New to seomoz, scared to death after last update

[TylerAbernethy]

man, I know I am opening the flood gates for some serious debates, so let's just not and say we did. All I want is for some people to help me out.

My site is www.ontracparts.com we sell heavy equipment parts.

So we were steadily increasing in traffic and rank, before penguin. I had ordered a few backlinks from a semi spammy source (meaning that they used spun content)

Like I said our rank was increasing pre-penguin, and I stopped ordering. We seemed to hold our postitions after I stopped ordering (for about 2 weeks everything remained the same)

So, I ordered more of them. Then penguin dropped and our rankings and traffic remained the same. for a little while that is. Soon the rankings started to drop.

Probably a direct result of those links right?? Well here is the weird thing.. Traffic is slowly increasing again now that I ordered more links.

Rankings drop, but traffic increases? what the heck?

what should i be doing now, post-penguin... just writing and publishing content on the site everyday??

How do I go about getting links if I can't just buy them anymore??

I should also mention that there is practically ZERO guest blogging opportunities.. I say that because there is nobody blogging about heavy equipment right now. Not that I could find anyway.

[seo-wanna-bs]

Rankings drop and traffic increases, most logical explanation is because you're ranking for more keywords or other sources are sending traffic. Check analytics, see how people are finding you, for what keywords etc.

If you have no sudden drops in traffic, it's unlikey the issue is Penguin.

However, moving forward, buying cheap links, from spammy sources, is building a foundation that won't get you far.

Before building links, do as much research as you can. You need a solid strategy to achieve long lasting ranks and avoid penguin.

[bronxpad]

Welcome to SeoMoz, don't panic, what I would do is write content on your site or blog several times per week. Doesn't have to be everyday. I would promote those writings on all the social networks. Then I would also engage in some community charities and then do press releases to your local papers. This will get you links of high pr value. I would also arrange for talks at your local community college about the benefits of your industry and try to get the school paper to run an online story with a link to your site. Now you will have an edu link. I would also contact local bloggers and site owners and see if they are willing to write a story about your industry and link to your site. Now you have local bloggers spreading the word about you with valuable links. I can go on for days on various strategies but this is the meat and potatoes. You will do well. I hope this helps and good luck.

[waynekolenchuk]

I agree with Joel. Don't panic. If you're scared because you think you'll be penalized for doing something spammy then don't do it.

You will succeed by providing valuable content to your prospective customers. This actually works.

[ZephSnapp]

I'm with Joel.  These are all solid ideas that you should follow.  One of my favorites is to look at Analytics and see if there are any phrases that jump out as longtail opportunities.  Then write a blog post about them.  Also, you can create infographs about the applications of heavy machinery, share pictures of your merc on Pinterest (bet nobody is doing that yet!) and generally be TAGFEE, you will be in great shape!

[ToughTimesLawyer]

Best Penguin Solution = Take a deep breath, check your Google Webmaster inbox, and keep an eye on your rankings for a few more weeks.

If you're still indexed and you didn't get a warning notice, you're probably fine.  Your traffic changes may have more to do with the fact that your site isa niche site in an industry that is susceptible to macroeconomic forces.

My site is the same way.  I'm targeting potential consumer bankruptcy filers in the Seattle area.  My analytics data swings form week to week.  If you've been tracking with analytics for at least a year, then your best metric is year over year traffic comparison, i.e. April 2011 vs. April 2012, or a specific week in April 2011 vs April 2012.

If your traffic is steadily declining and business cycles or year over year comparisons don't explain it, then you should consider link  building and link removal strategies.

Penguin freaked a lot of people out, myself included, because they had lots of directory backlinks from back in the day that are still hanging around.   I have about 600.  Two of my biggest competitors have 3,000+.  My biggest competitor has 10,000+ links from random directories, they do reciprocal linking, and they still outrank my on two of the biggest keywords in our industry.

Based on my analytics tracking, my numbers haven't changed; and based on my competitive analysis, my competitors haven't lost position.  If you take a look at the April 24 announcement from Google you'll see that Penguin affects a relatively small percentage of queries - 3.1% - as opposed to Panda which affected about 12%.   3.1% of all English language web queries is not that much, considering Google's search volume.

In my opinion, Penguin is a huge warning shot.  If you were one of the worst offenders you got hit hard or you got a warning notice.  But for the rest of us, we're officially on notice about artificial link building and web spam.    My guess is that in the next few algo changes Google is going to take an unfriendly look at webmasters that continue grey hat/black hat link building after Penguin.

[TylerAbernethy]

Thanks for your answer David, I haven't really thought about checking my analytics for bigger than 1 month trends. (The Google analytics standard)

Good point with macroeconomic forces too, because our industry is definitely affected by them. The thing is though, I am using "rank tracker" on firefox, and saw the rankings drop, so it does seem to be something directly related to Google's trust in my site.

I also didn't realize that penguin affected a lot less queries, but I hope i'm not one of the 3%

From this point I am definitely moving forward by only focusing on creating content. At least for now.

Later I will start thinking more about attracting link bait and the more advanced white hat strategies. (anyone know of some common / simple ones to consider when publishing content??)

Another side note that I am wondering about, what are peoples thoughts on directory links?

[ToughTimesLawyer]

You should also consider getting listed on some of the SEOmoz directories.  For instance the Better Business Bureau passes a lot of PR.