Penguin and Backlinks

[freestone]

I have been looking closely at my backlinks.  I readily admin that I have not worked on backlinks in years since for e-commerce there is little white hat opportunity but here is what I find in doing a detailed analysis.

I mostly have back links that are pointing to our nicely ranked site (well it use to be pre-penguin) being hyjacked by crappy sites that just put us on the their site in order to try and rank.  I have no way to prevent this.  They are like a cancer.  Point me to the Doctor.

Is Goggle penalizing us for these guys listing us in long pages list to create pages that obviously exist for one reason...... To display Adword Ads....isn't that a twist that simply sucks for use but has Google making money either way.

If they want to penalize us for them stealing our link then we should get a say in accepting the link.

Advice on dealing with this?  Do I have to hire someone to create enough good links to overcome this trash that I have no control over ?

Perhaps my competitors are doing this.  I simply can't tell.

Any advice is appriciated.

[Highland]

First off, I wouldn't panic. As the SEO Moz blog recommends, don't just start trying to take a hatchet to your links and assume that that will fix the problem.

Second, realize that a lot of what is going on with Penguin is algorithmic. That may not be any comfort, but I'm currently being beaten by generically popular sites, not competitors. There's nothing I can do until Google decides that they want to value quality sites again over popular ones. Did they penalize us for some backlinks? Possibly (when we started SEO years ago we did reciprocals with exact match keywords, one of the things Penguin is targeting), but the lack of highly relevant results (as in the pages getting #1 are simply popular sites with a page that mentions those words, not sites focused on them) for our primary terms means that Penguin, like Panda, penalizes first and fixes later.

Third, unfortunately, the only way to plug the hole caused by Penguin (we're down 15-20% in traffic on our #1 site over last year) is to buy Adwords. Get a budget and start a campaign. It's the only quick fix out there. If it is links sinking your ship, even nuking them all immediately wouldn't fix your drop and will probably hurt you more in the long run. Go back to SEO basics (quality content and building good links) and hope this storm passes soon.

[freestone]

I have discover that I have 288 back-links that 404.  Many of them come from suspect sites.  Do I 301 these backlinks so webmasters does not show these errors or to I leave them 404 as a vote that I don't like those unasked for backlinks ?

[dohertyjf]

Hey John -

Are these links pointing to your homepage, or to other pages on your site? This makes a big difference in knowing what to do with them.

Also, might there be other factors at play here, such as over-optimization onsite? I'd love to take a look at your site. If you don't want to share the URL here, feel free to PM it to me.

[freestone]

Most point to the home page but some to category or product pages.

We are working on onpage but wondering what if anything to do with this old stale back-links

[dohertyjf]

If they're suspect, or could put you at risk of over-optimizing from anchor text, I would leave them to 404. I assume these are links that were built for you in the past.

If they're branded links and you have a strong backlink profile, I might 301 them. It all depends on what your current profile looks like and how these may affect your current standing in regards to Penguin.

[freestone]

We have very little back-link profile and most of these links are from silly sites that back-link to sites trying to build Directories to game the system.  So it sounds like your advice is look at them and if not suspect and not back anchor text then recover them otherwise leave them 404