What do we do now?

[ScottBaxterWW]

OK where do we start?

Lets go back to June 2011So in June 2011 we left an SEO company that was looking after our account, after a year of being with them and not moving 1 place in the SERPS we decided to cut ties with them and move to a new SEO company...

Over the first 6 months things seemed to be going well, for our main keyword "car warranty" we started to climb up the rankings from #6 - #4 - #2, we also moved up for other keywords. One thing that I did notice when we were with the new SEO Company not much on-site optimisation was completed.Move forward to January 2012So over the Christmas period the usual happened, our rankings stayed the same put traffic dropped which is obviously normal for this specific time of year... But on the 7th of Jan 2012 our rankings dropped from #2 - #10, we contacted the SEO company in question and they reported back that a server that had 20links pointing back to our server had crashed on Christmas Day and the links had been de-indexed from Google, they said give it 2 - 3 weeks and the links will be re-indexed and we should pop back up on google.3 Weeks later we were still in the exactly the same position, the good thing was because we run a very good Adwords campaign the traffic to our site didn't drop.The SEO company then came back and said it looks like we have been placed in a 60day filter by Google and once the 60day filter had been reached we should pop back up - 65days came and went and we were still in the exact same position. After us waiting around for months to see if the rankings improved we decided to leave the SEO company and move all our SEO work back in-house.Move forward to February 2012Once we had full control over the account again we made some changes to the on-site optimisation of the site, we improved page titles, descriptions,

tags and also our content was re-written - we then waited for Google to pickup the changes and re-index our site.

YesterdaySo yesterday we checked our rankings - some of our longer tail keywords had improved but our main big traffic keywords had dropped even further - we had gone from #10 to #16, with the update to the algorithm yesterday targeting spammy websites we feared that we had been hit by the new update. We then cleaned up some links that looked spammy and asked for a reconsideration request. Now looking deeper into our backlinks we still have some spammy non-relevant links as well as a few big sitewide links - 1 sitewide link provides 732,667 links to our homepage and our total links indexed by Google is only 759,144.What do you think we should do...Wait for Google to come back to us after the reconsideration request?Remove more and backlinks?Build more high value links?If anyone can provide me with more information it would be great.Thanks,
Scott

[MoosaHemani]

WOW! Scott, this is interesting!  And here is my take on it!

I am taking some lines from your description! That says,

‘and they reported back that a server that had 20links pointing back to our server had crashed on Christmas Day and the links had been de-indexed from Google, they said give it 2 - 3 weeks and the links will be re-indexed and we should pop back up on google.’

I will question that.. if it is exactly what they said then in my opinion they were putting the link on the website that they can control and this can be a site of their network! If lot of links are actually coming from the network sites then I must say that Google was nice to you!

Changing the content improves your long tail but your main keyword dropped even more! In my opinion here is what you should be doing!

Remove as many low quality links as possible!

Get in to your link profile, get your hands dirty and remove it… you don’t have a choice or else the slap can be even harder!

Get more social

Google take social as a way to find the website’s credibility, get yourself active on social media accounts like twitter, facebook and G+

Create Link Baiting Campaigns:

Start the brainstorming process, sit with your marketing team and come up with any idea that is link worthy! Start a Quiz, Contest, Award or Badge! Something that allow your industry bloggers to talk about you and link to you!

Get Press Links!

You can even connect link baiting and press links if you are creative enough! Do something that becomes a story. Journalist likes stories, approach them and get a link from PR and news websites!

Start a Blog!

Share your expertise and start a company blog, it will give you a hard time but you will be able to get some great links, content that will eventually get you SERP benefits!

[ScottBaxterWW]

Hi Moosa,

Thanks for taking the time to reply!

Yep I think that's what they have done really.

I'm going to remove all the low quality links that we have, the only worrying thing is now if remove alot of these low quality links will we drop even further?

We do also have another good domain that is currently ranking higher than us in the SERPS which has had no SEO completed on it.

Do we 301 our main site to this new domain??

[MoosaHemani]

I have deal with this situation but at that time Google was kind of nice to low quality links or I should say Google was not as harsh as it is right now!

Well the ideal would be to build some quality links and remove low quality links side by side! Keep a balanced between the two activities and this might not hurt much but fluctuation is fairly possible!

As far as the redirection is concern, if the DA of the domain is good and some good natural links are point to it than, IMO its great!