since 2009 when this article was written?

Lets say I have the following structures:

domain.com/keyword-1/
domain.com/keyword-1/long-tail-1/
domain.com/keyword-1/long-tail-2/
domain.com/keyword-1/long-tail-3/

and

domain.com/keyword-2/
domain.com/keyword-2/long-tail-1/
domain.com/keyword-2/long-tail-2/
domain.com/keyword-2/long-tail-3/

Would I use 2 seperate sitemaps like so:

domain.com/keyword-1/sitemap.html
domain.com/keyword-2/sitemap.html

And I take it each sitemap only links to the pages within it’s own “directory” (so to speak).

Would the sitemaps link to each other too?

And would it work as well if I didn’t bother with subdomains?

Cheers, hope I can resurect this incredibly interesting post