Remove Links or 301

[ScottBaxterWW]

Howdy Guys,

Our main site has been hit pretty hard by penguin and we are just wondering what steps we should now take.

For the past 2 months we have been working through our back link profile removing spammy / un-natural links, we have documented everything in a spreadsheet...

We recently submitted a reconsideration request to Google and they have now responded saying we still have bad links.

I'm just wondering would be it easier just to 301 redirect our site to another TLD we have for our main site?

Or

Do we keep working through our links 1 by 1 and removing them?

Has anyone had any success in 301ing?

Thanks,

Scott

[Marcus_Miller]

Don't 301 it, that is not going to help and you are affectively just passing those bad links along to the new domain. I hate to say it, but you are looking for an easy option and there is not one, you just need to clean up that link profile as much as possible and illustrate the blood, sweat and tears you have gone through to do so.

[ScottBaxterWW]

Hi Marcus,

Thanks for the reply matey - I'm not looking for an easy option It was just what someone has suggested to us.

I'm going to continue removing the links and see what happens on the next refresh.

Has anyone seen there rankings shoot back to what they were before the penalty...

[Marcus_Miller]

Yep, this is really worth a read:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-wpmuorg-recovered-from-the-penguin-update

These guys were kind of collateral damage, a great site, but got some kind of penalty due to the anchor text from WordPress templates.

They managed to nuke a big percentage of the links in one hit via a single multi user WordPress installation and bang, they were back at the first refresh.

Don't 301 though, that is not going to help!

Keep me posted mate, would really like to hear how you are getting on.

Cheers! 
Marcus

[Force7]

Scott,

Digging out here and wondered if you would share a little more information.

Did you ever receive one of Googles letters claiming you had unnatural links?

Do you have any search terms on Google? Or is it across the board every search term 50+?

How long did it take Google to reply to the reinclusion request?

Comment about the WP, I wonder if there any recovery stories other than the WordPress one, curious that one jumped back up but of course it had national attention. Google could have flagged them in a positive way.

Force7