Start over or try to recover?

[SiteDeveloper]

I have a question about a site that was making good money while it was ranking, but no longer gets traffic.

This site did 3 things that might have gotten it in trouble:

1. Targeted keywords often showed up twice in the URL.  So the url would be something like http://mydomain.com/keyword/keyword-included-in-title/

2. It got links from low-quality sites, including blog networks like (the now dead) BMR

3. It got lots of links with the same anchor text

The content quality is actually pretty good.

I don't know if the site got penalized by Panda, Penguin, or perhaps lost rank because of something else.  What I can tell you is that the rank loss was gradual - one page at a time starting at the end of March and ending this month.

So the question is - in such a case:

Is it best to start over using good SEO practices?

Or is there a way to recover the sites?

[MatthewBarby]

Hi There,

I have been having trouble with the same thing and have found some good advice throughout the process of recovering.

One method that I have heard people suggesting was to change the URL of the page that is affected and then set up a redirect to the new page. From personal experience, I can tell you that this doesn't work. It is simply a very short-term fix (i.e., a few days if your lucky), then Google will start punishing you for the redirected page.

If it is only specific pages on the website that are being affected, try to pin-point the exact aspects of those pages that could be deemed as black/grey-hat. If it is the case that some of your webpages are ranking then you can take solace in the fact that your whole website hasn't been banned. So there is still hope to recover.

Try using OSE to check out all of your different anchor text and links, as well as looking through webmaster tools. If you can, contact these websites to have your link completely removed because at the end of the day, if your not ranking because of these links then they may as well be removed completely.

You could also attempt to remove your old pages that have been punished and create new URLs completely (don't redirect the old pages, simply delete them altogether) and just use the old content that was on them. This way you will get rid of all of the links to the punished page, and start a fresh new page with your old content. Re-index the pages through Google and slowly but surely, you will eventually start ranking again. Obviously this is not possible for your homepage, so maybe use this methods for some of your other pages and then put most of your effort into sorting out the linking profile on your index page.

I hope this has helped slightly and good luck!

Matt.

[SiteDeveloper]

Thanks, Matt, for your response.

Creating a new page might be the best approach for me.

If I do that - should I remove the old one?  Can I use the exact same content?  I don't want to get into duplicate content issues.

[MatthewBarby]

What I would do is to delete the old page and then create a whole new page. Because the old page is no longer on the server it shouldn't be punished for duplicate content. Just make sure that you ask Google to de-index the old URL and index the new one.

Bear in mind though that this is really a last resort method. But if you are having no luck at all with recovering from Penguin then this method could be more effective than just waiting it out.

Let me know how it goes and if you need any more info then just let me know.

Matt.

[SiteDeveloper]

I think I will do this because I don't know what else I could do. If I don't change the url - then I have the keyword in there twice no matter what I do. And it would take forever to dilute the bad links. Just one more question. How do I ask Google to de-index the old URL? Remove it from my sitemap?

[MatthewBarby]

I think that a lot of people are in the same boat as you so don't worry, many sites have began the road to recovery after the recent updates.

To de-index a URl from Google, go into Google Webmaster Tools for your website, then go to 'Optimization'>'Remove URLs' then type in the old URL and Google will remove it from the search engine completely. This mayy take a couple of days though.

I would also then create a new sitemap once you have done the new pages and submit this through Webmaster Tools also.

Matt.

[Marcus_Miller]

Without a look at the link profile itself, it's hard to make a call on this. If there are lots of good to honest links smothered by some junk then yeah, recovery may be worth fighting for. But... if the link profile is just junk, and it's going to be hard to clean up, well, you are better suited by just burning that house down and starting again.

[EGOL]

It sounds like you have some good content.  If if is original then move it to a new domain if you can't get rid of the bad links.

[SiteDeveloper]

Thanks.  What about duplicate content?  Do I just ask Google to de-index the old site?

[Marcus_Miller]

Just be procedural. Deindex the other site, check it has gone, (site: query), create your new site. If the content does not existing somewhere else, it is not duplicate.

[TheeDigital]

I agree with Marcus, it depends on what kind of links your website does have.  It generally sounds like to me, that you over optimized your website. 
If you do have plenty of good links, it would simply be an issue of getting rid of the "crappy links" however if you do have a ton of these now non-indexed links, it might be best to start with a new page.