Should We Pull The Plug On This Site?

[inhouseseo]

I am helping a retailer out with their site. They were hit hard with the Penguin update, and traffic has dropped by about 75%. Here are the stats:

• It is fairly new, has been up for about 3 years.

• Has partial match domain name

• Is nearly fully indexed with over 4K pages

• Has NOT received an unnatural link message from Google, so no manual penalty.

• Has had most keywords BURIED in the search results.

• Link profile: Has done about 50-100 blog comments, 500 directory submissions, 800 social bookmarks, 5-6 press releases, 300 article submissions (most removed), about 30-50 guest blog posts.

I am thinking it may have just been hit because of aggressive use of anchor text as opposed to massive spamming. Then again, the site has never really added great content and the product pages have no unique content.

Any thoughts?

[shiftins]

if it was an algorithmic hit check out this video

watch?v=ES01L4xjSXE

[JustDucky]

InHouseSEO - this is a GREAT question.   I wish there were more discussion of realistic case studies like this one rather than so much "focus" on negative SEO and a handful of high authority sites that were probably hit by mistake.

The consensus seems to be that you can file for lifting a penalty IF you can show you removed bad links AND document the efforts you made to remove the bad links that remain despite your efforts.

Matt Cutts appears to say you're more screwed if the penalty is algorhythmic.  Huh?  Buy BMR links, remove them and escape the penalty G imposed on your site for 50  -100 presumably manual and relevant blog comments?  Gimmee a break!

The 50 -  100 blog comments are probably going to be the worst of the lot to attempt to remove.  Have you had any sucess removing the trash directories?   You might be able to out grow the penalty by developing new links so that the number of suspicious (or bad) links falls below the tipping point.  On a recent WBF, Danny Sullivan opined that Penguin is just a devaluation of the bad links. (Not my opinion but it's an interesting opinion.)    No one has shared results but some people have suggested combining removing links with developing new strong ones.

Penguin is bizarre.  Some of my pages are (very) slowly returning to their former top positions even when some of the bad links point to them.   New pages with extensive content (think 2,000 words of unique/expert content) were among the first 2 - 3 to cover the event but now rank around 120. (Ouch).

I share your suspicion that for many of our sites, it's aggressive use of anchor text.   Developing non-aggressive links may dig us out.  Would love to hear from anyone who had tried this and what results they acheived.

[inhouseseo]

Do you have an e-commerce site? Is the site as a whole hit, or is it certain keywords/pages?

I would be careful with removing links, unless they are really spammy. You might do more harm than good.

I wrote about this here:

http://www.seomoz.org/q/using-dripable-to-build-url-links-too-dilute-link-profile

Anyways, good luck.

[JustDucky]

InHouseSEO - It's not an e-commerce site. (It's a blog with a couple of hundred posts many of which need pruning but many of which are high informative and written by someone with substantial experience in the subject.)

Sounds like you're telling me the best gamble is put in the work on this blog to try to grow the legit links so that the bad ones dip below the "tipping point" which prompts the Penguin attack.  Have you had success with this tactic?

The home page appears to be penalized b/c of keyword rich text from relevant blog comments on mostly relevant blogs/pages. (It's also quite possible it's just a rather severe devaluation 30 or so spots in the SERPs for the EMD keyword).  Other pages are hit or miss but the stronger pages (high bounce but very high times on pages) are beginning to return to some of their former strength (probably 50% of peak traffic).

Site traffic declined just before the 25th (the date that is associated with  Panda 3.5) and resulted in a 20% hit.  After Panda 3.5, the G traffic dove steadily (which I assume is Penguin added to the mix).  Traffic is now off by around 2/3 without excluding the Bing traffic.  (Have probably seen 15 -20% improvement recently with no new posts and only added one authorative directory link (Nat'l Trade Assoc. picked up the blog).

I just reread all of the comments in the thread you linked to.  (Never received a warning in WMT so I assume the penalty is algo.)

Reading your comments, it sounds like you recomment attempting to remove any blog comments that I created. (I don't expect much success based on what people are sharing.

If  my pet Penquin is algorhythmic and isn't scheduled to lift anytime in the next several months, should I try to guest blog my way out of the penalty?  (Assume I have access to decent releveant indy blogs that are low authority but extremely legit.)

Thanks for the reminder to re-read the thread with you and Egol.

[JustDucky]

Thanks.  I've watched the video before but it's worth reviewing.  Still seems a bit strange that someone can violate terms of service which G never bothered to enforce for years and get slammed with "Double Secret Probatiion" while a malicious site can clean up and eventually get the penalty lifted.  No doubt a malicious site manual penalty should result in a long time in the penalty box but at least it's obvious what to fix.  There doesn't seem to be a reliable consensus or even many case studies on garden variety Penguin recoveries yet.  Not knowing what Dean Wormer wants me to change is irritating.