My website keeps getting hit every other month. What should I do?

[sbrault74]

Since April 2012, my website impressions has dropped about 88% according to GWT. Every other month or so, the impressions are dropping by about 30%. My total traffic (visitors, not impressions) has dropped by about 25% but now I am getting lots of junk traffic.

A few of the major keywords I used to rank for are still ranking in the top 10 but only in the USA. Lots of the keywords have gone to page 2 or 3 in the US and are gone to hell in other countries.

Now I know I'm mostly responsible for this mess. About 3 years ago, I hired a freelancer to write news for my blog and she did a great job for quite some time so I stopped monitoring her work for duplicated content. Unfortunately, she started to provide me with copied content after a while and did so for almost 9 months before I noticed it.

I had also hired RankPoop - errr I mean RankPop - to build some backlinks and that eventually got me in trouble too. I got an unnatural links warning in GWT in July 2012.

Since then, I had more than 50% of the bad links taken down. There are still lots of them but they sure account for way less than 50% of all the backlinks. I have not submitted a reconsideration request yet as I haven't compensate for all the links taken down yet.

I also started adding LOTS of fresh, unique and useful content to the website. I've added near 400 articles (sometimes up to 7 or 8 articles a day) over the last 5 months.

I've also set lots of the duplicated posts to "noindex" and when they're not indexed anymore, I completely removed them in order to avoid any copyright issues (some were 100% identical to the source). I keep doing this gradually to avoid 404 errors.

In early March of this year, I did a complete redesign of the site. The navigation structure stayed the same and visually, the layout is quite the same although the graphical elements are much more professional and the site is much faster. As much as I would've like to avoid a complete redesign, major technical issues from the previous design (and development platform) was now forcing me to do so.

Unfortunately, I updated the website design right before the last Panda update so now I don't know if the recent traffic lost is due to the new design or because of Panda... or both.

Google is like a police officer who repeatedly give you tickets for the same offense, yet they won't tell you what that offense is.

My website is located at http://www.thewebhostinghero.com/

Any advice is welcomed.

P.S. sorry for my english, I speak french.

[EvolveCreative]

Sounds like you have a LOT of cleaning up to do if you want to rank organically. You know this it seems. Honestly, I'd focus on paid search and do organic on the side. You've got a site that is converting and has been converting for a while - why not try out a stable source of traffic and see what sort of return you can get that way?

One of my websites had 12 backlinks when it was hit by Penguin. I didn't spend more than 5 minutes trying to fix it.... just sold it and moved on (told the buyer about the penalty of course). That is another option for you to consider....

[sbrault74]

I tried paid search but in the web hosting niche, you can forget about it on Adwords. You ain't gonna get quality traffic below $10 a click.

I did get some nice traffic from Bing / Yahoo but now the prices have went up a lot since the competition increased so I had to stop the campaigns.

[sbrault74]

But my question is: why does it keeps getting hit over and over even though I'm improving the site more than ever?

[EvolveCreative]

Because it sounds like you were hit by every penalty Google has come out with. Contrary to popular belief, there is no threshold. You probably won't find the bottleneck and come bouncing back to the top as you once were... it doesn't work that way... unless you're a big brand like WPMU.org, JC Penny, Overstock etc. and get massive publicity over this.

After any penalty, algorithmic or manual, you're put on sort of a 'probationary' period. You'll get the tools you need to survive, but don't expect to get a decent job after being locked up... or in this case, bring in the big bucks again.

At some point a guru is going to come on this thread and tell you "don't loose hope" "you can come back if you make quality content and links!!"

I'm here to tell you to consider cutting your losses. Google isn't playing around anymore.

Try out AdWords again. Be creative with it. Mess around with the display network and exact match long-tail keywords.

[sbrault74]

At some point, I thought I could've removed too many links too quickly. Could it be part of the problem?

[EvolveCreative]

Not sure. Did you ever file a reconsideration request after getting the unnatural link warning?

[sbrault74]

No, as I haven't compensated for all the bad links yet.

[EvolveCreative]

Well that's your problem. If you can't get them all taken down use the Disavow tool. Show Google that you tried your hardest to get them taken down manually though.

[sbrault74]

One thing I forgot to mention is that the pages that are no longer ranking either have no backlinks or just a handful of links. That's why it makes me think that I can save this site.

[EvolveCreative]

One of my sites with 200+ pages of unique quality content had 12 backlinks on all pages combined and it got slapped by Penguin. If they don't manually recover the site your chances of recovery are slim.

[sbrault74]

What I mean is that these pages rank in pages 2 and 3 for their main keyword without backlinks.