Not Sure Exactly How Penguin is Effecting My Site (looking for tuff love)

[Juratovic]

Hello Everyone,

I own a small web design firm website. My site was for sure hit by Penguin, but not sure why they devalued my pages. I dont really do SEO or link building except for my own site. I normally turn clients down when they want SEO services. Mainly because we do web design really well, so I've chosen to invest my time doing that versus doing both.

For most of my keywords I took a 5-10 spot drop. Nothing super major, but enough that its tanking my business. I've survived all of the panda stuff, so I assumed my content writing, and link building tactics were good, but I'm wrong.

Here is my website: http://www.clikzy.com/ I will explain what I have been doing below, and I am looking for a little help/direction. I don't mind if you look at my site, links, and are brutally honest.

I do have original content ( I just ran everything through copyscape a month prior), and I occasionally get duplicate pages as my CMS tends to create them automatically, but we do a fairly good job of redirecting those pages when they occur.

My link building tactics have been a mixture of the following. I have used anchor text alot which could be my demise.

Forum postings
Blog Comments
Website Footers (roughly 20 over the course of a year)
Web Design Directories (explain below)

I did start using directories in January. I would use OpenSite Explorer, and review some of my bigger competitors, and would occasionally get listed on a web design directory they were on. I think total I probably purchase 8-10 since Jan  including botw, business.com, etc.

I have some local pages which I create case studies for which ranked fairly well. For instance for the term Baltimore Web Design I used to rank #1, but not I'm 5-6.

Here's the keyword: http://www.clikzy.com/reston-web-design.html

One more note: I did redirect an older website I have (12 years) to my current site (3 years) in Jan. Mainly because it ranked well for terms in NYC. I've dropped for those terms around 5 spots.

I have a few questions:

1. What would you suggest to fix something like this?

Power Content?

Better Links? (of course, we all want better links)

2. Remove links? I am not sure which ones are bad.

One thought was to just kill my local pages (roughly 15 pages) which would also kill any bad links I may have point to them.

3. If I have a bad link pointing to a internal page, could that bring down my home page rankings?

Any help would be appreciated.

I am in the process of interviewing  for a full time PR person to come on staff to help us with our content, and PR. I knew I should have invested in this person a year ago! ha!

Thank you!

Pete

[charles1]

Hi Pete,

Firstly I wouldn't remove any of your links, it looks like your links have been devalued.

This basiclly means that Google isn't counting many of your links. Most likely Website footers, blog comments and forums have all been devalued.

Watch this video by Rand for more info http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-on-googles-penguin-update

If you want to regain your ranking I would conentrate on content creation for your blog and guest blogging. It looks like you haven't added anything for awhile. Try posting each week. Also add some photos to each of your blog posts.

[Juratovic]

Hi Charles,

Thank you for the response. Just to clairify, as I have never had a penalty, or anything like this happen in the past.

If Google devalues my links, then I should not worry about removing them since they are not passing link juice?

I've never used a blog network, and I have not revived any messages from Google in WMT about spammy links.

I appreciate your help.

If anyone else has any repsonses, I would love to hear them!

Thank you,

Pete